Parents demand the best from their children’s schools. Whether it’s more engaging classroom environments or diverse extracurricular activities, the more a school can separate itself from the competition, the more attractive it becomes to families.

Adding a comprehensive social media plan to your school’s brand is a fantastic way to the increase parent engagement and involvement, while allowing potential families to get a better glimpse of what you can offer. Here, we take a closer look at how the right social media tactics can help your school in the long run.

Choose a Hashtag

First and foremost, you must choose a hashtag for your school and push its promotion. Type that hashtag into every Twitter, Instagram and Facebook post and encourage others to use it.

Secondly, pass out paraphernalia with the hashtag to push its promotion even further. Take Fall Creek School District for example. It gives away T-shirts, windshield scrapers and other trinkets with its hashtag #gocrickets splashed across all of them.

Once you’ve created solid branding for your school, parents, students and the community will want to join the movement.

What to Post

The next step is making sure you post effective and engaging content on your social media. You have to think about it from the parents’ and students’ perspective. What do they care about?

Parents want to know school updates without having to rummage through their child’s backpack and looking for the latest printed newsletter. Remedy that with posting classroom announcements, school cancellation updates, and even homework and course assignment reminders. Social media can create parent discussion boards and forums.

Students, on the other hand, are interested in their peers. To that name, post as much as possible about your students. Fall Creek School District uploads podcast interviews with high-achieving students. You can also post school sports results and individual player stats. You could even create a weekly student-of-the-week post. As long as the content shines a positive light on students, don’t be afraid to share it.

Use the Most Trending Platform

Lastly, make sure you’re using the social media platform your students are currently glued to, Snapchat. Almost 84 percent of Snapchat users are between the ages of 12 to 17. With this heavy number, your students are on Snapchat before, during and after school.

Active users on this platform open the app more than 18 times every day. Take your student-focused content and hit it hard on Snapchat. This is where you’ll capture the most attention from your students.

Those Reaped Benefits

A sure-fire way to avoid an angry mob of soccer moms at your school’s front door is by using social media to encourage community and parent involvement, promote positive sentiments toward your school, increase parent communication, boost school reviews and ratings, and ultimately increase enrollment.

Even if you don’t think your school can handle tasking a social media team, look at your structure and see if you can re-arrange positions to fill this team. Without it, you might be missing the opportunity to enhance your school and community.