The MEFA Institute^™: Using Social Media to Communicate with Families

  Hi, everybody. My name is Lisa Rooney. I'm here today to talk to you about using social media to communicate with families. This is part of our MIFA Institute webinar series. And thank you so much for tuning in today. Um, again, my name is Lisa and I manage all of MIFA's social media accounts. And I'm responsible for our PR strategy.

So if you see anything in the news, you're, you're seeing that coming from my desk. And I'm also, um, a part of me, this editorial team where we, um, strategize all of the content that we want to push out and all of the different ways that we want to push it out to our families and our counselors and our partners across the commonwealth.

Again, today, I'm here to share with you how you can expand Collins planning awareness and education through social media. Using social media is an effective way to communicate with families. There's so much solid information to get out regarding the college planning process, both related to college admissions and college financing.

In the past, Mises in person events provided one touch point for sharing information with families, but social media, especially over the past few years, has continued to prove its importance in the communication mix. Today's agenda is pretty simple. We are going to first talk about why. We participate why we meet up participate in social and we're also going to talk about why you should consider it.

If you're not already doing. So we'll briefly review the platforms. Mesa is actually using and we're also going to share some resources and a support that is available to you. If you wish to use your existing social media platforms to reach families, or if you want to dive in and try something new. As part of that discussion, we'll touch on what you can do now as a counselor within your comfort level to reach your families to help promote the upcoming seminar seasons and the upcoming college planning and college financing seasons that are upon us.

Excuse me. So first we're going to talk about the why, why participate in social media. So the first is the role of the school counselor. First and foremost, school counselors, you guys are amazing resources for families. Thank you. Each and every counselor touches the lives of hundreds of students per year, and you have the ability to impact families in so many ways.

You know, this, one of the ways is by serving as an advocate during the college planning process. To help you help your families, we work hard here at MESA to strategically plan out the tools and resources that will be most helpful to families who are in the midst of the college planning process. We share relevant blogs, we create short videos, we have tools on our website, we have webinar opportunities, both online Live and recorded, and we also have our new podcast series, all of our guidance is free with the primary goal of helping students and families realize their dream of a higher education.

One piece of that planning is ensuring our social media content is helpful, relevant, and engaging. Social media gives us another way of sharing information about the service and resources that families need throughout the college planning process. And we can really reach more families by social media and get that quality information out there to the public about admissions, financial aid and college financing.

In general, meet the social media pages. We're currently active on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn and we recently launched Instagram Just under a year ago. Um, we have over 43, 000 followers across all of our platforms. And we have an average potential reach, and I'll get into what that means in a second, of over 7, 000 people.

And so that average potential reach is one post. One post about a webinar that's coming up or a blog post that we that we have just recently published if we push that out there to all of our audiences on all of our platforms, we have a potential to reach about 7200 people. Each post, and so we can grow that even more and the way that we can grow that is by creating a ripple effect by encouraging social media engagement.

So if we increase our social media engagement, if you counselors are sharing some of the content that we're sharing, we can increase that number of people that we could reach, which in turn will help more families. By working together, you, our school counselors, and our partners can help get that key information that MIFA provides directly to families who may not already know who MIFA is.

In addition to sharing this quality information, we can spread awareness of Mises Free Services and let families know that we're available to support them along the way through the entire college planning process.

For those active on social media, there's already an existing pool of students and families to reach. Consider your family, your friends, your neighbors, your old colleagues. Chances are there's at least a few people on your friends list that have children who could benefit from these free resources.

These individuals may be interested in MESA's services or know someone who may be in need of MESA's services. I think all of us on the line want families to have the information that they need to make the experience a little bit less stressful. A great thing about social media is that it really doesn't have to be complicated and we have the resources and the supports in place for counselors.

We will supply you with a sample post to help you promote Mesa's upcoming campaigns and events. And if you're active on any social media platforms, you can easily share the resources that we put out directly onto your page to help increase awareness. Now, over the years, we used to see people doing this on their personal pages, but I just want to make a note here that I know that a lot of you have school counselor pages on Instagram, or you have a school counselor page on Twitter, or maybe you have a group for your senior class on Facebook.

All of these are relevant there as well. So anything that we're promoting you, you can push out in any form that you you wish and wherever you are existingly active. Our next slide is just a sample of our school counselor page, and this is just, this is an image, but what I want to share with you is if you go to MIFA.

org and you go to this for counselors link right here, you're going to see a plethora of information available to you to help you support your families. And on this page, you'll also find a link to our social media toolkit, and you'll see some examples of this throughout I believe we emailed all of our social media.

Toolkit to all of our school counselors in our existing email database. So if you're here, and you're not in our email system, please make sure to go ahead and sign up there as well. But we have gone ahead and created some assets for you that all you have to do is. Click save, and we have the text all you have to do is hit copy paste.

Upload the image, and we've done all the work for you to promote the upcoming financial aid. But, uh, Stephen, we have our admissions. Looking to the spring. We have our how to pay for college series, and we also have some standard content for you to promote me. This email curriculum as well. So, let's get into reviewing me for social media platform.

As I mentioned, we are on Facebook. We're on Twitter. We're on LinkedIn and Instagram here is an orange. We're really excited to be up and running on Instagram. We are growing our following we're working really hard to get more families and more counselors and more partners to follow us. So if you aren't already, please go ahead and do that.

I'll get into that a little bit more later. Um,

So I just wanted to share, uh, if you're not already following us, please do do so.

The first platform we're going to talk about is Facebook. Both individuals and businesses have Facebook accounts, and they find it as a useful way of communicating with school members, with parents, and with students. There are a lot of things to do with Facebook, and today we're going to talk about how to follow, post, share, and tag on Facebook as it relates to Sharing Me for Related Curriculum and Event Information.

So as I mentioned before, we want to make sure that you're following us. I imagine that many of you already are. We've been on Facebook for over 10 years now. Um, but if you're not, just a reminder to like MEFA's Facebook page, and that will get you updates of MEFA's posts on your timeline. And it's great to like it personally, or by your office, or school page, or both, wherever you, wherever you prefer.

You can see the address of the page here. It's Facebook dot com forward slash Mesa. M. A. so Mesa M. A. for Massachusetts. And, of course, you can go ahead and hit that like button right here and go ahead and like us as well. So, that in a moment, so on our next slide here, here's what Facebook page is actually going to look like.

So, again, you can go ahead and like here, but you can also follow us and by following us the 1st link here, you're going to be sure that all of our posts are going to show up in your new speed. Thank you. You can also share our page so you can share that out to people who may also like MISA colleagues who might be interested in hearing from us.

Friends of yours with children that could be in the college planning process. They could be planning to save anyone really who could benefit from MISA's resources. You can go ahead and share that. Again, all you have to do is visit MISA's Facebook page, Facebook. com forward slash MISA MA and you click the 3 dots here.

Right next to that little magnifying glass. And then you can click invite friends. You can share it. Once you click that, you'll have the opportunity to, you know, go ahead and do any of the things that you want to do to engage with our page further. So, we encourage you on Facebook to like and follow the Facebook pages of your most trusted organizations, not just MIFA.

So, Federal Student Aid is another example, the Department of Higher Ed. Um, you can share their content from your trusted organizations with your family. And then you can use posts, again, I mentioned this before, that promote MESA's offerings to help your families. We have created those sample posts that will be available to you on MESA.

org, but you can also go ahead and just share a specific post that MESA's put out if you think it's relevant to your families. If you are going to promote any of MESA's events or resources, we encourage you to tag us at MESA MA, and you can share events from MESA's Facebook page. We do try to put all of our webinars, upcoming webinars, into the events.

Section on our Facebook page, so you can go ahead and share that with your following as well. Again, like and share our posts that provide relevant guidance and events for your families and always encourage your followers to engage with NIFA and other trusted organizations on Facebook.

Here are some sample posts that we have from this year of different pages that have gone ahead and tagged MIFA. So, this 1st, 1 here is Murdoch High School, and they have included us in 1 of their weekly YouTube videos, um, and they have shared our series of webinars that you can watch from home. So, they've gone ahead and tagged MIFA.

You can see that little blue link here and they've also included the MIFA. org. Web page, uh, web page that folks could click through and go ahead and visit our, our link as well. I'm going to go over all the way to the right here and see the commonwealth learning center who shared a recorded webinar. Um, and again, they went ahead and tagged us and then included the link and that.

These this image right here was pulled right for me for that, or you didn't have to worry about that. Hello. Post in the middle, um, is actually 1 of our sample posts. So we sent this out to again, all of our school counselors that are listed in our email systems. If you are not, please go ahead and do that again.

Or you can sign up. For our emails. Um, and again, this is this is word for word. We created all of this for them. We've created this short bitly link, which is just a short URL that you don't have to see 3 lines of a link in a post. And then we also shared this image to you to help promote our upcoming financial aid.

101 webinar series. Now, we're going to get into Twitter

on Twitter. You can also follow. And share or retweet. It's a faster paced social media site and a lot of folks use this platform to find quick pieces of information. It's really like news driven. It moves really fast. It's not someplace that you're there to like, watch videos or engage with images of family and friends.

Used as an information hub. It allows users to write and read very short messages, which again are called tweets, and you can access that on your phone or on the web. Users can also attach photos, videos, and add links to external websites in their tweets. So again, Are you following us? We are at Mipha Tweets.

You can follow us at twitter. com forward slash Mipha Tweets, or you can just go ahead and type in the at Mipha Tweets up in the search bar. And this is what your page, the page is going to look like. You can go ahead and click that follow button, and that will get you to follow us if you're not already doing so.

Similar to Facebook, you can. Do a lot of different things to engage with a tweet. Here is an example of an upcoming our upcoming webinar, or I guess this past at this point, um, that shows how we promoted the understanding the FAFSA webinar that happened on September 22nd, and you can quote the tweet, which allows you to essentially share the tweet and then.

Include some of your own language, you can simply retweet it, which will just put this exact post into your feed and your follower will see it. You can just like it, which is going to help boost the algorithm and hopefully get that in front of more folks. And then this share button here, this last 1 with a little arrow.

We'll allow you to email the tweet. You can direct message it to somebody, um, or you can just copy the link and send it along in any way that you choose. Sometimes I find myself doing this and texting it to someone. Um, if I think that it's relevant and I want to make sure that they see it immediately.

Excuse me and again, we have some sample posts from Twitter. Um, we have this. This, um, Newton high school sharing a financially 101. Webinar series and again, this is direct language from one of the posts that we promoted and linking to our financial aid webinar, webinar series here. We have, um, I'm not sure who BPU SFS is off the top of my head.

I apologize, but this, um, is another recent post that we pushed out that they went ahead and quoted the tweet. So they've tagged us here, they have their own language and they're sharing our financial aid 101 series, um, and how folks can go ahead and engage with that and sign up. And finally, this PSHS guidance, um, using similar language, that we're hosting our financial aid 101 webinars, and then again, it's linking right back to MIFA.

org for folks, for their followers to go ahead and follow us. And sign up for those webinars. We're going to get into LinkedIn, which is a little bit different. Um, and we are constantly changing our strategy on each of our platforms. And with LinkedIn in particular, we really are seeing that this is really a place for us to engage with you, with our colleagues, with our, um, our folks who are in the industry.

And so if you're not already following us on LinkedIn, um, it's again, it's more of a networking site, but there's still values. You never know who will benefit from the information shared. It's a business oriented, social networking service, mainly used for professional networking, but it has more than 259M members.

Huge users can create personal profiles, search for friends or contacts and create extensive network of connections. LinkedIn works really well for reconnecting with past colleagues and classmates and it creates an opportunity for individuals to access professional development resources and opportunities, which is where we come in.

We are always posting a lot of the content that we share on our other social media sites, but we're trying to share it in a way that can be used as professional development or just as a reminder to you all and anyone else who is following us that our resources are available for the students and families that we serve.

This is an example of one of the posts that we've promoted recently, which is army of a podcast. If you're not already following us, you should fantastic. We have experts in planning, saving and paying for college on. We try to post at least twice a month. And if I do say so myself, it is a really wonderful podcast to listen to.

So if you haven't already, please check it out. Um, but again, we are promoting these here for our colleagues to listen to, but then also they may they may find an episode that is relevant to someone that they're working with, um, in your counseling office, or at a college, or in 1 of our community based organizations.

So, we do try to promote all of the different things that we promote here on other sites. But again. We encourage you to engage with that to help boost that algorithm. Another thing that we're constantly trying to do on LinkedIn is promote our MESA Institute, which is a professional development series designed for you school counselors, college access professionals, um, to really get some more professional development on the college planning, saving, and paying spectrum.

You can get PDPs for participating in MIFA Institute webinars. And again, we do try and post all of these here, and you can go ahead and invite some of your colleagues, and you can go ahead and sign up through our event links. And again, all of our MIFA Institutes are offered through Zoom.

Now for Instagram. This is my favorite topic to talk about. But the reason why is because it's new and it's different and we're really excited to continue to grow it. And Instagram operates similar to the way Facebook does and that you can follow us. You can like us and engage. But it, of course, is a little bit different because it really is digitally image driven and video driven and it's a little bit faster paced in our stories.

Um, we are again on me on Instagram at Mifa Ma, and here is just what it looks like on your mobile device. So Instagram is primarily, if not totally used by the user on their phone. If you're not familiar with it. It allows folks to scroll through and see images and engage with those images. Some of the things that you're going to notice on our page here is that there is this Sprout link.

So any of these images that you're seeing here, you could click on this Sprout link and that's going to bring you to a page that looks just like this. But these images are clickable, so it allows you to come back to meetha.org and get those resources directly back into your, um, stream. So you can go ahead and see a blog post or sign up for a webinar or listen to a, a podcast that we've promoted.

Another thing that we really are excited about is the opportunity to do stories. And stories is just another way for us to link out to our content on MISA. org, but it also allows us to engage with our followers. And so this is a recent story that we posted and it allows us to ask if there are questions.

This is related to a FAFSA Webinar that we held recently and when the webinar was over, we asked if anyone still had questions and we found out there were some questions and so someone asked about the FSA ID and we were able to answer that and provide that free resource. So, with Instagram, we're really able to be very quick and reactive and answer questions of our families right away and be there when they need us.

Finally, I just want to share that we also have shared language and images that can be shared across our Instagram pages. We have seen quite a few of you already sharing our content and this language is directly from our school counselor tool kit, our social media tool kit for counselors. Again, the image is the same.

You've seen this throughout this presentation. And we just encourage that if you do have a following of students and families, please check that out and use it to promote some of our resources.

So, as we wrap this up, I just am curious, um, and I want you to think about it. How are you communicating with your families? Are you using social media? If you are, are you using it in the ways that we've talked about? Has this given you any opportunity, um, to grow your audience? And if so, please reach out to me directly.

I'm happy to help answer any questions if you want to start growing, uh, your social media for your students and families. What else can you do? Well, you can sign up again for me to email, even if you don't have a child that that is at home, or even if you have young children last year, 1 of my colleagues signed up and at the time had a senior in high school.

High school sophomore and a first grader, and received a bunch of different emails based on those three different age groups, and it kept this person in tune to with what MEO is putting out there. And I think it would be really helpful for anyone who is working with students and families who see those emails that are going out to families.

Um, at all different stages, because it'll really level set you and get give you a good understanding of what is important to families at every stage in the college planning process, regardless of if someone has an infant or a six year old or a nine year old, a 13 year old or an 18 year old, who knows, um, and then through to this.

webinar series, like and follow our social media pages and engage as much as you can share as much as you can. Um, we are trying to get all of this information out to families so that they're aware of who we are and what we do and that we want to help make college a reality for them. If it is something that they are interested in.

And finally, we, we share a lot of information in our emails to school counselors. So if you're not signed up for those, please make sure that you're doing that. You can do that at MESA. org. Make sure you click on that school counselor page and you'll get that. Um, and we are trying to share all of our resources with you and making sure that we can support you as best we can.

Finally, I just want to make sure that, um, You know that we are here for you. And if you have any additional questions, you can reach out to us. Um, again, visit me for dot org. You can call us at 800449. You can reach us at college planning at or, or you can reach out to me directly. Again. My name is Lisa Rooney and you can reach me at L Rooney.

R. O. O. N. as in Nancy. E. Y. at dot org. Or you can just shoot a direct message to any of our social media platforms. I'm the 1 who. Fielding all of those, so I'd be happy to answer any of your questions there as well. Thank you again for attending and as always have a wonderful day.