Social media is an important marketing and communication tool that has been used by businesses for years. In the past, schools have been slower to adopt social media marketing into their marketing strategies , however those that use this outlet have seen the benefits and rapid increase in activity and importance. Utilizing a simple social media calendar for schools can help save time, improve their social media presence and strengthen their relationships with their audience of students, teachers and families. It is an essential tool for any school or district that wants to maximize its social media presence and effectively communicate with its community.

Our complete social media calendar for schools and districts includes content ideas and themes, key dates, and holidays, as well as tips for creating and managing social media accounts effectively and efficiently. This calendar aims to help schools and districts maintain a consistent posting schedule, create high-quality content, and engage with their audience.

The Complete Social Media Calendar for Schools and Districts

03/20/2023 5:20pm 11 minute read

‍

What is a social media calendar?

Social media has become a crucial tool for schools to reach and engage with their students, families and communities. Over 90% of social media marketers report using Facebook, and 79% report utilizing Instagram. Managing multiple social media platforms can be overwhelming, especially when creating content and posting it consistently. This is where a social media calendar comes in handy.

A social media calendar for schools is a schedule that outlines the content you plan to post on various social media platforms, including the date and time you plan to publish it. It helps you organize and plan your content in advance, ensuring that you have a steady stream of engaging content to share with your audience. It can also help to give a big-picture view of your social communications for the included timeframe, whether that’s the week, month, or even the upcoming quarter. A social media content calendar will let you easily see the types of content (videos, images, etc.) and topics to make sure you aren’t focusing too heavily on one area and ignoring other content areas.

Benefits of using a social media calendar for your school

Not all schools have a dedicated marketing team, which means that whoever manages your social media profiles likely has other responsibilities too. Utilizing a school social media calendar can help to avoid the last-minute content scramble just so that you have something to post that day.

Here are some other reasons why schools should be using social media calendars:

1. Consistency. One of the most significant advantages of using a social media calendar is that it allows you to maintain a consistent posting schedule. By planning your content in advance, you can ensure that you post regularly, which is essential for building and maintaining your audience.
2. Time-saving. A social media calendar helps you save time by allowing you to plan your content in advance. As we mentioned earlier, instead of scrambling to create content every day, you can spend a few hours each week or month creating and scheduling content in advance.
3. Improved content quality. Planning your content in advance allows you to take the time to create high-quality content that resonates with your students and families. It also enables you to ensure that you cover a range of topics and themes that align with your school’s mission statement, values and goals.
4. Improved engagement. By planning your content in advance, you can be sure that you post content that resonates with your audience, increasing engagement on your social media platforms. Your audience will know to expect regular posts and might even get a feel for your pattern of posting (i.e. posting always at 9 AM on Tuesdays, weekly lunch menu posts on Mondays, etc.)

Plan topics, organize and streamline your content

A social media calendar is a great tool for planning topics and assets, as well as organizing ideas for social media content. With a social media calendar, schools can plan their content in advance. This includes identifying themes and topics that align with their brand, identifying key dates and events, and brainstorming ideas for content that will resonate with their audience.

We suggest creating content around and reminders for key dates for enrollment applications and deadlines, any calendar updates like early release dates or days that your school is closed to students, and sporting or school-wide events. Recognizing holidays is a great way to connect with your students and their families, wish a happy holiday, honor veterans, or highlight something fun like Valentine’s Day or Halloween.

Other topic ideas could include:

• Staff spotlights
• Alumni profiles
• Behind-the-scenes look into some of your classrooms
• Highlight student accomplishments
• Recap sporting events
• Share information about your school programs that your audience might be interested in.

While developing the school social media calendar, you can also organize ideas and assets, making sure that you have the necessary resources to create and publish high-quality content posts. These resources could include images, videos, blog posts, and other types of content that will help you to communicate with your audience and achieve your social media marketing goals. Canva is a great tool for quickly and easily creating graphics to support your content when photos or videos don’t exist. Use real-life pictures of your staff, students and school whenever possible to keep your social media messaging authentic.

While the same creative asset can sometimes be used across multiple channels, consider changing up the caption or accompanying text depending on the platform. In instances where character counts matter, like on Twitter, short and sweet and to-the-point posts are best. For video-dependent platforms like TikTok, having a library of videos to pull from will help you engage on that platform.

Maximize your team's efficiency

A school social media calendar can be an effective tool for dividing workload and maximizing a team's efficiency. By planning content in advance and assigning specific tasks to team members, schools and districts can streamline their social media workflow and keep everyone working towards the same goals. A social media calendar can also help to avoid overlap or gaps in content, as team members can see what others are working on and adjust their tasks accordingly.

Additionally, a social media calendar can help to identify areas where team members may need additional support or training, allowing schools to address these issues and improve their social media performance over time.

Social media calendar options for schools

There are lots of resources available online for social media calendar templates, many of them are even free depending on the specifics you’re looking for. Different calendar templates can be found for different timeframes, organization styles or with different information fields included. Here are some of the social media calendar options for schools:

1. Monthly Calendar. A monthly calendar is a simple social media calendar that outlines the content that schools plan to post on a monthly basis. It can include important dates, holidays, and themes for each month.
2. Weekly Calendar. A weekly calendar is a more detailed social media calendar that breaks down content by week. This can be useful for schools that want to post more frequently or for schools that have multiple social media accounts.
3. Yearly Calendar. A yearly social media calendar provides an overview of the entire year's social media content, including holidays, events, and themes. This can be helpful for schools that want to plan their content in advance and ensure that they have a consistent message across all their social media accounts.
4. Content Theme Calendar. A content theme calendar is a social media calendar that focuses on specific themes or topics. This can be useful for schools that want to target specific audiences or promote specific initiatives.
5. Customized Calendar. A customized social media calendar is tailored to the specific needs and goals of a school. This can include a combination of the above options or a completely unique approach.

DIY Social Media Calendars

Many school staff and administrators find that spreadsheets (like Google Sheets or Excel) work just fine for what they need. With a little customization and forethought, you can create your own spreadsheet with fields for your specific social media channels, the different types of content you create, and the number of teammates involved in developing and maintaining your social media profiles.

Social Media Calendar Softwares

More advanced and robust options also exist for school marketers who use social media marketing as a piece in their overall marketing strategy. Project Management tools like Trello or Asana offer many of the capabilities that a spreadsheet would, with additional features like setting timelines and due dates, utilizing a visual calendar, tracking project progress and sending automated reminders.

Social media content scheduling tools for schools

Content scheduling tools are also a great time-saver for schools. Not only do these tools allow you to pre-schedule content for the day, week or month, but they also track and record results. Most social media platforms offer this scheduling service within their individual platforms too. For example, within your Facebook profile, you can schedule future content and review the performance of your posts on Facebook.

You’ll find data on followers and engagement, and be able to see which Facebook posts are performing well, and which ones aren’t. If your school maintains a social media presence across multiple channels, it can be both time-consuming and overwhelming to track and analyze metrics from each individual channel.

A popular social media content scheduling service is Hootsuite. Hootsuite allows the user to create content, upload graphics, tag accounts and post to several different social media channels all within the Hootsuite platform. You can also review metrics and compare your different platforms and their activity. Hootsuite also offers more advanced tools like activity monitoring, to notify you when you’ve been tagged in a post, or when keywords that you have identified as important or relevant are being talked about on social media.

This can be helpful in making sure you don’t miss a post if your parents, students or community are tagging you in their own content. Automating as much of your social media content process as possible will save your team time and energy that they can use to support other school marketing efforts.

How to get started

The first step in developing your calendar is determining the time frame you are working on. Are you creating a calendar for a week or a month? The next step is determining the topic categories that your social media messaging needs to address. Recruitment, athletic accomplishments, alumni spotlights and more might be topics that you choose. Once you’ve selected your topics, start to fill in your calendar assigning topics to different dates. Look over your timeframe to make sure you’re not favoring one content topic too heavily, and adjust if needed for a balanced content marketing message.

Content Writing

Now comes the actual content writing. Craft your posts, select your images or make note of videos that need to be edited. Assign tasks as needed to be sure you and your team can meet the post due dates. Find any links that your posts may need (to your website, to a news article featuring your school, or to a school event calendar) and include them in your calendar.

Schedule Your Posts

Finally, schedule your posts. Pull the resources in your content calendar into your chosen social media platform or service, giving an extra proofread for accuracy before selecting the date and time that you’d like your post to publish. Sit back and let your posts go out into the world, checking in periodically to assess performance or to review metrics.

How SOLVED can help

We know that marketing for schools and districts can be challenging and overwhelming. The team at SOLVED  can help craft your creative school marketing strategy, develop digital assets like photography and videography and ensure that your website is modern, fresh, and up-to-date. Your digital presence may be the first (and in some cases) only first impression for prospective new students or parents, and you want to make sure that your marketing activities are performing at their best to drive enrollment and growth. Schedule your free consultation with our team today!