Great things happen when parents get involved in their child’s education. Not only does the school benefit from the support, but research shows [1] that it even helps academic achievement.

Unfortunately, traditional forms of parental engagement (e.g. Parent-Teacher conferences or sending a note home) don’t make much of an impact these days.

And yes, you can blame the Internet for this disruption.

These traditional methods still add some value. But that number is waning as more of the population becomes dependent on digital communication. Things like Facebook and Twitter aren’t restricted to the younger generation anymore.

Getting active on social media platforms gives your school unparalleled access to parental engagement. It’s time to embrace this powerful technology. Are you ready?

1. Reach Out to Parents

First things first, make sure to let the parents know about your social media plans. Send a letter home or shoot off an email blast with an announcement of this new engagement strategy.

It’s about getting them involved. Your efforts won’t go very far if you don’t let parents know your intentions. Getting them informed from the beginning helps ensure the success of your social media efforts for the school.

How schools are ALREADY doing this:

Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls uses beautifully designed HTML email newsletters to send parents updates with what is happening - their latest news, photos, videos, tweets. 

These dynamically pull through from their content/social channels. You mean to say they don’t spend hours putting this all together? That’s right. 10 mins. Max.

Notice at the bottom: connect with us.

This is parent engagement.

Social media has required schools to reach a new level of transparency. Blogging, specifically, has allowed schools to publish authentic content and forge a strong connection with their community. It has also given schools an opportunity to develop a voice that is hard to replicate on any other platform. Previously, a school would have to rely on journalists or word of mouth to portray the school’s story. This was always a risk on the school, as you would have to trust a 3rd party to represent you in the way you want. Now, you can help define your school’s story.

Heads are the leaders and visionaries of schools. They set the vision, mission and strategy for the school, which is central to their role. Nobody knows the school as well as the head and nobody has the same reach and authority either. This puts the head in a powerful position when it comes to the voice and marketing of the school. To sucessfully market and brand your school, it is essential that the head is involved - after all, people are much more interested in what the head has to say than the marketing person. It is the same with almost every organisation.

Some of the most successful businesses in modern times have all had a clear and focal leader that has communicated well with their audience. Think Apple’s Steve Jobs, Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates etc.

Let’s use Sir Richard Branson as a wonderful example of social engagement. If you search “Richard Branson” into Google, the first thing that appears is his blog. What happens when you type your head’s name into Google?

Who has more followers - Virgin or Sir Richard Branson? Virgin has a 75,000 followers, Branson has 3,177,069 followers, and counting. When you go onto the homepage of Virgin, 3 things stand out:

1. News
2. Companies
3. Richard’s Blog

One of the biggest companies in the world are heavily promoting content that their CEO is creating for people. One of the busiest people in the world is frequently creating content for people to consume. Please do take a look at Richard’s Blog and think about the blog posts he is creating and why.

Community

Most school websites have a section or page referring to ‘Community’. Every school has a community but, on a website, it often feels false. This is because you are telling people about your school’s community in a sales pitch - you are trying to persuade your prospects. A head’s blog can change this because you can showcase your school’s community in a real, authentic way.

A community can be developed through blogging. Write an engaging blog post and people will share, comment and discuss. Discussion and commentary will bring people together and personalities will shine through. Responding to comments and questions breeds organic engagement.

Culture & Value

What does it really feel like to go to your school? Is your school a fun, vibrant one? Do you have traditional values, coupled with a modern approach? There are a lot of buzz words that schools throw around when discussing their culture and values. Your school’s head should be the voice of this and there is no better way to do this than through a blog. The head will share the core values, which will resonate with the school’s audience when communicated correctly.

Leadership, Opinions & Personality

Leaders of organisations can use blogs to inspire and lead people. Heads can do the same through their blogs. They are an effective way to informally communicate with people to inspire action. Blogs can be a good way to command influence, vision and authority. Blogs also allow people to gain an exiting insight into the school as well as the thoughts from the head.

Heads can use blogs to establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Many will be put off by the fear of controversy, but opinions should be communicated to receive a reaction. Conversations happen because of opinions and that’s exactly what you want from a blog.

Every head has a personality and this should be showcased in a blog. Prospects will reflect on the head’s personality and will want to see authentic, personal and real content.

Is blogging right for your Head?

It completely depends on the head themselves. If the head wants to blog then begin to think strategically about it. If the head does not want to blog then that’s fine. A head that is not interested, have the time, nor the desire just won’t make a blog work. Blogging requires passion and commitment, and it’s not for everyone.

The worst thing you can do is persuade your head to blog when they’re not a right fit. This will lead to disengaging, uninspiring and non-authentic blog posts.

Blogging Heads

Some heads are already blogging and we have a list of them below. Take a look at their blogs and consume their content. Think about what would work for your school.

Carry on this discussions using #HeadsBlog on Twitter!

Blog: Kevin Fear | School Twitter: Nottingham High School

Blog: Jo MacKenzie | School Twitter: Bedford Girls’ School

Blog: Jonathan Lancashire | School Twitter: Dean Close School

Blog: Martin Reader | School Twitter: Wellington School

Blog: Dr G A Silverlock | School Twitter: King’s School Junior School

Blog: Chris Edwards | School Twitter: Bromgroves School

Blog: Lucy Pearson | School Twitter: Cheadle Hulme School

Blogging for schools has naturally taken off so far in 2013, and it’s great to see. However, there are still a lot of schools yet to join in. In this post, we’re going to give you an insight into whether or not a blog is actually right for your school and what the benefits of blogging are. 

• Does your school have current parents and pupils? 
• Does your school have prospective parents and pupils?
• Are they online? 
• Do they read online?

If the answer to all these questions is yes, then your school would benefit from a blog. So what benefits does blogging have?

Community

Three of the ways that blogging benefits your community are: 

• Attracts new prospects to a great school
• Helps and entertains current community
• Increases their social capital, with valuable and shareable content

Content is a great way to attract prospects. People share good content and this will increase the school’s visibility on social media. Social recommendations are so powerful today. 

It is very important to always exceed the expectations of your current community. They are the people who will eventually be asked for their thoughts and opinions. Just like any other business, reviews are so important. More and more people are looking for social proof when looking to make an informed decision. They will search online, they will ask online, they will talk to their social network. 

People want to consume good, valuable content that they find interesting. Provide this to your community, give them something to enjoy. More importantly, give them something to talk about. 

Social Media

Blogging is social. It can act as a perfect catalyst for discussion, whether it be positive or negative. Remember, social has given us an incredible way of turning negative press into a positive outcome.

Excellent posts lead to discussions on social media. Your school can drive communities to converse about topics of interest and to engage people. 

Posts can be adverts for your brand masked as a helpful, interesting piece of content. They help to capture your brand the way you want it to be perceived, and gain exposure for your school. 

Great blogs can go viral. Your content, if highly valuable, can explode on the social web and potentially increase your school’s reach to thousands of new eyes. 

SEO

Quality content is loved by search engines and can heavily influence your search rankings. Google, in particular, has long been in a battle against spam and low-quality websites. A good blog will help Google in this decision-making process, showing them that your website is different and will offer their users a better experience. 

Long-tail keywords are a hugely important facet of every school’s online marketing strategy. Your school will have the few keywords that drive a large number of search visitors. This may only accumulate to 20% of all search traffic and long-tail keywords could make up 80% in total. 1 in 4 searches have never been performed before. 

By increasing your visibility on search, you can begin to control your brand. Sometimes, negative or unwanted news links can appear in your branded SERP (search engine results page), and this is very hard to control when the brand has no content to promote. 

School blogs are incredibly popular right now and it’s great that we are seeing a huge variety of topics being covered. They are adding personality to schools and every school has something quirky about them that makes them unique. Promote that unique something, whether it be a horror film club, weekly rock music performance, an on-site farm, or anything. 

How does your school blog? Do you have any ideas for a blog? Share your thoughts in the comments.

There is a plethora of content being produced and shared across the social world. Schools need to increase the visibility of their blog in order to stand out amongst competition. 

Here are 7 ways schools can make their blog more visible:

1. Identify most popular posts and keywords

   Use your Google Analytics account to discover which posts were viewed the most and created the most social activity. Also look at which posts created the most links and comments. This will give you a great insight into which posts garner the most interaction with you audience.

   Again, use Google Analytics to discover which keywords people are searching for to find your posts. Are you number one on the ranking pages? If not, get there! 

2. Track and leverage trend

   Take a look at other blogs from similar school’s are they beginning to share something that you are not? Subscribe to other blogs (not necessarily school blogs) and take a look at trends. If you see them doing something different, then begin to leverage this. It will keep you innovative and up to speed with what your users want and expect. 
    

3. Think ‘why would people share this?’

   You should be able to give an answer to this about most of your blog posts. Take a look at previous blogs that you thought people would share and use data to
   back you up! If the data shows that people did not share, take a look at other posts that you thought would people would share for the same reason. Were these not shared either? If not, then at least you know now. Marketers are not always right but by using data can make better decisions.

   Not all posts are shareable. Just because somebody did not share it does not mean the post is invaluable. However, if you want people to find your blog then you need shares to not only increase referrals, social influence but also SEO. 
    

4. Make the most of the headline

   Headlines are in some ways the most important part of increasing your visibility. You have to sell your blog post in just a few words and if you don’t sell your blog right then it will not attract targeted visitors. It is so difficult to hit this on the nail but luckily you can test headlines to determine which formula and words works best for your audience.
    

5. Test different kinds of promotions

   Where do you usually promote your content? Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Emails, Newsletters, Digg, Reddit? There’s a lot of channels, right? It is unrealistic to fully promote your posts through all the channels available to you (not just the listed channels). However, you can experiment with different kinds of promotions. All these channels have their own communities, they have their own etiquette.

   Try something new. (But remember: track & analyse!)
    

6. Optimise content for social

   There are so many school blogs that have really good content but they are just not optimised for the social world. Many are static webpages that offer no social functionalities such as comments, social shares etc. 

   Comments allow you to engage with your users and thus they may become advocates. Social sharing buttons act as a reminder to users to share content. 
    

7. Have something waiting for new readers

   Nobody wants to read a blog that is never updated. You need to keep your audience excited and engaged by providing great content, regularly. Having a range of new content for first visitors means that they can go through old content and gives them an incentive to subscribe or return. Once they return even a couple of times to find no new content, they will quickly forget about your blog. 

Do you have any tips for school marketers? How to do you optimise your content? Let us know in the comments!