Your school is never at a loss for events to post about on social media. Just keeping up with posting these events will keep your social media team on their toes!
Here are 5 tips to marketing your school events more efficiently and with the greatest social impact:
- Use Hashtags – whether it is Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or especially Instagram, selecting carefully scrutinized hashtags can amplify the social reach of your post. One tool (though not perfect) to check who else may be using your hashtag across various social platforms is Tagboard. The surest way is to search each platform to see if other folks are using it already (you want to ensure you are not using the same hashtag as an inappropriate organization is using it).
- Capture it on Video – assign specific people to each event to capture some quick smartphone video and post it directly to the appropriate social media channels. Vine and Instagram are hugely popular – here’s an article by the folks at RenWeb about using video in school marketing. I also have experimented briefly with a cool video app called Videolicious that allows you to assemble video and photos into a short, narrated story about the girls soccer team that you can upload to all the major social media channels. It takes a little work, but I’ve seen some pretty phenomenal videos (none are mine yet!)
- Tweet it live – I’m not particularly fond of having to follow a play-by-play tweet fest, but occasional score updates keep the at-home fans engaged. My sons and I were recently driving home from baseball practice (they are 9 and 11 at the time of this post). I had my son pull up the high school baseball team’s Twitter account since I was driving. When he first pulled it up, the most recent tweet reported a 7-run deficit starting the bottom of the 8th inning. He kept it open and all of a sudden the tweet said, “3-run homerun!” which pulled us within 4 runs. We redirected our route and by the team we made it to the field, tweets had reported that our guys had pulled within 1 run going into the 9th inning. We parked and ran up to the field as our home team guys started batting in the bottom of the 9th. I tweeted a picture of me and my boys (as well as texted it to my wife) – we were fully engaged! (sorry to say they lost by 2 but we loved the experience anyway).
- Start a Monday morning radio show – whether you use a podcast or something simple like Soundcloud, grab some guys and gals who have an interest in radio/sports and give them microphones so they can turn a vacant photo lab (who uses those any more?) into a studio for producing their own audio show recounting the greatest plays, the challenges ahead against the next team or the preferred hashtags that other students should use leading up to this Friday night’s game (or whenever the game is held). Moderating the show will be important and you should stress that it is not a show to say critical things about the players – but rather an audio show capturing the fun of each sporting event (interview one of the on-the-field trainers about their job on the field or one of the band’s drum majors about the upcoming halftime performance. Make it engaging and something all the students will want to listen to!
- Blog the news – hopefully you are turning those journalistic-minded students into sports writers or writers who cover important events around campus. If you can, seek permission to have students accompany the debate team to their competition or the volleyball team to the regional tournament to capture the event. These are important skills students can learn and showcase as they look at colleges and universities look at them. The blog posts can house photos, video interviews, radio show embeds from Soundcloud (#4) and certainly textual descriptions of the events. Students (and especially their parents and grandparents) love to see their name in the news!
-Randy
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