Despite several public backlashes in recent times, Facebook remains to be the world's largest social media platform, with an astounding 2.38 BILLION monthly active users as of 2019.

With that many eyes on Facebook, the advertising opportunities make the platform one of the biggest shop windows in the world.  Using Facebook for paid advertising is not only highly targetable, but is also a cost effective and trackable method to get users onto your website.

Haven’t used Facebook ads as part of your school marketing before? No problem! Let’s start with the what and why...

What is a Facebook ad?

• Posts that a business has paid Facebook to show to a targeted user based on information provided by a user’s Facebook account. 

• A user could be targeted for a number of reasons.  It could be age, gender, location, and even interests. 

Why should my school pay for advertising on Facebook when I can post on my page for free?

• Posting organically (non-paid) is limited to the people that already know about you and their friends. Paid advertising allows you to reach a significant amount of new people, that are targeted specifically by their demographics and interests. 

• Advertising on Facebook doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. It is a much more cost-effective marketing channel than more traditional approaches.  Bare in mind a higher budget will result in higher click-through rates to your website, but a budget of £250-£300 for a four week campaign can be successful. 

What could my school advertise on Facebook? 

• Open days and events 

• Public events

• Staff Vacancies

• Overall awareness campaign of your school

Let’s get started with creating a great Facebook ad campaign in five steps! This example is running a campaign for an Open Day: 

1. Optimise your website for the campaign

Before setting up an ad, there’s a little bit of ground work to optimise your website for the campaign. Humans are naturally impatient and will leave the website if they can’t find what they’re looking for, so ensure the landing page is highly engaging with clear information and calls to action. 

Use the calendar for event itineraries and booking forms. Any booking forms should be as simple as possible, embedded onto your website and redirect to a thankyou page on submission to make completions trackable.

E.g. www.yourschoolwebsite.com/open-day/thank-you

2. Set up your campaign within Facebook ads Manager

You may or may not be aware that Facebook made some pretty significant changes to their news feed algorithm earlier this year. Now the dust has settled, we can look at how you can make the most of these changes to better your #SchoolMarketing.

Within this blog post, we hope to show you a candid view into how we, two 16 and 17 year old teenage girls, living in the South East of England, view social media and how it is used by us and our friends.

Intro

The majority of teenagers in our modern world today use social media and it plays a huge role in their daily lives. On the other hand, the way in which they use social media greatly differs to the way in which most adults utilise social media, in both the sites that they choose to go on and the way in which they use them. 

Most teens use social media as a means of communicating with friends, whether that be through sending a Snapchat using the bee filter, so their voice seems to have jumped 3 octaves higher, or by posting a ‘candid’ photo on Instagram which only took 20 tries to get. For this reason, teenagers generally prefer different forms of social media to adults, as they try to communicate using the social media platforms, which are fun, quick and easy to use. This therefore explains Snapchat's increasing popularity amongst teens because it is instantaneous and amusing to mess around with, whilst Facebook is being used less and less by teens as they can get more visual, safer experiences elsewhere, without their mum commenting on every single photo that they are tagged in. 

There are many preconceptions linked with how teenagers use social media channels, from the expectation that teenagers are deprived and send inappropriate photos to each other over Snapchat or that they harass adults on Facebook for expressing what teens believe are ‘outdated’ opinions. Even within the social group of teenagers there are stereotypes attached with how we use social media. For example, when going through Facebook or Instagram, every 15-18 year old is dreading the inevitable encounter with a ‘Twelvie’, that one friend everyone has who is twelve and thinks they are the coolest person in the world. They regularly post pictures of themselves with the caption ‘I didn’t choose the thug life, the thug life chose me’. The pictures tend to consist of poses which cause scorn and second hand embarrassment from the older teenagers, mainly because they remember a time when they thought that was a cool thing to do. 

Likewise, even within the older branch of teens, we dread running into that one friend who has very strong opinions and is not afraid of saying them, whether that be through a post on Instagram with a caption a mile long or 100+ seconds on a Snapchat story ranting about some injustice they encountered that they just had to mention. This became particularly prevalent in the lead up to and the aftermath of the EU Referendum…#Brexit. Certainly in our school common room, you couldn’t go five minutes before someone closed their apps and locked their phones in disgust, professing that ‘Suddenly everyone’s a politician’.

Most Popular Types of Social Media in the UK (In Order of Popularity) and How We Use Them:

Happy #BackToSchool time everyone!!! Yes, it's the new academic year and you might just be wondering what social media breakthroughs have crept up on you over the summer holidays. 

Here is our handy summary of the social media you should be on RIGHT NOW, or at least getting very excited for! So...where shall we begin?

STATS!

Yes, statistics. We all love them - don't lie. These numbers and facts help us to see the reality of how entities such as social media effects us. More importantly they offer guidance in where your school should be driving its social media marketing strategy.

Overall

People mistake social media for socialising. WRONG. People do socialise on social media, but that's just a tiny part of how we use social.

Social is used for learning, collaboration, productivity, writing, curation, entertainment, storytelling. Not just socialising with friends.

Students natively use social media to communicate, curate, and share ideas online.

As teachers, this gives you a great opportunity to increase their passion for learning. Giving access and implementing strong educational resources is a great way to engage students both inside and outside the classroom.

It’s important to incorporate your lesson materials using this new medium. It reaches students through a medium they use everyday. And it also chronicles all the tips, lessons and answers you provide in your stream.

Finding bold and innovative ways to use social media is a great way for your school to progress into this new generation. These are just a few ideas that you can infuse social media into your lesson plans to.

Using Snapchat for Quizzes

Schools are seriously misunderstanding Snapchat, and how people use it. Snapchat is trying to replace TV. It understands that people are moving away from tradition television into YouTube, Netflix, and other mobile channels.

Big media companies (Sky, Daily Mail, National Geographic) have set up their own channels on Snapchat because they understand that's where people are spending their time looking for entertainment.

Because of Snapchat's ephermal nature, teachers can use it for memory quizzes. Simply set the time (1-10 seconds) that you want the image or video to appear, and publish your story to Snapchat.

“We owe it to each other to tell stories.” – Neil Gaiman

 

From a very young age people are taught such infamous childhood fables as The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Hare and the Tortoise and The Goose that laid the Golden Eggs. 

These fables originate from 620BC and are still taught in schools today!

How many still remember these famous fables? Almost everybody will remember at least one of these infamous fables. 

Storytelling began on cave walls and has travelled through time passing through rock art, hieroglyphics, painted artefacts, and has now entered the modern era with social media. 

Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Vines have stories captured and shared every day. Storytelling hasn’t changed - but the channels we tell them via have evolved.

(The Hare and the Tortoise 1700-2015)