By: Britney Morgan
Video has proven to be one of the most important mediums for creating engagement with followers on social media. Schools can leverage this medium to connect with their school community and increase engagement with key stakeholders. The content ideas are endless, but first let’s take a look at the numbers.
– 100 Million Internet users watch online video every day.
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– 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.
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– The number of video plays on Facebook is up 785% over last year.
– 70% of marketing professionals report that video converts better than any other medium
Here are 7 ideas on how you can use videos to connect with your school community.
1. Go Behind The Scenes – Your school community is a family, and everyone loves to feel like they are a part of something special. When your school is doing something new, fun and exciting take some behind the scenes footage and share the excitement with your stakeholders. They are sure to like, comment and share this with their network as well. Some behind the scenes ideas include school renovations, back to school event preparation, high school football opening night and school performances.
2. Highlight Events- Sharing some of the biggest moments of some of your school or districts events and happenings is a great way to increase engagement through social media. Events can include, athletic events, school performances, field day, graduations and school dances. School observances are great as well. Doing something special for Read Across America day? Create a video to capture some of the greatest moments. Don’t just put together a montage of photos and video clips, include interviews with students, staff and supporters involved with the event and tell a story. Always tell a story.
3. Live Stream- Many districts live stream board meeting to be transparent and graduations to include student supporters that are unable to attend. A lot of athletic programs live stream games. You can live stream or live to tape and playback later. Whatever option works best for your school or district communications strategy.
4. Promote Upcoming Events and Happenings: Short promos reminding students and parents of important testing dates and how to prepare, homecoming spirit days, winter holiday, parent-teacher conferences, first day of school and more.
5. Create Short Videos about different programs in your school or district or even to address concerns within your school community.
6. Tutor with Videos: These are great to keep the learning going outside of the classroom. Do you have data that shows what your students need help with the most? Use this data to determine what subjects to focus on and use your most spectacular teachers to help create videos to encourage learning at home. Both parents and students are sure to appreciate this.
7. Create Hype Videos: If you really want to build excitement around your school community try this. As coaches and other members of football programs continue to become more fluent with technology and video-editing, there has been a rise in preseason “hype” videos that gets players and fans excited for the upcoming season. Ron Clark Academy puts their own twist on hype videos as they create something similar to welcome and introduce their new cohort of students to their school each year.
Things to remember:
Video Quality: Remember your audience expects quality videos that are informative and engaging. If your video falls short, your viewers may not return. Always try to keep the majority of your online videos under 3 minutes as many people may lose interest if they are too long. Live stream and recordings of entire events of course will be longer.
Metrics: There are a variety of ways to measure success. For each video campaign you launch you can track the number of video views, amount of engagement and interaction with your video player, enhanced SEO, and conversions rates. Always pay attention to what your audience engages with the most. Then increase your content focus in those areas.
Does your school or district use videos to connect with students and families? If you have any other ideas that you would like to share with readers. Share in the comments section below!