Social Media Resourcing

[Ruston Long]

Hi All. I’m researching to what extent schools are resourcing social media. i.e 1 Full time 0.6 FTE etc. Also if you could please indicate how many students you have approx and whether you are a low, mid or high fee school and how active you are with posts e.g. posts per week, that would be extremely helpful. Many thanks, Ruston

[Robyn Birkin]

Hey Ruston, I’m at a university College, so slightly different, however our budget and my time is below zero!

Some ideas though to help with managing things are:
Instagram – later.com and schedule out some posts, and then you can bulk with live things
Facebook.com – make use of the scheduling function too from natively in FB so that you can appear more active than you need to be

Batch process – meaning do a bunch of stuff at the same time (i.e. spend 3 hours at the beginning of the month scheduling/planning your Insta and FB and then it becomes very light in the end)

Copy stuff from your school newsletter.

Try and recruit students if you can as ‘in charge’ of photography and videography for events.

With social media – often consistency is more important than frequency, although for a school, I’d aim for about 3 times per week on whatever mediums you choose, although social media can be a huge time suck if you let it (and possibly for only limited ROI).

[Ruston Long]

Hey Robyn

Long time no see and great to hear from you! It sounds like you’re working under some very challenging budgetary conditions! Thanks very much for your tips.

Regards, Ruston

[Dionne Molina]

Hi Ruston,

What is it that you want to do on social? Just post page posts to Facebook (for example) or do you want to create, optimise, promote and measure social campaigns? Or do both! I think this is pretty important for you to define first and then you’ll be able to make some judgements on resource.

In my school, I manage all socials – that includes the day to day posts across 4 platforms and also our paid social campaigns. They are not sit and forget and I invest a lot of my time into creating the content and then ensuring they are optimised throughout the campaign. I also need to create campaigns that hit each audience depending on where they are in the funnel — then there’s the re-targetng campaigns from Facebook pixels etc. I don’t think social can be regarded as simply posting posts to Facebook anymore, so personally I do feel it’s a full-time resource and a mixture of content creator and digital marketing savvyness.

Having said that, I don’t work full-time on social (perfect world). I’m the Marketing Manager at our school so my time has to be divided across many varied and wonderful things. Ideally, I’d love more resource in this space. We have 1,100 kids at our school, and I would say we are mid-tier fee.

As far as how active – trial and error will see what works best for your school. For us, we post to FB about 3 times a week. Anymore than that and we find that FB does not show our content to our audience as the algorithm prefers friends and family posts over business pages. Instagram, we might post once or twice a day – sometimes more sometimes less.

Feel free to contact me if you want to chat.

Cheers
Dionne
molinad@hvgs.nsw.edu.au

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Dionne Molina.

[Ruston Long]

Hi Dionne

Thank you so much for your insights and follow up phone conversation. It’s been very useful to hear about your very systematic approach to social media!

Regards, Ruston

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