Words and content are the most fundamental tool to any school website, yet they are also key to enticing any prospecting parents.
While design immediately strikes at humanity’s desire to be satisfied aesthetically; the content and words drive human-kind’s need to acquire information and make decisions. The words we hear or read and the content provided is just as, if not more, powerful than the images that we see.
The #FutureSchool is well and truly here. Make sure you don’t get left behind in the move over to #RemoteLearning. Remote teaching & learning from home should by no means signify the end of #SchoolStories! The show must go on(line), get it?!
With the majority of schools closed, spreading positive messages from your school on social media is more important than ever. Here are some of our top tips to keep your #SchoolStories flowing:
Much of life is in a long intermission. One thing won’t be delayed: the admissions season. For that show to go on, it must be staged online with admissions and marketing sharing top billing.
Prospective families still want to explore your school even if the campus is closed. They still want to experience its educational benefits. Current families considering next year do too. With that in mind, here are 7 ways admissions and marketing can team up to take the show online.
Disruption and uncertainty are the new normal thanks to the coronavirus. But, let’s face it, as school marketers, many of you have been here before.
Closed campuses and cancelled classes go with the territory in much of the U.S. during winter. And, as comms professionals, you already keep your communities in the know no matter where they or you are.
What’s different, of course, is there is no end in sight to working from home - and working from home has gone worldwide.
Because the show must go on, we’re sharing these 7 #WFH Tips to make your transition a smooth one.
Can you believe it’s been almost 4 years since our original blog on teens using social media! How times have changed.
We asked a real life teenager how they use social in their personal and school life, the results are surprising! Below, we break down the verdict on the platforms of our 2016 blog, platform by platform.
After the infamous Facebook scandal regarding the privacy of its users’ information, Facebook’s user base has dramatically declined. The platform has become far less relevant for teens as the years have gone by, mainly because the population of older adults and embarrassing family members has increased as they’ve discovered social media and tried to become ‘hip’ and trendy. For this reason, in 2020 teens tend to avoid it, and in some cases scorn the older population using it, with jokes being made about ‘Facebook mums’ and their love of cringey minion memes. Many teens have either deleted or abandoned their accounts and prefer other platforms, usually where anonymity is found and a younger audience is prevalent.
The concept of vloggers and influencers has remained, and in some cases grown. Being a YouTuber has become even more prominent as a career path and is a job many teens might aspire to do out of admiration for the fame and glamour it seems to hold. In recent years, YouTube has been updated to include features such as stories, the ability to post images and text, premieres for videos to induce hype, YouTube live streaming and even the option to purchase premium and be able to access many additional features. YouTube in terms of video entertainment is definitely in conflict with Netflix which has become a staple in most teen’s lives, however for me the beauty of YouTube is the variety of content, from informative videos and tutorials to TV clips and sometimes full episodes you can watch for free - something you don’t get with Netflix.
Twitter has still not been crowned the most popular social media site, but has become more politically charged. Politicians now Tweet regularly to share their viewpoints and gain broader support, and controversial personalities share their perspectives on things, often causing uproar. Twitter is a brilliant platform for teens to access these political debates and understand politics in a way more geared towards them. Notably, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg is someone who speaks to her fellow teens on a similar level and has come into conflict with other Twitter users in recent years due to opposing views on climate change. The site is brilliant for teens interested in becoming politically informed and watching debates unfold.
Twitter also has content relevant to teen life outside of politics, especially its place in the world as the origin of meme formats. Exam tweets and memes following GCSE, AS and A-Level papers are incredibly popular, especially due to the support of hashtags by the site. After my GCSE exams, the first thing I’d do was get home and laugh at the tweets and memes people were uploading every few seconds which were relevant to the paper I had sat. It offers a way for teenagers all over the country to connect. I, for one, felt much better about my biology exam after someone admitted in a tweet to writing about children photosynthesising in their paper.
Twitter is the place to be for heads and principals. Don’t take our word for it, this is how TES put it:
“Heads who want to do well at the job: go on Twitter!”
We couldn’t have put it clearer ourselves. If you’re still not convinced, check out what Ann Haydon, head of school at Harrow School, Hong Kong (@HeadHarrowHK) had to say about the matter:
“Love it or hate it, Twitter has changed the way we communicate, changed our ability to communicate! It now has 284 million monthly active users and 300 billion tweets since it started 8 years ago. So why are so many head teachers still rather reluctant to tweet?”
Now this is the million dollar question! There is a whole industry built around making sure websites are listing on Google’s first page and for very good reason. 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.
For schools, ranking on the first page for branded searches (i.e. your school name) is usually pretty easy if you are following the basic rules of SEO however you also want to rank highly for more generic non branded searches eg “Top private schools in London”, “Independent schools near me”, “girls schools in Surrey”.
Here’s how you can do that…
