For most schools, social media can grow as big as you want it to. Should you wish to post content once a month then it will be easy to manage but almost completely useless for marketing. If you want to use social media effectively to generate enrolments, promote yourself or position your school, then you will need to put in some time and effort. Don’t be despondent, having social media channels is a worthwhile endeavour that is beneficial on many levels, but it can be a lot to manage, especially if you oversee your accounts alone. Thankfully, there are many different tools out there to help you with posting, analytics and monitoring.
Here are 10 tools that can streamline your school’s social media marketing.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to monitor and publish across all your social media channels on one dashboard, and also offers analytics. This is a comprehensive social media management platform used by big and the small organisations.
2. Buffer
A slightly different social media manager. Buffer lets you schedule posts to all of your social media channels, plus much more. Buffer also have a great blog worth looking at.
3. Hubspot
Hubspot is an overall inbound marketing and sales program that has integrated social media posting, monitoring and analytics. We here at imageseven use Hubspot for our inbound marketing and social media.
4. Facebook Pages Manager
This application from Facebook allows you to manage up to fifty pages from your smartphone or tablet. Post, monitor and see insights all from within the app.
5. Sprout Social
Another effective social media management tool, Sprout Social lets you monitor, communicate and analyse your social media accounts from one platform.
6. Agora Pulse
Manage, share and analyse your social channels as well as being able to compare yourself with competitors and run contests. Agora Pulse is a simple but useful social media tool.
7. Bitly
Shorten, analyse and optimise the links you use for your webpage with Bitly. This is great for cleaning up long, unattractive URL’s and gaining insights on your link performance.
8. Crowd booster
Crowd booster allows you to measure and optimise your social media engagement. You can then share these real time analytics with those on your dashboard or export them as graphs and tables.
9. Google Analytics
Collect, visualise, analyse and report on data from your chosen websites. This is likely the most comprehensive analytics tool available for schools big and small.
10. Rival IQ
Rival IQ is also an analytics program with a focus on revealing insights on your competition as well as yourself. We also use this tool at imageseven, as do many of our clients.
Whilst many of the above tools are good at managing your social media channels, it is worth noting that they are all slightly different. This means that you should find a social media management platform that is right for you. Many also offer different levels of subscription so that you can further personalise the service you sign up for.
Another point to remember is that more marketing tech doesn’t always mean greater simplicity. Ensure you don’t over complicate your marketing and make things harder for yourself by trying to use too many services. Social media is a great tool for schools and can be made much simpler to handle with the right tools.
