Do you publish on social media only to hear crickets in response? More often than not, the problem is not your post; it’s the social network.
You used to be able to publish on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter and see lots of engagement in the form of likes, comments and shares. But nowadays, it’s much harder. The reason is that the social network’s algorithm is no longer so generous. With billions of users spending countless minutes or hours on each platform, they won’t put your content in front of large numbers of people unless you pay. But what you may not know is that the investment can pay dividends—especially with boosted posts for schools.
While most schools run paid advertising campaigns on social networks to build audiences and generate leads, they don’t necessarily boost posts they’ve published on their feed, even when they have superb content on their social channels. The thinking is that one channel is paid and the other one should be free, but this view is outdated.
Take a look at the results of boosting posts with just $100 – the reach, impressions, and engagements are high for such a small investment:
When your social media is used as a channel for content that answers your personas’ concerns, gives them valuable information, and helps them along the enrollment funnel, make sure to boost those posts to get the full effect. With organic reach for brands at an all-time low, it’s sad to see a school with an awesome social media presence but little to no engagement. In fact, research shows that the average reach of an organic Facebook post is around 5.20%. By simply boosting posts, schools can begin to see better results and more effectively reach their target audience.
Here are the top four reasons why putting dollars behind social posts on your feed is worth it.
Reason 1: Build Your Brand with Boosted Posts for Schools
When potential students consider studying at your school, they check out your social media. Younger students mainly look at your Instagram and TikTok while their parents hop over to your Facebook. Older students may be on any of these networks, including Twitter and LinkedIn. When you post regularly but get no engagement, it tells users no one cares about your posts and, by extension, your school, courses and programs.
If you want to look good and build excitement around your school’s brand, you need to boost posts to drive engagement. Interested in doing precisely that on your school’s social media account? Our team of industry experts can evaluate your social media efforts and help you develop a stronger inbound marketing strategy!
Reason 2: Build Audiences to Retarget
When using boosted posts for schools on social platforms, you can build those who engage with your post into an audience and then retarget them with ads based on their previous actions. For example, let’s say you published on social about a blog post on careers in cloud computing. You can then retarget everyone who clicked on that post or spent a certain amount of time on the page reading the blog with, for example, an ad promoting an information session on your cloud computing program. You could also target them with program info, sending them to a landing page and asking them to fill out a form to get program info by email.
By using engagement audiences, you can target audiences very specifically so they feel your offering is relevant to them. The outcome is better results from your “microtargeted” ad campaigns.
Reason 3: Generate Leads Using Boosted Posts for Schools
When you boost posts and drive up your reach, you will have more users commenting with questions or writing to you on messenger. These should be treated as leads and handed over to your recruitment team, who should have direct access to the social platform in question to engage with those leads as quickly as possible. Taking this into account as you develop a social media strategy for schools can help you generate a higher ROI.
Reason 4: Rank Higher on Search Engines
One of the factors search engines look at when ranking your website and blog content is social engagement. If your social posts get little in the way of response, search engines decide the content must not be very good. The result? Your content dips in search engines and gets harder to find. But just a small amount of money put into boosted posts for schools can have superb results.
We recommend that a small budget be put aside each month for boosting social posts. In 2023, this needs to be part and parcel of your social strategy if you want to take your digital marketing and recruitment to new heights.