We are thrilled to tell you that King's Bruton has been ranked by EduRank (the leading digital measurement company for schools), the second-best school for social media for the academic year 2018-19! This is the second time we have achieved such a ranking, but the first time we have achieved it for an entire academic year!

“I am delighted that King’s Bruton has been ranked the 2^nd best UK independent school for social media in the academic year 2018-19. This is an incredible achievement for a school of our size and is testament both to all that happens in this vibrant school and to our dynamic marketing team. This is yet another impressive achievement for King’s Bruton in our highly successful 500^th Anniversary Year.”
Ian Wilmshurst, Headmaster.

This is an excerpt from EduRank’s website:

How The Top 3 Independent Schools Use Social Media (And What You Can Learn From This)
Using social media effectively is a critical part of promoting your school marketing campaigns… But you don’t have time to keep up with ever-developing best practices, or to learn the nuances of using the platform. Despite this, the fact remains: you need to be able to use them well in order to succeed. If you don’t have time, what can you do? The answer is simple: Model the strategies used by top performing schools around the country.

In this article, we’re going to review the performance based on Edurank’s scores. Edurank, if you’re not familiar, is social media benchmarking software that is specific to the education sector. Obviously, all schools are different, so Edurank’s algorithm ranks schools based on how well they use Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, as well as looking at more general metrics, such as brand cohesiveness across all platforms. One important point before we get started. In our view, there are many ways to measure the relative “success” of a school – this is just one of them. At the end of the day, producing quality content that is right for your audience is far more important for your success than just focusing on the metrics. Also, what works for one school may not work for yours, so invest time in testing and refining your social media strategy.

Based on Edurank’s findings, the top three independent schools for the most recent academic year (18-19) were:

• Rossall School
• King’s Bruton
• Surbiton High School

But how have they ranked 1, 2 and 3 this year respectively and what are they doing to get to the top of leader board? We’ll take a look at their accounts and work out why we think they’ve got social media nailed, as well as giving you a list of quick, actionable takeaways you can put to work in your school for the coming year. For the record, we no affiliation with any of the above schools or provide marketing services for them.

School #2: King’s Bruton | Bruton

King’s Bruton is a co-educational independent day and boarding school located in Bruton. Founded in 1519, the school first transitioned from being boys-only in the 60’s, making the full switch in the 1990’s. This school serves students in the 13-18 age bracket. King’s Bruton has a rich and storied history – but they’re not set in their ways. In fact, their social media use makes them as relevant in modern times as they ever have been.

Per Edurank, their Youtube use gets a perfect 100: an interesting result!

You might be surprised to see YouTube listed as the strength of a school on this list. While we all know how powerful video is as a medium, few of us would dedicate much time to marketing ourselves on the platform. Upon closer inspection, we can see that King’s Bruton have several high-performing videos on YouTube. Looking at the above, we can make some observations:

• The most popular video is one that explains what life is like at the school. This is obviously interesting to the parents of prospective pupils. At under 4 mins in total length, it’s short enough to hold their attention – without skimping on the important details.
• The second most popular video is of the Queen’s visit to the school. While you may not be able to leverage the appearance of a royal at your school, it’s possible you’ve had other notables visit: celebrities, local politicians, or anyone else that people could be interested in seeing.
• Videos of school events (i.e. school plays or music recitals) consistently perform well. That’s because these kinds of events are nostalgic for the people that attended them, and interesting to those who weren’t present at them. Making recordings of these events available after the fact could be a great way to get more mileage out of the effort put into running them in the first place.

To read the full report, click here.

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