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Storytelling on social media for the education sector

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Webcertain logo
by Webcertain Social
14 minutes

The education sector is one that can truly thrive on social media. From attracting prospective students and enticing the world's brightest lecturers, to sharing newly published academic research and the latest news, social media can be a fantastic way to get your messages out there. But many educational institutions are unsure of the best ways to tell their stories on social media. This guide will explore ten tips on how to approach storytelling in the education sector, in order to truly make the most of your social media presence and do justice to your fantastic educational institution.

Table of contents

Introduction

One of the most common things people say when we ask them to post something on social media on behalf of a company is: "I don't have anything to say." Our simple reply is: "We don't believe you." A more dramatic reply that we would never say out loud would be: "How could you live and have no story to tell?"

What Dostoevsky, whose words we borrowed above, was trying to say is that human beings can always tell a story. Even having no story is a story. Go and ask someone what they have done today. Chances are, they will tell you they have not done much. Retort by asking what "not much" means. What will come next will be a story.

So, why do people struggle so much with storytelling on social media? A big reason is how public the social networks are, and how some people are so good at storytelling, others do not want to be compared to them. This is a struggle most companies face, but particularly those who need their people to be at the forefront of their social media activities. Amongst them, educational institutions are particularly dependant on their human voices. You need students to get more students.

The education sector has a long history of sounding academic and serious. No matter what kind of education we are referring to, there is a feeling that everything related to its promotion needs to be perfectly proper. The problem is, proper does not always reach your target audience anymore. Students are increasingly less concerned about your list of awards and more interested in what kind of experiences you have to offer outside the classroom.

Some educational institutions have started to notice this, and are increasingly bringing their students, researchers and staff to the forefront of their social media strategies. But what about the educational institutions that are not so social media savvy? How can they start telling their stories on social media?

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Meet your main characters

A good place to start would be to decide who are the best characters to showcase on your social media pages. Our professional opinion is that all your characters have a place there: from teachers to students to your admin teams. As with all organisations, educational institutions are made up of a wide variety of people doing a diverse range of jobs – they can all tell the world why they chose you.

However, allowing all these people to have a voice on a single social media platform can turn out to be a bit chaotic. There are other topics to promote, after all – events, open days, courses, special offers, research, tips, etc. – you cannot simply flood your social media pages with posts about your characters. A good trick to use here is to put all your characters into different categories – e.g. lecturers, students, recruiters – and then figure out what social medium fits whom best. As a general rule of thumb:

It is vital not to forget your international students. This may require you to be on local platforms, like WeChat and Xiaohongshu in China, or Naver in South Korea. The key to discovering which platforms to use for your international students is doing some good old market research. This can reveal insights like which platforms they are using and what type of content they are consuming on those platforms. If you do not have the resources or the need to do an entire market research, looking into your personas works as well.

Once you have decided who your characters are and which social platforms to showcase them on, it is time to put together a plan about what they will say and how they will say it. Do not get us wrong, you should definitely not be writing a two-page script for them and holding it behind the camera news-reading style, but you also do not want to simply put them in front of a camera or behind your X account and let them say whatever they want. Your characters' stories should fit into your entire social media strategy.

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10 tips to empower your main characters to tell the story for you

The first thing you need to do before you even begin talking to your characters is map it all out. Include this kind of content in your editorial calendar for your social media activity, and allow yourself plenty of time to organise everything.

This might mean you have to start as far as six months before you go live with your first post, particularly if you have to mould your schedule to other people's agendas. Do you think that is excessive? Let us tell you an insider's secret: no successful social media campaign was ever rushed.

So, what exactly do you need to do?

1. Find your main characters

Begin by figuring out who is willing to talk about you on social media. Do not assume or even worse, tell anyone, that just because they are your employee or student, they should instantly be willing to go public about why they enjoy being at your educational institution.

It can be quite simple to smoke out the willing employees because chances are, they are already on social media, but if you do not know that, present the idea at your next meeting. Tell them you want to start a social media campaign with content/videos/posts from your employees and ask for volunteers. Do not forget to encourage them and make it known why you think someone would be a great candidate for this.

Reaching out to your students can be both trickier and easier at the same time – they will definitely be more willing to do it, but you cannot hold their hand through the process as you can with your employees. So, why not suggest a reward: ask them to sign up and offer a freebie or a voucher or a free ticket to the next paid event you are organising. You can also ask your international students to help you create content in their own language; they might feel more comfortable with this idea.

2. Let them tell their stories

Once you have your handful of willing characters, do not just tell them what they should talk about. You should have a vague idea of the general theme of your campaign, but be flexible and let the theme change according to what your characters want to talk about. Ask them if they have a particular topic in mind, and be prepared to offer a few suggestions if they do not.

Your goal is to show that your students and employees love you, and forcing them to talk about something they are not that keen on will lead to them looking unnatural on camera or giving you an unengaging piece of content.

3. Be proud of their successes

The best moment to ask someone to be your social media star is when they have just achieved something extraordinary: an award, a promotion, graduating or even just getting the job. There are a lot of companies who give a shout-out to their new employees from the very start.

For education, writing about students who have graduated is the norm. Plenty of big names like the universities of Oxford and Harvard do it, particularly around graduation time. Some go even further and keep in touch with their alumni, asking them to write on their educational institution's blog about what it is like to have a particular job and how they transitioned from being a student to being a professional.

4. Show a day in the life of a student/teacher/employee

Some of the most interesting social media content is the kind that follows someone around and shows what it is like to be them for a day. This is the perfect content to convince potential students to enrol at your educational institution or potential teachers to work for you.

The best bit is that it has the potential of being evergreen content, and you could even attach it to course information or job vacancies. E.g. "Are you considering enrolling for a Chemistry degree at our university? See what your day could look like by following Hannah, one of our Chemistry students, around for a day."

This content needs to be rather short though, even if it is promising a day in someone's life. You cannot actually post an eight-hour-long video showing every bit of Hannah's day – you are not trying to pitch a reality TV show idea here! – so go for something like five minutes maximum, showing the bits of Hannah's day that the new student will also likely follow.

International students and their parents will appreciate this kind of content the most. Studying abroad comes with risks and a lot of unknowns, so the more content they can get about what it is going to be like, the better.

5. Get your staff and students to comment on news

Educational institutions are often at the forefront of research and innovation, so an easy way to get your characters to talk is to ask their opinion on a certain topic. If you are doing your job right, your premises should be brimming with experts and brilliant minds, who must all have opinions about what is happening in their field of study.

Some of your students might not be as eloquent as your staff, but their opinion also matters – they are tomorrow's experts, after all. Consider creating content like vox populi interviews where you ask different students what they think about the same topic.

Keep an eye on international news as well and offer your international staff and students the chance to explain to their colleagues and classmates what is going on with a certain event in a certain country. For example, people outside the US might not know why the president has so much power and people inside the US might not understand the role of the monarchy in the UK. Use a presidential election or a royal wedding as opportunities to have your American and British students and staff explain them.

a megaphone and a microphone
6. Let students and staff help each other

Being a student can be harrowing at times. Studying can be exhausting and assignments can make no sense. Every student has gone through at least one moment of having no idea what they were researching. How about being brave and admitting this is a truth, then empower some of your students to also be courageous and create content helping other students overcome the tough times?

Your international students will be a gold mine for this kind of content. There is a lot to take on when moving to a new country: from very small things like different plugs and pedestrian crossings to big things like food and social behaviour. Then, there is the fact they will likely miss home and those they left there. You might also have students who are struggling with the language, and they will likely feel embarrassed by it, so having content to assure them can go a long way to make them feel understood.

You can also use social media as a channel where your students could reach out if they need help. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger can be great tools for this – as well as international platforms such as WeChat, KakaoTalk and Line, which can be good if you have a lot of Chinese, South Korean or Japanese students, respectively.

7. Ask your characters what content they need

Once you have your social media characters, do not just use them as sources of content, but also pick their brains on what kind of content you could create next. Rather than what they want (which was tip 2), ask them what they need or what they needed, but lacked when they joined your educational institution.

Run your ideas past them – for example, ask your international students if having other foreign students talk about how to live in a certain country would have been useful to them, and your teachers if having a video of what their daily job would look like would have helped them make up their mind about the job faster.

8. Make sure you have a mix of fun and useful content

No one can be serious all the time and no one can be fun 24/7 either, so do not prioritise one over the other. There is often a tendency for educational institutions to be too serious too often and forget that everyone needs a breather once in a while. The same rules apply to your social media pages. As much as they are there to help you spread knowledge, they are also there to bring up fond memories and showcase opportunities to create new ones. For example, you should promote both teaching events and things like summer parties, even if on different platforms.

9. Build a long-term relationship

Did you manage to create great content with someone? Do not just throw that away once it is live – ask them if they would be willing to help out again if another opportunity arises. Do not worry if you do not quite know what that opportunity might be; good Social Media Managers are a bit like journalists – they keep a list of people they could work with again in their desk drawer.

Make sure this list is detailed, containing the topic you worked with them on, as well as the platform and the format. You might not want to repeat them if possible, so knowing who contributed to what without having to scroll down for hours on your social media pages will be of great help.

10. Make sure your characters fit your strategy

You should have a good idea of how you are going to use your characters in your social media content. There are two ways to do this: the first is creating a campaign only about your people, the second is creating content that fits various campaigns. Let us give you an example: if you have a campaign about campus life, insert content created with your characters amongst content created by the marketing team; if you have a campaign about recruiting new teachers, insert interviews with your current teachers amongst content about who can apply and what the job entails. The idea behind this approach is to give people facts and figures that are then backed up by real stories told by real voices.

a laptop and a lightbulb

Conclusion

To sum it all up, the trick behind getting your people to talk about you on social media is finding your characters, allowing yourself enough time to do it, and letting your characters find their own stories rather than imposing your official narrative on them. Everything is becoming about experiences nowadays, so educational institutions need to move towards showing the experience of learning and making the most of the great minds crossing their doorsteps. A key thing is to distribute your characters on the appropriate social media channels; please do not post videos of your students strolling through campus on your LinkedIn page or a lengthy interview with one of your researchers on Instagram Reels. Do your market research, see who belongs where, and be brave enough to step onto international social media platforms if that is where a significant portion of your target audience is. Good luck!

To learn more about digital marketing best practice for the education sector, click here.

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