Share Your School’s Story With Social Media In A New Way

With the 2021 school year in full swing—and most Asia Pacific schools resuming online—it can be even more time consuming and frustrating as an international school marketer to share your school’s story with social media. Usually, you might find yourself trying to persuade teachers to send you photos of classroom activities, or running around the school to gather snippets to post on your streams. Take that effort, mix it with online classes, and it can feel almost impossible to really showcase your school’s competitive advantages—especially if you are trying to captivate and engage your current following and attract new registrations too. After all, the purpose of social media for international schools is two-fold—increase admissions and communicate what’s going on with current families. Unfortunately, it can be hard for school marketers to find the right balance between both—that is until now!

Giving Your Community a Voice

Having worked in an international school as a marketing and communications manager, I completely understand how difficult it can be to try to come up with exciting content while also juggling many other tasks. On one hand, you want to highlight your school’s identity, brand, and competitiveness, while also being light, engaging, consistent, and relevant. On the other hand, you might have hundreds of other things on your to-do list to tackle, events to host, school tours to run, and much more.

Does this sound familiar? Just know that you’re not alone. At IES, we have a solution that we are extremely passionate about! Not only will it help you save tons of time, but it will enable you to tell your school’s story through social media in new ways and from different perspectives!

Class Intercom is a social media management platform that was made specifically for schools. It lets you manage ALL of your posts in one place—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. You can easily create, schedule, publish, moderate, respond to, and monitor your handles using their easy-to-use site or app.

While being able to oversee all of your posts in one place is key, what makes Class Intercom impressive is that you can add multiple staff members or students to your account. They can then create posts from wherever they are. Oh, and on top of that, you as the administrator, have the final publishing approval! When you incorporate Class Intercom, you’ll be amazed at the ways you can truly share your school’s story with social media by giving more of your community a voice.

Now, let’s take a look at this social media management tool works and the advantages associated with it.

The Advantages of Class Intercom & How to Use it

When I first heard about Class Intercom and how others could be involved in the content creation process, I thought back to my time as a school marketing manager. If I could’ve had a tool that allowed me to give students and teachers the freedom to create posts for my school’s social media channels but I’d get to approve everything before it went out? I would’ve jumped all over it!

If you’re anything like me—you’re usually double, or even triple checking your content before sending it out to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or other streams. That’s why Class Intercom is so great. If you give students, teachers, or even other office staff members access, you get to decide on their particular roles and permissions. For example, you will most likely only give students the authorization to create content and submit it—while moderators (like you) would have the ability to publish what they submit.

So, once someone else creates a post, you can double check the grammar, spelling, messaging—or any other details you want to quickly go over before sending the post out to your followers. How awesome is that!?

This is the Class Intercom desktop dashboard. You can see in this photo that different ‘roles’ will have different permissions. You even get to choose the labels for the roles, and what each role entails.

Before we take a closer look at how to use Class Intercom, let’s go through some of the benefits.

Then, you’ll see a screen like this where you can choose the channel you’d like to post to. Maybe you want your post to go out to multiple channels? You can select as many as you’d like.

After you’ve selected your channel(s), you’ll see the section called ‘your message’ where you can start typing in text. You’ll also see a ‘preview’ of your post to the right. You can even select any media you want to upload just below the message. 

Also note that in the far right bottom corner, you can choose to submit the post as a draft, publish (because I’m admin), or discard.

You’ll also notice that in the bottom left corner, you can choose who you are assigning the post to. For example, students who only have content creating permissions would assign it to a moderator—or even a particular person—who could then approve it for publishing.

If you scroll further down on the left side of the post, you have the option to schedule it for another time. I’ve done that in this example.

I’ve chosen to save this post as a draft. You can see that reflected now on the main dashboard/home screen. However, if I assigned the post to someone else and clicked ‘submit’, it would show up in the ‘pending’ section as you can see in the next image.

After a post has been submitted to someone with publishing permission, it will appear in the ‘pending’ section on the dashboard. Whoever it has been assigned to will receive a notification that there is a new post that requires their approval.

From there, the assignee (admin/moderator) can go into the post and decide whether or not it’s ready for publishing (next photo).

Notice how I can now decide to ‘discard’, ‘edit’, ‘approve’, or ‘deny’ this post? This gives you control of what’s going out to your followers and can help keep your messaging aligned. If I like the post created, I’ll simply approve it. If not, it can be edited first. Or, you can even re-assign it back to the person who created it.

If you go up to the ‘notes’ tab (next to ‘preview’), you can leave some feedback.

For example, if I wanted Lesley (me) to check the spelling of the post, I would go up to ‘notes’, create a note, go down to the ‘assign to’ section in the bottom left (see photo above), choose ‘Lesley’ from the options, and then select ‘assign’. The post would still remain pending and the author (me) will receive an email notification indicating that they’ve been assigned a post. They can go in and edit the post and re-assign it to the admin/moderator—or particular person to be approved for publishing.

When the post is just the way you want it, you can choose to ‘approve’ it for publishing. If it’s scheduled for a different day or later on, it will show up in the ‘approved’ section of the dashboard. If it was created to go out right away, and has been approved, it will appear in the published tab (next photo).

And voila—your post will appear on the social media channel that you selected!

Note: If the post was unsuccessful publishing, you’ll see it in purple and you can try again. If it fails to publish all together, it will show up as grey—as you can see in the third one down.

Of course, like any new technological tool, the best way to learn is to actually go through the motions! It might seem a bit overwhelming now, but it’s a very simple and effective tool to use. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be a pro!

USING CLASS INTERCOM VIDEO TUTORIAL

What I love the most about Class Intercom is the potential it has to not only help market your school to new students/families, but its ability to show your followers what’s REALLY happening in class, at sports games, on field trips, and so much more! From a school marketing perspective, there are so many ways that you can use this platform to captivate your current followers and attract a whole new audience.