If you’ve read my ‘About Me’ page you’ll know that I’m new to international school marketing.  I had never actively managed a company Facebook page before joining my school 6 months ago.  The agencies I had worked with previously had never offered that service so managing a Facebook presence was totally new to me.  My predecessor had fortunately set up the account with a generic communications@xxx email address so it was easy to take over.  If you don’t have one of these email addresses set up I would definitely recommend it.  Then all your social media can be associated with that address and can easily survive you once you move on to pastures new.

Firstly some context.  Facebook is huge in Myanmar.  The internet was only allowed from 2012.  There was no web building know how in the country prior to that so Facebook was the easiest way to get an online presence.  Facebook here is almost as ubiquitous as Google is back in the US or UK.  Most companies here have Facebook accounts but few have actual websites.  The people of Myanmar have taken to Facebook ravenously and many are pretty addicted to it.  I now have a few Facebook friends who are Burmese and they tend to be very active to say the least.  That said, the school population is only around 30% – 40% Burmese with the rest being expats.

Our school Facebook account was launched on 30th Jan, 2017.  I can see from the history of the account that the page was able to attract 1300 page ‘likes’ by the end of the 2016-17 academic year.  The population of the school including students, parents and staff is around 2,000 so getting 1,300 likes in 5 months I think was pretty good.  The ‘posts’ history doesn’t go back that far but I am assuming that there must have been someone with some enthusiasm for the platform on those first few months.  Unfortunately, that is seemingly where the enthusiasm stopped.  Knowing how hectic school life is, I have some sympathy.  I can see from where the post history does start (and it looks like you get about a year) that in the 6 months leading up to June 2018 there was an inconsistent number of posts being published latterly averaging out at maybe 1 a week.  The total number of page likes at that point was up to just over 1,700.  The first lesson then, is that 1 post a week isn’t going to cut it.  During that period the page likes only trickled through and the engagement per post was poor.

Facebook is a self-reinforcing platform.  The more engagement you get, the more likely your posts are to appear in people’s news feeds and the more engagement you get etc etc.  By ‘engagement’ I am talking about comments, clicks, reactions and shares.  Note that engagement is what is key.  You can post away all you want and there are tools out there that can automate the process but if no one is engaging with your activity your posts won’t be getting out there.

I started in August of this year.  It was difficult to set a goal as I haven’t done this before but my initial target was an additional 1,000 likes (so 2,700 in total) with 3,000 likes as my stretch target.  ‘Likes’ are a reasonable measure as, in order for your posts to show up in someones feed, they need to have either ‘liked’, or ‘followed’ the page.  Number of followers would also be an acceptable measure. I did a ‘back to school’ post and from there started posting as often as I could.  I have someone in my team with a number of hats but social media along with the yearbook are two of them.  Taking photos for the yearbook is a must (if you produce a yearbook) but you may as well use some of them for Facebook.  Facebook is very much an immediate medium.  People (and especially students) want instant reaction to whatever it is they are posting or being posted about them so you can’t be too picky about the photos.  Don’t spend hours using photo editing software to make that perfect shot because by the time you’ve got the image up, the story has moved on to something else.  Photos are hugely important for engagement.  Posts without any images in my experience get a fraction of the engagement that posts with images get.

After a little while I posted by first video, which was a video of a basketball game.  Videos get even more engagement than images so I highly recommend posting video content.  Video content is trickier because the chances are you’ll have to spend a little bit of time editing the footage.   Keep the total length of Facebook videos fairly short.  Ours are usually between 30 seconds and a minute at most.  Longer videos should be saved for the YouTube channel (and I’ll post my experiences on this soon).  Again, don’t overthink the editing.  Students post video material all the time from their phones straight to Facebook barely viewing the material themselves first.  Timeliness is more important than the quality of the edit.

One criticism I had early on is that we were only posting Sporting events and it looked like we were some kind of sporting academy.  When I first got to the school the sporting events were easy to identify and show up to.  It took a bit of time before people starting asking me to come and photograph a student event taking place in the classroom for instance.  It’s important to mix up the type of events you’re posting about and also mix up the school age levels.  We are a K through 12 school so it’s relatively easy to find something interesting going on somewhere.

We don’t allow face tagging but we do allow comments.  If you can get students commenting and sharing your posts, then engagement really starts to build.  Our first really successful post was about some students who had camped out for 2 whole days to be there first for the opening of a Krispy Kreme (don’t judge).  Their friends commented on the post and then it went locally viral throughout the community.

Once you start getting some engagement and getting into the habit of posting regularly (we probably post 5-8 times a week on average), start taking a look at some of the tools Facebook offers you as the administrator of your site.  The ‘Insights’ tab gives you a great overview showing you your latest stats and comparing the latest week’s performance with the previous week’s.  You can then drill down into each area to get a more detailed breakdown.  At the bottom of that section there is space to view competitor sites.  Facebook gives you some top line stats about them so you can see how you’re doing.  My goal next year is to overtake our nearest competitor in terms of page likes.  If you go to the ‘Publishing Tools’ tab you can also write draft posts.  This is handy if you want to have someone else review the content first.  Finally there is also the option to schedule posts.  This is great to keep up engagement during the holidays.  We scheduled about 5 posts during the Christmas break and they all had great engagement.  We are planning on doing this over the summer so we keep the community engaged during the long holiday.

Once you’ve got an engaged audience you can use the platform to reinforce school messaging making sure that whatever’s most important for the school is getting out to community.

So far our activities on Facebook have been very successful.  We’re already over the stretch target of 3,000 likes and heading for the new target of double the number of starting point likes by the end of the academic year.  Our engagement has steadily increased as has our reach.  We are regularly getting reach numbers in excess of 1,000 and the share, reaction and comments figures regularly getting into the hundreds.

I hope this has been of some use.  It’s really NOT rocket science.  To summarise:

Try to post once a day or thereabouts.
Use photos for all posts and throw in video content where you can.
Don’t overthink the content and especially the videos.
Use the tools that Facebook gives you to analyse your data and set goals
Once you’ve built an audience, cherish it.  They will desert you quickly if there’s nothing to engage with.