A few takeaways from the session on social media at the Fobisia Leadership Conference 2018:
- Your school should sit on every social media platform that it can - even if it's not used. For example, just because your school doesn't use Snap-chat at the moment it doesn't mean that it won't in the future. You don't want to find yourself held hostage to someone squatting on usernames you might want in the future. Get on everything, even if you lie dormant. Store the login details somewhere safe.
- Don't use .pdfs for any part of your website. They are not searchable by Google's spiders and are near-impossible to kill when they go out of date.
- Pretty much all schools work in multi-lingual environments these days. There are good reasons for not translating everything on your website, but your admissions page should be viewable in every language your customers come at you with. Get it translated.
- Your enquiries page should be as simple to fill in as falling off a log. People should be able to make an enquiry whilst holding their phone in one hand at a supermarket queue. You only need two pieces of information at the enquiry stage - name and phone number or e-mail. Don't annoy potential customers by asking for anything else - you can fill in the gaps later once you know you've got someone through the door.
- Check that your website is mobile friendly. Almost all traffic is likely to be generated by people on handheld devices like phones, if your site doesn't look good on a mobile people are going to rapidly lose interest. Get it sorted.
- No page on your website should have more text than fills 1/3 of the page. Text pages are boring and nobody reads them. Prune, prune, prune.
- Google your school regularly for the following and if you don't like what you see, fix the problem:
- fees
- job vacancies
- examination results
- Social media platforms should drive traffic to your website in order to make sure that your website is used. If you post everything on social media and don't link back to your website, no one will look at your website anymore. Here's an example of the sort of post that drives traffic back to the main site: