How can you take your school’s social media to the next level? By following schools who are doing it right!

I’m thrilled to be sharing the social media journey of Minnehaha Academy this week. They are going to share some insider knowledge on the power of LinkedIn and Facebook advertising – so you don’t want to miss this one!

Minnehaha Academy is a premier Christian school located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They are committed to academic excellence for students in preschool through twelfth grade. They provide high-quality education integrating Christian faith and learning, and they started back in 1913.

Rebekah Peterson, Director of Marketing and Communication, recently shared some insight into how social media has been integrated into their overall communication strategy.

When did the school start using social media?
Minnehaha Academy has been using social media to stay in touch with current and prospective families for a number of years – most notably Facebook and Twitter. We’ve since expanded to Instagram and LinkedIn.

How do you manage all of your pages?
Our Marketing and Communication team is comprised of two people – me and the marketing manager. We work together to make sure that our social media channels at Minnehaha are current and active. It does take a lot of work, but we think it is a worthwhile activity that engages current students and families, as well as prospective families.

Currently, we are able to stay organized by planning some of our content ahead of time with a marketing calendar that we share (a print copy and a Google calendar). Then, as last-minute things happen, we can sneak those posts in as well! We do not have time to tailor our content for each channel, so once we have our post and text ready, it’s really just a matter of copying and pasting. To get the best results for our videos, we post natively to Facebook. For our Instagram posts, we use HootSuite.

What strategies do you use to gather content for your social media channels?
We try to get content however we can! We enlist the help of parents, staff, or teachers to take photos if they are attending an event. We will also attend an event ourselves and take photos or videos. While teachers are good about taking and sharing photos, we want to make it fun – so we are launching a social media contest. Each month, we’ll ask classrooms to post photos using the #MyMinnehaha hashtag, and once a month, we’ll select a winning classroom. We’ve even done some fun family challenges like the photo below!

I love the #MyMinnehaha hashtag! How have you used that to promote your school?

Thanks! The hashtag has been a great way to gather stories and perspectives from our various community members – parents, alums, teachers, staff, students.

We highlight certain posts every quarter in our magazine, advertise the hashtag at events, and have given away t-shirts with the hashtag. It’s been a really fun way to get our community involved. They enjoy seeing their posts appear on our website, and we love seeing the contributions.

Have you utilized paid campaigns through Facebook to grow your reach?
Yes, we do use paid ads on Facebook for certain events or posts. We’ve found it to be an effective way to reach people in a very targeted way and it is a good value.

For example, an ad in our local newspaper can be $1,000 and an ad in one of the big Minnesota magazines can be over $2,500. It is very hard to track ROI in print.

Instead, using Facebook, we can spend as much or as little as we want, targeting our specific audience down to the most minute detail. We generally create ads for our Admission Open House events and other community events we host. The cost of these ads are so variable depending on the size of audience, reach, length the ad will run, etc. I’d suggest starting out small ($10-20) and see what kind of response you get from that investment.

One other item to note is that you can create an ad just for the people that like your page. We all know that only a handful of our fans see the content that we post to our FB pages because of the algorithms. If you want to increase the likelihood that fans will see your post – try running an ad! You’ll automatically get that reach we all want to see from our organic posts but rarely do.

LinkedIn is a new place for me, can you describe how your school uses this platform?
We’ve had great success connecting with people on LinkedIn. As I mentioned previously, all of our posts are similar from one social platform to the next. To keep things simple, we post the same content we post on our other channels to LinkedIn. We are also sure to respond to any comments that we get on LinkedIn, just as we would any other channel.

What impact has social media made on the school culture?
The reality is that a large part of community happens online. We need to be engaged in that community and be a part of the conversation. Social media allows us the opportunity to share photos and videos that give a view of daily life in the classroom that parents, grandparents and alums just don’t get to see too often. It’s a great way to connect to others and get people excited about Minnehaha and the variety of activities we offer – in and out of the classroom.

What advice do you have for other private schools using social media?
There are so many social media channels to spend time on and the demographics are so different on each one. Figure out who you want to connect with (parents, students) and where they spend time online. For instance, Facebook is a great way to connect with parents and share links to blog posts, while Instagram is better for sharing great photos – but links don’t work so well. Once you’ve determined the best social media channel for your school, keep it active and well maintained. Then, once you have a schedule and system in place for that one, move on to others.

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