Does your school have a Twitter account or Facebook Page? If the answer is yes, that's great! The demands of modern times require modern solutions - social media is one answer to the ever-growing demands of school marketing.

But how far does your presence on social media go? How about a school YouTube account for sharing all your awesome video content? What about Instagram and Flickr - two places to host photos and images? No? What about SoundCloud for audio? Issuu for publications? Pinterest for inspiration?

All of these channels offer something new to your school's marketing - and should all be considered important tools to make use of.

Knowing how to use them is important - of course! But being able to see how they can fit into your school, which departments and subjects they can be applied to, and understanding that their limitations are often your own is essential if you want to ✨STAND OUT✨ with your marketing.

YouTube: the place for video!

For hundreds of years pedagogy has formed the core to teaching and learning. 

Learning outcomes and academic results have become the focus for educators and the community around them - a narrow view that is having less and less to do with today's modern needs in education. While striving for educational greatness is not necessarily a bad thing, the single-mindedness desire to top league tables and churn out the best grades is failing our children. Schools need to be adaptable to new styles of education, otherwise the only losers will be those who are receiving an education.

Schools tend to focus on buying technology, without considering the human impact.

Schools talk a lot about ‘educating the whole child’, and ‘giving them opportunities beyond the curriculum’ to thrive in what they are good at - but are we missing the point? 

The Reality

Following on from last week's industry-specific predictions, we take a look at 6 predictions for schools in 2017.

So, let's get started...

[1] VR

2017 is a big year for virtual reality (VR). We've already had exciting hardware releases with Playstation VR and Samsung Gear.

Facebook is betting big on VR, with Zuckerberg believing VR will be the future of the platform.

Schools are going to play a big part with VR too - in both education and marketing.

Children in schools are going to grow up and enter a world that has heavily adopted VR - just as computers were. Google are already pledging to bring VR to 1 million pupils in the UK.

We'll start to see more schools using VR inside classrooms. We'll also see schools offering VR tours of the school, and to watch concerts, sports fixtures etc.

There's no more immersive way of a experiencing a school, without physically visiting it, than through VR.

If you're reading this, you made it through 2016. Congratulations.

Welcome to our inaugural social and digital predictions. In this first part, we'll look at trends we're witnessing within the tech/social industry. In the next part, we'll look at school-specific predictions.

Firstly, let's revisit 2016... Gulp.

Our 2016 predictions - how did we do?

1. More Twitter characters [CORRECT]
2. Moving further away from television [CORRECT]
3. Periscope inside Twitter, and the real launch of live streaming [CORRECT]
4. 360° videos and 360°live streaming [CORRECT]
5. One-click purchasing on social media [INCORRECT]
6. Snapchat to be sold [INCORRECT]
7. Battle for news [CORRECT]
8. Vertical video [CORRECT]
9. Messaging apps = The new OS [CORRECT]

To read more about last year's predictions, and an analysis of each, take a look at our recap of 2016.

What does 2017 have in store for us?

[1] (More) Live Streaming

We called it last year, and it’s becoming clearer that live video on social platforms is the trend for 2017. We’ll start to see live-streaming move way beyond just early-adopters and into the hands of the mainstream users.

How many Facebook ads have you ever seen on TV, billboards, etc.? None, unless you remember the awkward TV advert back in 2012, when Facebook said ‘Chairs are like Facebook’. Yes, that really happened.

Yet, we’re constantly seeing the new Facebook Live adverts. Why? Well, Facebook know how important it is to win the live-streaming battle.

The Advent period does not need to be all about chocolate you know (though it can't hurt to have some chocolate every day ). Instead, we can have lots of fun online while delivering a really strong and engaging marketing campaign.

Yes, the #SocialAdvent Challenge is back for 2016! 

Every day we are going to be setting a different challenge. So, for 25 days you will have something new to share on Twitter. The idea is that you will be able to share things that your communities will be interested in. It also helps you get into a rhythm of tweeting (and will hopefully inspire you too!). 

To take part, and be in for a chance to win infamy, post your Tweets using #SocialAdvent. You will be able to follow along and find inspiring content from other schools. We will be monitoring #SocialAdvent every day and picking our favourite Tweets for each badge.

Make sure you check back here each day to see all the winners and the challenge of the day.

Day 1

Each year, schools all around the world share their inspiring #SchoolStories throughout December. Each day there's a new challenge to tackle and share with your community. We call it #SocialAdvent.

Will you be taking part? Last year, schools taking part reached over 2 million people.

The #SocialAdvent Challenge 2016

December has been a firm favourite at @intSchools HQ for the past three years, following the great fun we've had running our #SocialAdvent challenge. This year we are looking to make the challenge our greatest one yet, with a record number of participants across a global audience.

To make it extra special, our creative elves have been hard at work - coming up and designing a bigger, better and refreshed #SocialAdvent challenge to spread festive marketing cheer this December. 

So, without further ado we have this year's #SocialAdvent to share out now!

Hi there, and welcome back to this article. Last week we looked at Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Google+.

The list doesn't end there! So, let's continue on from where we left it...

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