Social media is a must for your school. But are you scoring an “A” or an “F” when it comes to your efforts?

Not on social media? Start here.

Facebook is still the number one platform for schools to use, but how do you know whether your school is scoring high or not? Measuring the success of your social media efforts can be a bit complex and the insights tab on Facebook can be overwhelming if you don’t know what to look for. But, I am here to help.

I’m sharing several notes here, but there is also a recorded webinar on this topic that can be accessed by members only. If you are interested in joining us, learn more here.

Facebook Fans

This is usually the first thing we think about when measuring success. How many fans do you have on your page? While this is important, you’ll see further down how it is truly not the most important measurement.

Starting out, the goal should be to get your fan base equal to your school enrollment. If you have 800 students, then your goal should be 800. Now for bigger districts, this is a tougher hill to climb. But some of those districts have separate Facebook pages for each school, so you should be driving that goal number from the school enrollment. You could total them all up to get a district number.

Once you have met your enrollment number, a 25% growth rate each year is your target. You want to keep growing because most people on social media don’t go back and “unlike” a page if they’ve moved or had a relative graduate. They will remain a fan forever even if they are less engaged with the page. New likes mean you will continue to grow your engaged audience.

Reach

Facebook makes it easy to dissect your analytics with the insights tab. Click this button on the top and the first thing you will want to note is the reach (5,398 on the far right in the image above). This number tells you how many people have seen the posts that you shared in the last seven days.

What is a good reach? A good number is reaching four times the amount of likes you have on your page each week. New Auburn reached 5,398 with 806 fans on its page. That rate is 5,398/806 = 6.7. That is a high reach!

Posts Per Week

The more you post, the more reach you will naturally have, but you want them to be good posts! On average, #SocialSchool4EDU posts 20 times per week for the schools we work with. If you aren’t posting at least once a day, then I would say you aren’t truly using social media.

You can scroll down to the “Pages to Watch” section to see the number of posts you did in the last seven days. Here you can see that Cameron did 20 posts, while Bruce did zero.

Engagement

Are your fans paying attention to your posts? Do they really care about what you are sharing? That is what engagement measures.

I recommend again scrolling down to the bottom section of the overview tab inside of insights to see your engagement. Here you can see that Flambeau (number five on the list) had an engagement level of 184 for the past seven days. With 859 likes, the engagement percent is 184/859 = 21%.

For the schools I manage, I set a goal to grab an engagement level of 20%. Many times we come in at 16 or 17, but the goal is 20%.

What is your engagement percent? Calculate it now. If it is less than 10%, you have some work to do!

Pages to Watch

A little competition is always good, right? So the “Pages to Watch” section is a great opportunity to see how you measure up with surrounding districts, rival schools, or schools that you know are doing a great job with social media (like Mineral Point and Mondovi).

By clicking the “Add Pages” button, you can add the schools you want to keep an eye on. If a school has a great week, you can click on their school name and Facebook will show you the top-performing posts from their page. Gathering ideas from these schools is a great way to improve your social media performance. That is what I share on my #SocialSchool4EDU Facebook page.

Report Card

Looking at all of this information each week is helpful, but if you are the only one seeing it, that is a problem. You need to develop a plan to report these fun statistics back to your board and other staff members.

If you are interested in how to assemble all of this information (and more) into a nice-looking report card, remember there is a recorded webinar on this topic that can be accessed by members only. If you are interested in joining us, learn more here!

If you are not already using social media for your school, we need to talk – like now! Here are 10 reasons why you need social media for your school. I help districts get started and we can get you up and running in a matter of days!

E-mail anytime at andrea@socialschool4edu.com