Top Trends in Social Media Marketing for Schools in 2024
The world of social media marketing is fast-paced and ever changing. It can often be a task to keep up with all the latest news, updates and trends. If you find it hard to keep up to date with what’s hot and what’s not, or if you continually find yourself wondering, “should I jump on this trend or not?” or “Would this trend work for my school’s brand?”, then we’ve got just the blog post for you!
Keep reading for 5 trends we’re seeing in social media marketing for schools in 2024 — and how best to leverage these trends to level up YOUR school’s digital marketing game.
1) Value Driven Content
The current economic climate makes marketing independent schools increasingly challenging. Of course, you don’t need us to tell you that. Not only are you contending with your direct competitors (other independent schools); suddenly you’re also competing with grammar and state schools.
With this widened scope, schools are now putting an increased focus on showcasing their facilities, co-curricular activities, and anything that sets them apart from everyone else. Think about your school's unique selling points which could give you the edge and set yourself apart from the rest of the market then find creative and engaging ways to show them off on social media.
2) High Quality Content
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if you want to see results from these channels, it’s not enough just to post on social media — you need to market on social media.
The gap between those blindly following every social media fad and posting without purpose, versus those producing carefully and strategically curated, on-brand content showcasing their school’s USPs, is becoming increasingly wide and obvious. As the saying goes, think quality over quantity! Have the courage to step outside your comfort zone (without disrupting your brand voice, values and school personality) and create engaging video content and images alongside current trends to take your content to a new level.
3) Use AI Cautiously
In this new AI era, seeing and hearing from the faces behind a brand is becoming increasingly important. Across industries, marketers are realising that while AI has its place, the importance of maintaining human contact is key in building trust with parents looking for a school for their children.
Mix up your content and ensure that, in conjunction with posts showcasing your school facilities, location and values, you’re also incorporating content starring representatives such as your school head, head of admissions and head of marketing, to let prospective parents get to know the team behind the school.
AI tools and automations are a great way to take the extra workload off your marketing team, but they will never replace human connection, something that is important to maintain in your content, especially for schools where trust and relationships are imperative.
4) Meme Marketing
Memes have always been popular on social media and continue to be a favourite trend for 2024. Why? Because they are funny and relatable! While schools have traditionally been reluctant to jump on the meme bandwagon for fear of hurting their brand image, if used correctly, they can really work for schools! Just remember to always balance the humour aspect against your brand strategy to avoid being gimmicky. Are memes funny? Yes. Are they ALL appropriately on-brand for school marketing? Absolutely not! Select ones that parents will resonate with and relate it to the education industry or your school.
We have even seen some excellent examples of curated meme marketing with students’ involvement, which worked fantastically. When done well, it adds variety to your content, can inject some personality into your content and boost engagement.
5) Trends & Templates
Reels are still hugely relevant on Instagram, and we’re seeing schools getting increasingly creative with Reels content, with brilliant results! Where there was once a reluctance to produce anything other than polished, “professional” looking Reels content, schools are now stepping outside of their comfort zone and embracing trending audios in a way that’s still on-brand. Look out for the “Trending audio” alert when scrolling reels alongside the upwards arrow. You can also browse a list of all the current top trending audios by tapping on “Trending audio” prompt you will see when scrolling reels.
Templates can also be a fantastic way to save time on content creation as you can simply add your own clips to a set template and add any text as required and you’re good to go! Look out for the “Use template” prompt above the reel creator’s name and follow the prompts – super quick and easy!
If this was helpful, and you’re interested in learning more about leveraging the power of reels to increase your school’s enrolment numbers, why not check out our Instagram Reels For Education: Beginners’ Course which walks you through the A-Z of creating engaging reels for your school and how to adapt trends appropriately. You can check out all our social media courses for school here.
