How Often Should Schools Post?

Posted Date: 11/08/2021

Article Posted by Spencer Patton

Schools are experiencing a paradigm shift. 2020 rocketed the education industry further into the digital space faster than ever before. For many parents and guardians, the idea of homeschooling has become more appealing, and online charter schools are more accessible than they were in the past. This digital movement leaves public and private schools with an option: concentrate on marketing their schools or operate on increasingly small budgets year after year. A strong step toward solving this multifaceted problem is by increasing brand awareness. Schools can achieve this by creating and distributing a large amount of content to multiple digital platforms.

How much content should schools post to reach this goal?

The answer to this question isn’t the answer anyone wants to hear. Schools need to post as much as they can! Yes, I know. "As much as they can" isn’t a finite number. The reason for this is that everyone has different needs, a different sized team, and a varying budget. 

Here is a better question we should be asking ourselves. 

How can we maximize the time that we do have when creating content?

The first step in saving time is adopting more efficient content creation processes. Instead of wasting time creating individual posts, you can use the 4 step process of Capture, Edit, Distribute, and Refine. 

Let’s take a look at the first step in the content creation process.

Capture
Capture your pillar content. What is pillar content? Pillar content is a large, long-form piece of content created from events or other staged video opportunities. Some examples include:

• Speeches
• Meetings
• Podcasts
• Recorded Q&A’s
• Recorded athletic events

Edit
The second stage is editing your pillar content into micro-content and articles. Micro-content is a short-form version of your pillar content. Here are a few examples:

• Cut a 3 min clip of your pillar content and post it on SM platforms.
• Take a great quote from your Pillar content and make an image with the quote on it
• Create a meme using an idea from your pillar
• Take another quote from your pillar, play it at the beginning of your video, and expand on that quote, making yourself a part of the conversation

Examples of how you could use your pillar content as an article include:

• Transcribe your Pillar content into an Article on a subject of Choice
• Transcribe a Q&A

To simplify this process, you could use speech-to-text software to automatically convert your video into a readable transcription.

Distribute
In this phase, we’ll talk about where we will be posting each piece of content. Once we have cut and edited each of our pieces of content, be it pillar content, micro-content, or articles, we must decide where each will be posted to. Every platform has its strengths and weaknesses. The bullet points below will show you exactly where to post each kind of content.

• Pillar Content - (for Facebook, Youtube, IGTV, Website or Podcasting Apps)
• Micro Content - (For Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)
• Articles - (LinkedIn and Website)

Now that you posted all of the content that you made, it’s time to move on to the most advanced step.

Refine
In the final step, refine, you will do two things: discover what parts of your content your audience responded to the best and repost those ideas, quotes, or images in a different format. Here is how you can do this. 

• Read comments on your videos and see what people are talking about.
• Note the parts of the videos that matter most to your audience.
• Repost this new “community-driven micro-content” as Instagram stories, Instagram Reels, Facebook Stories, or Youtube Shorts

​If you did these steps 👆🏽 you posted 26 pieces of content from 1 piece of Pillar Content. Don’t believe me? Here’s the breakdown.

1 Piece of pillar Content Distributed to 5 platforms
(Facebook, Youtube, IGTV, Website, and your favorite Podcasting App)

2 Three-minute Clips from the Pillar content Distributed to 4 Platforms
(Facebook, Twitter, IGTV, LinkedIn)

1 Static Image Quote from the Pillar content Distributed to 4 Platforms
(Facebook, Twitter, IGTV, LinkedIn)

1 Meme from the Pillar content Distributed to 3 Platforms
(Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)

4 Three-minute Clips from the Pillar content Distributed to 4 Platforms
(Facebook, Twitter, IGTV, LinkedIn)

1 Clip from the Pillar with You Expanding on the Topic Distributed to 4 Platforms
(Facebook, Twitter, IGTV, LinkedIn)

1 Transcription Article from the Pillar Distributed to 2 Platforms
(Website, LinkedIn)

If you did this, you created 26 pieces of content from one video! Nice work!👍🏼

That’s it! Hopefully, by using this framework, you will become more efficient in your content creation process. We hope that this increase of valuable content will give you an advantage over competing districts and build trust with your community!