Tweet to Success: School Admissions Marketing on Twitter

Are you looking for an approach to reenergize your school’s marketing mix and generate applications to support full enrollment? An effective way of breathing new life into your school’s social media presence and reaching out to potential applicants is social network marketing through Twitter. Marketing on Twitter enables schools, non-profits and businesses to reach over 6 hundred million users, who spend an average of 7 minutes a day on the network. Using well-crafted tweets, school admissions marketers can create and share compact, but powerful bits of information—complete with links to website content—that are informative, engaging and personally relevant. Establishing and maintaining a social media presence for your school is a necessity in 2012!

Assuming that your school already has a Facebook page, Twitter is a great next step in building an effective social media presence. Successful school admissions marketing entails supplying information-rich content to prospective students, and Twitter is an extensive social platform where you can reach a broad demographic audience through social network marketing. Adding Twitter to your marketing mix can help you build your school brand, increase admissions applications and fill classrooms.

Twitter reaches 9% of global internet users on a daily basis, and Twitter use is on the rise with 540 new accounts created every minute. Young people, including prospective students, spend a lot of time conversing, socializing and finding new information on the site. With high traffic and usage rates, social network marketing on Twitter would make a great addition to your marketing strategy—helping you reach out to your key demographic and achieve your admissions and enrollment and goals for next fall.

14 Topics You Can Tweet About Right Now!

1. Important News

2. School cancellations due to extreme weather

3. A photo of the day

4. Athletic scores and updates

5. Links to school newsletters and blog posts on your website

6. Admissions news and events

7. Alumni happenings

8. Engaging and relevant educational quotes

9. New academic offerings

10. Library additions and news

11. Outside news content that features your school

12. Community involvement, such as community service and fund raising

12. Extracurriculars, such as dramatic productions and student government

13. Spotlights on exceptional students, alumni and teachers

14. Videos of school milestones, such as graduation day and homecoming

5 Keys to Successful School Admissions Marketing on Twitter

1. Be Genuine.

Great Tweeters are genuine and authentic. They provide useful and entertaining information in their own unique voice. Your Twitter followers should get a true sense of the identity and atmosphere of your school. Your tweets should highlight not only your important news, academic offerings, sports programs and extracurricular activities, but also the spirit of your school—all the facets that make your institution a special place to learn.

2. Be Trustworthy.

Effective Tweeters are clear about their motives. Tweet with integrity; be transparent about why you are tweeting. Consistently and reliably presenting valuable content through Twitter will help you position yourself as an informational resource on your school and earn the trust of prospective applicants, current students and their families.

3. Be Polite and Engage in Conversations.

Send shout-out tweets—directly thanking followers who share your tweets, make comments or answer questions. Shout-outs and thanks are not only polite; these actions are also great at kick-starting conversations. Do not simply blast out one-way messages, as this is off-putting. Actually converse, truly listen and reply to fellow Tweeters. When someone new follows—or subscribes to—your school, follow them back. Join or host a Tweet chat. Create hashtags to start community conversations on specific topics. Responsiveness and true engagement with your audience will ultimately increase your reach and influence on Twitter.

4. Generate Excitement.

Great Tweeters have authentic enthusiasmfor their content. This cannot be manufactured; true enthusiasm is unmistakable. Effective writing—even tweets—springs from genuine interest. Select your content carefully. You should be deeply involved in the day-to-day happenings at your school. Who could be better at writing content about your school than someone in the thick of it? Excitement is contagious. To generate excitement, you yourself must be excited.

5. Prompt Calls to Action.

Share lots of links to your school website and information about admissions news and events. Think about the people you want to reach with your content and generate content based on what your audience—prospective applicants—is interested in. Creating calls to action in the content you share on Twitter will help you reach more prospective students and increase your ROI.

An effective Tweeter is informative, entertaining, engaging and responsive—listening to, not only talking at, his or her followers. Twitter is a social network, so your marketing activity on the site should be social as well. Although sharing interesting content is essential, you also need to get involved, converse and truly engage your fellow Tweeters in order to achieve an increased ROI from your social network marketing. The summer is a great time to establish or update your school’s social media presence on Twitter. For more advice on how to succeed on Twitter, check out Secrets of Becoming a Pro B2B Tweeter and Do Your Twitter Followers Know Whether You Can Fog A Mirror? If you would like help, Innovative Marketing Resources is available to create and maintain a targeted social media marketing campaign to help you reach your admissions and enrollment goals for the fall.

Read more:

• Tweet For Your School Using the 75/25/1 Rule