Is your social media helping you attract leads, or are you just wasting your time with it? Maybe you don't know for sure. Below are 5 basic things you can check to see if your school’s social media is on point.

1. No User Generated Content Strategy

What are you doing to encourage your students to be involved in your school’s social media strategy? Schools who understand that their students are an army of marketers, and who actually involve them in their social strategy get better online results. Read our blog, and watch our video on how school’s that understand the difference between good social media and great social media always get better results. This blog talks more indepth about this subject. Here are a few ways to get your students involved in creating content to help promote your school:

• Reward students who use the school’s hashtag in their social media. This will encourage them to post more about their experience at your school. Every time they post about their experience is free branding for the school, and we’re reaching a targeted audience – the friends and family members of your current students.

• Host a photo contest. You can do this on Snapchat using a filter you’ve created, have them take a screenshot of it and upload it to Facebook or Instagram so you can pick the best ones. Remember, prizes can make or break a photo contest. Give away something of value that will be worth fighting for.

We always do the top three with the most votes get the best prizes, and then we do three judges choice winners, so we don’t exclude anyone who may not have a large social media following.

You can use an app on your Facebook page, or website to host a contest. The great thing about using an app, is you can capture lead information. In order to vote on a photo, apps require an email, or phone number, or any lead capture information.

Even if you don’t require some form of information, leads for our schools who do photo contests go up. The friends and family will want to vote for the person they know, but you can help encourage the vote if you offer voter prizes. You’ll need their contact info to let them know if they win. Make sure in the terms and conditions that you let the voters know that you will be using their info to contact. You’re not selling their info to 3rd parties, but you should get their permission, or let them know that you will be sending them promotional material.

Check out a few Snapchat filters we created for our clients for some awesome photo contests we helped them run.

2. Your Posts are Too Enrollment Focused

Remember the 70/20/10 rule when posting to social media, which means that 70% of your posts should be providing value to your audience, 20% of the posts need to be you sharing other people’s valuable content, and 10% should be salon, or enrollment focused. You will attract more leads by providing valuable content people find helpful, then you will by always posting about how people should enroll at your school, or book a salon visit. People enroll at schools they trust. How are you building trust? This is a question you should be asking yourself before you post on social media. Being the authority voice in your industry, and giving away great info builds value, and ultimately trust.

*Bonus stat: Did you know that 70% of a potential student’s mind is pretty much made up on where they’d like to enroll before they call a single school? Think about how your social media, website, etc. is having an affect on this 70%.

3. Not Promoting Class Start Dates

When it’s time for your 10% of enrollment-focused posts, you should promote your class start dates with a great image, or video. At least have it in the text if not in the image, or video. Doing this creates urgency. We’ve seen some really good results for our schools doing this. Take the following for example:

We posted this for one of our schools. Notice the subtle start date. This image/ad alone drove 18 leads over a weekend for just $71.

*Bonus: Having “Scholarship” verbiage in ads/posts helps increase CTR, and leads, but you need to actually make sure you’re offering a scholarship on your landing page after someone clicks, or your conversion rates will be low.

*Bonus: Notice from the picture that there’s no more than 20% of text on the image. If there were, Facebook would not allow you to use it as an ad, as it would violate their 20% rule.

*Bonus: We've found that having start dates in your pay-per-click (PPC, AdWords, SEM) ads helps increase click through rates, and conversions!

4. You Don’t Have a Picture (w/ Filters) or Video in Every Post

It’s been proven over, and over that posts with either an image, or video get more engagement than boring text post. No one likes to read these days… except you, because you’re reading this blog right now! Congratulations!

If you’re applying this to Instagram, it’s been proven that images with filters get more engagement. One school, by using videos in their Facebook and Instagram ads, dropped their cost per lead in half on Facebook, and doubled their leads! 80% of your future posts should be video. Video rocks it on social media!

The post below post drove over 1k views pretty quickly. Who doesn’t love a good sebaceous filaments video?!

If you’re interested to learn more about creating a video funnel ads campaign on Facebook, see our blog on how to stop wasting money on Facebook. You can also catch our next article on this very subject in the next Beauty Link Magazine, volume 8, issue 4.

Check out this image we posted on Facebook for one of our schools. It drove over 2300 shares, 11.4k likes, and had just over 600 comments. The comments, likes, and shares are great, because that means free branding!

5. Your Reputation is Stinky

Most beauty schools don't focus on their online reviews, but they should. Online reviews platforms, such as Google and Yelp are great places to focus on building your reputations up online. This is social media, because social media is public customer service.

If you don't think online reviews are important, take a look at these stats:

• 90% of people read reviews before visiting a business

• 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation

• 82% of people admit that online reviews have impacted a purchasing decision

Do you have a review strategy for your students, and guests? If not, here are a few things to remember:

• Be consistent. Once you start getting reviews, you always have to, because it would appear unatural if you got a bunch of reviews, and then none at all. Review platforms like natural flows of reviews. Doing this helps you avoid filters that may hurt your local organic rankings.

• Tell your students that getting reviews for themselves is important for the following reasons:

They’ll be building a great skill of getting other people to talk about them.

They can take a screenshot of each review and include it in their portfolio to help them stand out in an interview.

Focusing on your online reputation can come with big payoffs in terms of more organic website traffic that converts at a higher rate. Have a look at the two screenshots of two schools who started to focus on building their online reputation. You’ll notice that they’ve both had YUGE increases in website traffic, but more importantly, increases in conversions, or leads for their admissions team. These increases are outlined and labeled in red below.

*Bonus: make sure you’re responding to all the positive, and especially the negative reviews too. This helps show potential enrollments and salon guests that you care. Social Media is public customer service! 

Wrap Up

An important thing to remember in all of this is to be consistent. If you are a busy in-house marketing person who wears a lot hats (usually admissions people wear the marketing hat as well), I’d prioritize this by starting with building your online reputation up, and then making sure you’re promoting your class start dates at the very least. If you’re an owner and want to work with a company to help you improve any of these strategies outlined, it’s always best to choose a company who specializes in your industry, so that no one is learning on your dime. Oozle can give you a free analysis and look into each of these things at no cost. Call or email us to set up a time to chat!

If you’ve found this article helpful, let us know in the comments below and then share it on your social media! If you feel like there’s something missing or not quite right with anything mentioned here, let us know in the comments to start a discussion. Let’s help this awesome industry thrive!

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