Episode Summary

More than any other communication channel, schools have been quick to adopt social media, but there are a few key differences between how schools and the private sector can use it. Schools already have an established audience, while new businesses must build theirs from scratch. Schools can reach families without needing to build a following.

Engaging on social media requires competing for your audience’s attention. It’s also a forum that often leads to negativity, where complaints can overshadow positive discussions. Managing a social media account can be too time-consuming, especially if you have a one person communication team.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Social media is a hotbed of creativity you can draw inspiration from. Social media can also help reach new families, but its use should be targeted and not at the expense of your existing school community and more direct communication channels.

In this episode, we’ll discuss the rise and fall of different communication channels, why social media is different for schools than it is for individuals and companies, social media’s potential downsides and when it can work for your schools. We’ll also give you some recommendations on how to get the most out of social media when you do use it.

Episode Notes

Schools need to use social media selectively and strategically to get the most out of it. Focusing on already-established communication channels may be a better use of your time and lead to stronger relationships with your school community. 

In this episode, we discuss the rise and fall of different communication channels, why social media is different for schools than it is for the private sector, how it can and can’t work for your schools and recommendations for how to get the most out of it. 

Featured in this episode are Dr. Carmen Simon and Aurora Meyer. 

Dr. Carmen Simon is the author of Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions.

Listen to Season 2, Episode 81 of the SchoolCEO Podcast to hear our full interview: Dr. Carmen Simon: Impossible to Ignore - Capturing Attention.

Listen to Season 2, Episode 80 of the SchoolCEO Podcast to hear our full interview: Aurora Meyer: Crafting Meaningful Connections. 

Visit SchoolCEO’s website to read The SchoolCEO Guide to Social Media. 

Episode Transcript

Tyler Vawser (Host): Social media is the cool new kid in school. Or at least it was when it debuted 15-20 years ago. 

And because it's so pervasive, it's also seen as an end in and of itself—you create a social media presence to have a social media presence. But is that really the best use of your district's time and attention? Not necessarily. 

Hi, I'm Tyler Vawser. In season three of the SchoolCEO podcast, we're giving you a complete guide to school marketing. And what marketing plan is complete without a social media component, right? But when we think about social media for schools, we need to be very careful about how we approach it. 

More than any other communication channel, schools have been quick to adopt social media. Companies and influencers had early success, reaching a wide audience, and schools tried to follow suit. Normally, SchoolCEO is all about taking ideas from the private sector and applying them to schools, especially public schools that are having to compete for the very first time. 

But the private sector has more resources to experiment with social media marketing than the school does. 

So, in this case, and in this episode, we have a different take and we have some advice about when you should and when you should not lean into social media. 

In this episode, we discuss: The rise and fall of communication channels, why social media is different for schools than it is for individuals and companies, the downsides for social media at schools, and when social media can work for your schools and our recommendations on how to get the very most out of it.

Let's dive in.

Every meaningful mass communication channel peaks. But then eventually it gets too noisy to be as effective as it once was. Just look at radio. On October 30th, 1938,  CBS Radio broadcast a stirring tale of an alien invasion called The War of the Worlds starring Orson Welles. 

You may have heard of it because the radio play was so scary and so convincing it reportedly caused mass hysteria among listeners, many of whom believed it wa s a real news broadcast. 

And the mere fact that you may have heard of it more than 85 years after it aired is proof of its overwhelming success, its singular hold on radio listeners everywhere and the incredible returns of its advertisers right? Wrong.

According to an article published by slate on the anniversary of the show, they said, quote, 

"Far fewer people heard the broadcast — and fewer still panicked — than most people believe today. How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. 'To what program are you listening?' the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent answered a radio 'play' or 'the Orson Welles program,' or something similar indicating CBS. None said a 'news broadcast,' according to a summary published in Broadcasting. In other words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938. This minuscule rating is not surprising. Welles' program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time — ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show. Several important CBS affiliates pre-empted Welles' broadcast in favor of local commercial programming, further shrinking its audience."

In the 1930s radio ownership doubled from about 40% of us families in 1930 to almost 90% by 1940. As the audience increased, the number of stations did too. In  the year the war of the worlds aired,  there were 689 radio stations. Do you know what else happened that year? 

The very first American television sets were produced and sold commercially. 

 Do you see where we're going with this? Technology evolves, trends change. At a certain point every communication channel has diminishing returns and the faster it rises, the faster it falls. 

 Social media had a meteoric rise and it benefited from widespread adoption. It felt like overnight news anchors started to list their Twitter handles on screen. Major sports teams encouraged their fans to follow them on Facebook or Instagram. And at first, social media made a lofty promise to give everyone a voice. 

 The Arab Spring was a powerful example of the role social media can play to bring countries and cultures together to facilitate progress. 

But then something changed. Fast forward to today and social media doesn't quite have the same promise it did back in 2010. Now it's often a distracting quagmire of misinformation, intrusive advertisements and unrealistic ideals and social media platforms no longer facilitate democracy and the cross-pollination of ideas. Instead, hidden algorithms create millions of echo chambers that deliver the content they think you want to hear. 

Despite these downsides, social media makes a lot of sense for a private sector company. 

But let's look at how social media for schools is different from private sector companies. 

First, schools already have an audience, the private sector is trying to go from 0 to 1, but school districts are already at 100 when it comes to building an audience. If you and I were to start a new company that sold watches the first thing we would do is probably build a website and start taking pictures of the product to share it on X, Facebook and Instagram for a simple reason— because a new company has no audience and it needs one. And our goal is to attract an audience of people who love watches.

 Why? Because that audience will help spread the word to others who also like watches. 

 And our hope is that they and others like them will buy the product. And later they'll continue to share that with their friends the same way that they found us—on social media. If you're a school leader, you have an audience to begin with. And for most public school districts, you've had one for over 100 years. 

A second key difference is that school districts already have phone numbers and email addresses for the students and families who attend your schools. The goal of our watch company joining social media is to drive traffic to our website. Why? Because on our website, we can display a pop up that asks someone to give us their email address and their phone number to save 10 percent.   

If you're like me, nearly every time I visit a website selling a product, I have this exact experience—a pop up appears and I give my email address and then my phone number to save  or 10%. Why? Because getting my contact information gives the marketer, the website, the control of how, when and how often they can reach me. Their intention is to bring me and all their other customers back to their websites again and again, to continue to sell more products without relying on a third party tool like social media. 

This is really important to understand. Although a social media presence is practically a requirement for any modern business, it's also often a means to an end. But for schools, too often, social media has become an end in and of itself. If you already have a direct line to your families with their phone numbers and their email addresses, why spend so much time thinking about how to share content to a social media platform where you have to rely on their unknown algorithm? You can't guarantee your audience will see it and it effectively disappears after a few hours. 

And so in a way, schools are actually starting at the social media finish line, you already know how to reach your audience, don't work your way backwards. 

The question is how can you engage them with the communication channels you already have and that you control. 

So let's talk more about what schools get wrong with social media first. 

Social media requires network effect, which means unless everyone shares their audiences with each other, there's really no advantage. And so what might seem like a real positive, getting access to many other audiences and people that you don't normally have access to, can also be a disadvantage for the simple reason that your audience is also being shared with everyone else.  

In other words, you're sharing and outsourcing your school community, your audience with the world, you're giving it to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook or you're giving it to Elon Musk and X. 

 What that means is you're not just sharing your audience with the World Wide Web, but you're also encouraging your audience to go to a platform where their time and attention is going to be pulled in 1,000 different directions away from you. 

When you send a parent to your Facebook page, they're also seeing a land's end ad or they're seeing pictures of their friend's new baby or grand baby or an influencer's artfully arranged photos of a vacation in the Bahamas. Remember you're competing for your audience's time and attention in the arena of social media. You're facing stiff competition from some of the world's best advertisers, influencers and celebrities and it's not even friendly territory. 

In 1938, Orson Welles was a rising young star. He was handsome and talented and he had a charming British accent, but the competition was stiff and even he couldn't pull off a ratings coup for his program. So instead of fighting for attention, communicate in a less crowded arena that you control on your own terms. 

The second thing that social media gets wrong is that it can often breed negativity. You don't need me to tell you this because you know, firsthand. While it can facilitate communication between members of your community, it also invites the most negative among them to share their thoughts and amplifies their voices. 

Sometimes you're literally giving a platform to someone that you would never hand the microphone over to. Instead of the open healthy dialogue, you may have been meaning to start bad actors or quote “keyboard warriors” can hijack the conversation if you're in school communications. 

You know this all too well, those who agree with the complainer who can cause a pile on effect and soon any other perspectives on the matter are completely drowned out, especially the most positive perspectives. And because public schools have gone through a shift where public sentiment is not always positive, you need to be really careful about giving keyboard warriors who have the time and willingness to fight, a place to do it. 

I've had the experience of talking to the same person about the same topic on social media and in person. And let me tell you, it felt like two completely different people. On social media, they were terse, rude and mean. In person, understanding, respectful and even empathetic. This is a real phenomenon known as the online disinhibition effect. Essentially being online lowers people's inhibitions. This can lead to people either behaving meaner or opening up more online than they normally would in face to face conversations. 

When people act meaner online, it's called toxic disinhibition. It's so easy for people to say toxic things to an invisible audience online. Don't give them an invisible audience to bully. 

Third, social media's goal is often too generic. Instead of focusing on your existing audience it focuses on attracting an imaginary someday audience. And what's worse is we have no guarantee that the audience will ever see it. Unlike email or text messages on social media, we don't control whether our message reaches them. Instead, we cross our fingers that an algorithm and a little bit of creativity will be enough to get our content in front of our audience. 

Four, keeping up a really active social media portfolio can take a lot of time to manage. While there are many tools to help you post content quickly you have to come up with the content first, then you have to respond when people engage with your posts and that's probably the most time-consuming piece. Maybe you're a one person communications team—is that time that could be better spent on more direct communication channels with an audience you know you can reach? 

So with all that being said, should schools be using social media at all? The answer is yes and no, let's talk about how you can make social media work for your schools. 

One, it can help you reach an audience that otherwise wouldn't see you. Not every potential student and family is already in your schools. And so there's a place for social media when it comes to open enrollment or student engagement. But the answer isn't more and more and more. Like we said, you can't neglect your current audience for the could-be audience. We're in a whole new era of competition for students, staff and resources among K-12  schools. But the truth is this doesn't apply to every district. 

If you're a rural community school that is an hour from the next district, you already have a rapt audience; proximity is the single biggest driver of enrollment. So you don't need to spend a lot of energy, making sure families that live two hours away know your name.  

Likewise, some urban districts are at or above capacity. So prioritize keeping your existing audience informed and engaged. But a lot of you are trying to attract new families to your schools. A social media company might encourage you to send your audience to their platform to help you grow your audience. But for the majority of schools, your audience is local, not global. School districts are often trying to engage the same demographics, the same locations year after year after year. So trying to reach a local audience on social media is a lot like traveling halfway across the world to talk to your next door neighbor. 

A couple of years ago, SchoolCEO published a social media report. It's available on our website. And in that report, we analyzed two states known for having a wide array of school choice programs: California and Michigan. Each state's Department of Education shares detailed records on how districts are gaining or losing students to school choice programs. 

 We looked to see which districts had an account on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter expecting to find that schools who are on social media would be attracting more students than those who were not. And as it turned out, there was no statistically significant connection. 

In sifting through hundreds of school profiles, we noticed that many schools only posted a few times a year. We wanted to see if this trend held true across the board. So we calculated the number of posts per district then compared those numbers with the district's gains and students. The result was the same—no significant correlation. 

 The takeaway is this: if your goal is to use social media, in addition to your other communication channels, the best approach in this case is a targeted one. If you want to attract new students, ask your current students’ parents where they heard about you, was it even on social media? 

 Which platform? And go from there.

 Next, social media can help spark your creativity in other channels. Remember the water bucket challenge that was so popular on social media ten years ago? It was a really fun and engaging way to raise money for A L S. And it definitely inspired many schools to have more fun with fundraising.

Social media demands really engaging content and excellent visuals to stand out. All communication does. Good social media content is creative expression at its finest. But the same can be true for email, text messages, your website and any other communication channels you use. My advice is use social media to prompt you to be creative and to really think about how do we create an engaging moment and engaging piece of content, regardless of what channel it's on. Social media can actually prompt you to think about how do we create a really engaging and even entertaining voicemail the next time we reach out to parents? Or how do we make this email really slap (that one's for the kids)? Or how can a short form post on X transform how we write engaging text messages and notifications? 

Parents and families are used to hearing from schools via calls, texts and emails—use that set expectation to your advantage by delivering good news, exciting stories and quote unquote, “no need to reply” messages that simply invite them to know about the great moments happening each and every day in your buildings.  

When we talk to schools about why social media, it's often because they want to share the great moments that are happening in their schools. But there's many other ways to do that. And in fact telling those great moments through a channel that ordinarily is just business—what time the game is? Don't forget about testing next week, or remember to bring these things for your students field trip—when we're able to use those same channels that are used just to share information, to share great stories, we have a chance to really stand out. 

In season two we invited Dr. Carmen Simon who studies the science of attention and memory to talk about how to make messages memorable.

[Excerpt from SchoolCEO Conversations Season 2 episode - Dr. Carmen Simon: Impossible to Ignore - Capturing Attention]

Dr. Carmen Simon: What the entire communication sequence would depend on and how influential you are. Is how you establish a rhythm between these types. So in our study, we were looking at text versus video, and the study had three phases.

Dr. Carmen Simon: In phase one, I was having people look at an inbox that had emails. You're mentioning that the marketers in your population send out emails almost every day. So imagine that you are now faced with an inbox. It has text-based email, text-based email, text-based email. Suddenly there's a video in one of them, and then there are more emails that are simply text-based.

Dr. Carmen Simon: So in other words, you are using one stimulus to prime how the brain reacts to this next stimulus. Priming simply means that you're showing the brain a stimulus. You're influencing how the next stimulus is being processed. So the good news for all of our listeners is that they don't have to try so hard with every single stimulus that they produce. 

Dr. Carmen Simon: Look at the cadence through which you're sending out stimulation, knowing that at some point you might have to sacrifice a few in order for the next ones to be processed appropriately.

Finally, social media can help us think about how do we appeal to human nature and show the general public the best moments that happen in our schools. Can we elevate the best stories to change public perception? We should already be sharing good stories with our school community, but you don't need social media to interact with them. You can use other communication channels like text voicemail, email, your website or app. And when you do, encourage people to share and talk about your stories regardless of the channel, because word of mouth is still the single best tactic to attract new customers. 

Let's hear one last perspective on this. Aurora Meyer is an award winning communications manager at Columbia Public Schools in Missouri. In a conversation with SchoolCEO Meyer had something really surprising to say about Columbia. They do not operate a district-wide social media account. Instead they rely on already established channels of communication, even print and give individual schools ownership of their social media accounts if they choose to have them. 

[Excerpt from SchoolCEO Conversations Season 2 episode - Aurora Meyer: Crafting Meaningful Connections]

Aurora Meyer: “Some of our schools have different Instagrams. Whatever makes most sense for that school that they want to maintain themselves, they absolutely can. And then we can reshare or we can pick things up as we see them. But with 42 buildings and 26 elementary schools, even if we had the ability to constantly share and reshare all the amazing things, it would not get through to the families that need to hear that or want to see it or want to be in the know as quickly or as effectively as the school sharing it themselves.

Aurora Meyer: So I think by putting the emphasis on fostering those already established relationships and already established communication channels, it gives our schools the ability to maybe cut through some of the clutter, maybe even cut through some of the social media trends that we’re all observing, and really just use it as a way to reinforce those relationships…

Aurora Meyer: So I think about that in multiple ways and actually as I look at our overall communications in all the forms and all the ways that we do that, first and foremost, sometimes it's just about establishing a connection. 

Let’s review: so far in this episode, we’ve talked about the rise and fall of communication channels. Every successful mass communication channel eventually peaks and becomes too noisy to be as effective as it once was. Radio was saturated with programming by the time The War of the Worlds debuted in 1938. That same year the first American TV sets were sold commercially, spelling the eventual downfall of radio, at least as the primary source of entertainment (and advertising) in American households. Then came the internet and with it online advertising, then social media. What’s next? 

We’ve also discussed why social media is different for schools. One, schools already have an established audience of students and families. Two, schools already have access to direct communication channels like phone and email. Social media also requires schools compete against other content for the limited attention of their audience. 

The potential downsides of social media for schools are these:  

One, network effect, i.e. you have to share your audience with everyone else on the platform,

Two, negativity—inviting keyboard warriors to pile on complaints, 

Three, you have to rely on an unknown algorithm for your audience and therefore have no control of whether they will see it or not and 

Four, social media accounts are time-consuming to manage.

BUT, there are instances when social media can really benefit your schools. Obviously, it’s one way to reach a new audience. Not the only way, but one of the tools in your toolbelt for attracting new families to your district. It’s also very creative, so it can be a great source of inspiration if you’re looking to be inspired—just remember, you can take that inspiration and apply it to the communication channels you already control like email, text and your website. And finally, it’s an extra, outward-facing channel to elevate the positive stories happening in your schools to help change public perception. 

What do you do with all this information? Here are our suggestions: You only use social media selectively and strategically i.e. when it makes sense for your district, you consider taking a page from Aurora Mayer’s playbook by empowering individual schools to manage their own social media accounts rather than following a district-wide approach, and most importantly, you prioritize your already well-established communication channels. Because If the producers of The War of the Worlds were already in contact with listeners? And If they could call them up and play the broadcast right there on the phone with them? I bet they’d listen. 

The SchoolCEO podcast is brought to you by Apptegy. You can find a transcript for this episode and full issues of our magazine at SchoolCEO.com. If you like what you hear, subscribe to our newsletter and get bite sized tips on school marketing sent straight to your inbox. If you follow us on social media, we'll let you know when new episodes drop. 

Season 3 of the SchoolCEO podcast is produced by Tyler Vawser, Britney Keil, Tanner Cox, and Ryan McDonald, with Eileen Beard as contributing editor. Thank you for listening.

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