What’s your story?
By Dionne Molina
Director of Marketing and Community Relations, Hunter Valley Grammar School, molinad@hvgs.nsw.edu.au
School marketing teams are reasonably adept at using social media to market their school these days. Surprisingly though, there remains an incredibly underutilised feature lurking in Facebook, Instagram and even LinkedIn, which many schools have been slow to leverage in their marketing strategy. Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have seen (and possibly used) Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn Stories in your personal social feed, but if they are not part of your school marketing plan, they should be!
For the uninitiated, Stories are fleeting glimpses of life shared ephemerally, meaning they disappear after a period of time (24 hours). They are displayed through Story ‘cards’ and are viewed, used and consumed by millions of people every day.
Stories occupy prime real estate in our social apps, making them a very important channel for schools. If you are yet to discover the power of Stories, here are some considerations to get started.
Storytelling
It may seem like stating the obvious, but Stories are most interesting and effective when they tell a story – beginning, middle and end. You’d be surprised how little storytelling is considered in marketing. Rather than sharing a bunch of images of your next sports carnival in an Instagram post, think about how Stories can elevate that content for big impact and engagement. For example, film, photograph or Boomerang the start of the day (excitement building), some action throughout the day (races, smiling faces, close finishes, chants and costumes), and then the end of the day (winners and champions). Make your Stories engaging using a mix of video and stills and add gifs, filters or text to narrate the story of the day and keep your audience moving through your Story and coming back for updates.
Like all marketing and engagement activities, you should have a goal and plan for your content, so don’t underestimate the time required to strategise, structure and develop a good Story before you get started.
Social media is social
Many schools forget this critical point and fall into the trap of ‘telling’ and ‘pushing’ information out to their community rather than engaging, creating conversations or seeking and sharing user-generated content. Your audience wants to connect with humans (not just a brand or institution). The very nature of Stories allows schools to be authentic, go behind the scenes, facilitate connections and build engagement.
If you’re a little low on inspirational content, perhaps you could consider a ‘Story Takeover’ to show your school’s unique personality, which is also highly engaging to your audience. A Story Takeover is when an individual or a group posts to your Facebook or Instagram account, who ordinarily would not have access to it. For example, your school captains, photography club members, support staff etc. Imagine your groundspeople capturing the beauty of your school through their eyes and their work. What an interesting perspective of your school story.
Stories are an excellent way to showcase content in new and exciting ways and are especially good for the content which doesn’t fit or work in traditional posts. This doesn’t mean you should throw your brand book out the window. Always bear in mind what is appropriate to your brand and your audience and importantly, your goals.
Stories have loads of neat features like polls and sliders, which can engage your fans but be thoughtful about how you use these features. You can be fun and creative but do not be irrelevant to your audience or else they’ll just bypass your Story.
Don’t let the memories fade
So you have done all the work, created a fantastic Instagram Story full of colour and fun, and then it disappears after 24 hours. Make Instagram Highlights your friend. Highlights collate and save your best Story content so they can live on in your profile.
Highlights are the first thing a user will see when they land on your Instagram profile so put your best Story content in there. You can brand, classify and organise your Highlights in whatever way you like. Think about creating Highlights, for alumni, sport or even the highlights of an entire school year. If you use Canva, they have templates you can access and edit to brand Highlight covers.
Mobile and vertical
While there are ways to use a desktop to upload Story content, it is far easier to use the Story feature as it was intended – via a mobile device. This means content should be captured (or downloaded) to a mobile device and then upload directly to Stories in the relevant app.
For seasoned mobile photographers and videographers who are used to capturing video horizontally, turning the phone vertically was hard to get used to initially. Stories are viewed vertically, and they are most effective when the content is captured vertically from the onset. To get the most bang for my buck, I will simultaneously capture content both horizontally and vertically to deliver that content most effectively and appropriately across various platforms and features. I also differentiate my content between social apps because the audiences are very different (but that’s an article for another time!).
There are some great school marketing and communications teams out there doing some fantastic things with Stories – seek out a few examples and see how you go creating your own.
