Two forces seem to be constantly evolving in school marketing offices: social media and artificial intelligence (AI). Just when your school thinks it’s mastered the latest social media trend, a new platform or algorithm emerges, and you need to change your strategy.

Similarly, AI tools for schools are advancing at a breakneck speed. Remarkably, more than 80% of companies have integrated AI into their marketing experiences, and not surprisingly, one report showed that drafting social media posts is one of the most popular uses of AI.

For schools looking to grow their online communities, it can be difficult to keep up with all the changes that happen every day, but using the power of generative AI and social media to tailor your school’s content can mean better brainstorming, more effective engagement, and streamlined communications.

It’s not all about ChatGPT, though — with the help of various AI platforms, you can upgrade your school’s social media strategy faster than ever.

Let’s explore how your school can use the latest AI tools and social media to not only keep up with the times but stay ahead of the curve to create a more connected school community.

Creating Short-Form Videos

Klap shortens the video content creation process by quickly generating multiple short-form video clips from a single YouTube video. Simply paste the YouTube URL into Klap, and it delivers Reels, TikToks, or Shorts, which you can edit afterward. Each clip comes with a title, transcript, and virality score ranging from 10 to 100 to give you an idea about its potential impact.

When I provided the URL to one of our monthly website recap videos, Klap produced a 30-second recap. It assigned this clip a virality score of 75, indicating its moderate potential to engage our audience. Klap's explanation highlighted the video's strengths and areas for improvement and provided feedback on how to optimize the content.

Klap states that their software works best with videos with a lot of speaking, like interviews and reviews, but this would have taken me an hour (or longer) to create. Instead, it was generated within a minute! 

Klap also encourages users to customize clip captions, styles, and positions to best suit their brand. In my experience, Klap automatically added relevant emojis to most captions, which is fun but not always appropriate for schools or districts. Thankfully, they’re easy to remove or edit!

AI Tools for Social Listening

School pros don’t have time to monitor multiple social media platforms to see what the community is saying about their school—let AI monitor and analyze the conversations for you. 

The goal of social listening and monitoring online conversations is to gain insights into your audience's opinions, emerging trends, competitor activity, and industry developments.

AI-powered social listening tools like Brandwatch or Sprout Social can monitor conversations about your school, industry, or relevant keywords across social media platforms to give you a deeper look at your audience and create a stronger social media strategy.

Keep Reading: Social Listening for Schools

Meta AI

One of the newest chatbots to hit the market is Meta AI, which can be found when you go to the search bars on Instagram, Facebook, and Meta.ai. After using it for a little bit, I realized that it’s similar to ChatGPT and some chatbots, but I think Meta’s responses regarding social media were significantly better.

It helped me brainstorm quality ideas, and when asked to create a copy for a social post, the copy was much more usable than ChatGPT. It’s nice that you can brainstorm and post your content within the same app.

I asked Meta AI for some social post inspiration for the summer, and it provided me with some strong ideas, such as promoting summer camps, highlighting facility upgrades, and sharing throwback Thursdays.

Text to Video

Create video content in seconds with text-to-video tools like Fliki and Vidiofy! These tools take text from a webpage, script, or recording and turn it into engaging video content. The AI voiceovers are getting better and better every day, but they can still sound a bit robotic at times. But this is a great option if you can't get someone to do a voiceover!

Use these types of tools to turn a pre-existing blog that performed well into a video for social media – or include it at the top of a blog as another option for readers.

Canva’s AI Image Generator

Images are so important in social media posts: LinkedIn posts with images have a staggering 98% increase in comments, and X (Twitter) posts are 3x more likely to create engagement when images are included. 

But you may not always have the time to capture original content – that’s where Canva’s Magic Design comes in. I'll walk you through how I quickly created an open house graphic.

Add Keywords or Phrases to Prompt your Design

Create a new design in Canvas and click on “Design” at the top left corner. In the search bar, add descriptors or a sentence to explain what you want created. I entered the “School open house event promotion with blue and gold.”

On the left, you can see the AI-generated designs it created, and in the middle, you can see the one I selected.

Editing the Design

Now that we have a unique template to work with, it is time to add your school’s branding.

I added an image of the school and the logo, made the colors match the logo, and included the event date and time. If your school has specific fonts that you use, make sure to update that as well. This only took me roughly 10 minutes to create.

Key Takeaway

Social media is essential for schools and districts to communicate with families, build connections, and attract new students, but it's often time-consuming. Recent advancements in AI and tools like Klap, Meta, Canva, and Finalsite's AI Writing Assistant can save you time and create high-quality content for your school's social media strategy every day of the week.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As the Social Media and Content Specialist, Hailey oversees Finalsite's social media accounts and helps grow its online community. Following her time at the University of Kansas, where she took up rowing, Hailey is a fitness enthusiast who enjoys playing soccer and running.