Increasingly, when I check out other school's Facebook pages, I've noticed a trend that is troubling. The trend is that school's treat Facebook like a scrapbook by randomly posting photo after photo and sprinkling in a news story about their school from the local paper.
Is this how you post to Facebook for your school?
Now, I want to be clear and say the posting photos and news stories has a place on your school's Facebook page. Heck, we do it all the time.
The point I'm trying to make, however, is that you need to have a strategy when posting to Facebook for your school and I'd like to offer a simple strategy to get you started.
Joe Pulizzi, the author of Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less
, states,
In social media marketing, the center of gravity—the focus of the marketing activity—is located within the social networks themselves…In contrast, the center of gravity for content marketing is a brand website.
Let me explain Mr. Pulizzi's comment.
The concept is that with inbound (content) marketing your social media posts are designed to drive traffic back to your website or blog where you can convert that traffic into an inquiry.
The concept of social media marketing is that you aren't trying to drive traffic anywhere. Rather, your goal is to keep the traffic on your social media channel where the post was made.
Let me give you an example of each type of post.
In the post below we had an inbound marketing focus which meant we were trying to drive traffic to a landing page with the hope of converting them into an inquiry where we can drop them into a lead nurturing email sequence. I like to think of this type of post as recruiting prospective families.
In the following post, we had a social media marketing focus which meant were trying to keep people on Facebook. I like to think of this type of post as retaining our current families.
Your homework now is to audit the last 10-15 posts to your Facebook page and determine whether their focus was inbound marketing or social media marketing.
Going forward I offer this simple strategy – when you post to Facebook for your school make sure that you use both types of posts: posts that drive traffic back to your website and posts that keep people on Facebook.
Happy posting to Facebook for your school!
