How does your school stack up?
In 2019, imageseven researched key changes and trends occurring in school marketing and social media, building on its inaugural study of 2018. More than 370 schools from around the world participated in our School Marketing and Social Media Survey 2019, providing truly global insights.
Chances are that you are familiar with the names of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, but how about Pinterest, Snapchat or StumbleUpon? Do you know your tweets from your likes? Is organic reach dead? Is Pay Per Click (PPC) more effective than Pay Per Impression (PPM)? The social media landscape is ever changing. For schools, knowing where to fit in or, equally as important, where not to, can either magnify your marketing and communications or become a black hole for your school marketer’s time.
The survey saw respondents participate from 19 countries across the world, with schools from the United States (55%) and Australia (26%) taking the lion’s share. In total there were 376 respondents, presenting a comprehensive view of the current state of social media marketing in the education industry.
Social media has certainly become a dominant tool for modern school marketers and this was quickly confirmed with 94% of respondents agreeing that it was important for their school. However worryingly, 57% of respondents also felt either uncertain or disagreed when asked whether they can measure their Return on Investment with the use of the platform. An area that school marketers will certainly need to investigate further as they are also finding social media marketing more difficult than last year (29%).
It was no surprise to see that Facebook is still the school marketers’ preferred social media platform (70%). However, it is interesting to note that this is in decline compared to last year’s findings, where Facebook was overwhelmingly the most popular platform (86%). Instead, it is Facebook’s younger and more aesthetic sibling – Instagram – that stepped out from the wings in 2019 with 23% of respondents reporting it as their preference, up from just 6% the previous year.
Elsewhere it was a relief to see that more school marketers have made their websites mobile-friendly (80% vs 70%), interesting to see the rise in school marketers’ use of live video content for their marketing (34%) and intriguing to learn that 44% of school marketers are using a social media scheduling tool.
However, despite having more experience with social media and using scheduling tools to lessen the load, time is still the biggest enemy with 63% of respondents reporting their biggest frustration as not having enough time.
