78. Making Sense of Social Media Audits for Schools With Karl Boehm

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Tara: Welcome to Mindful School Marketing. I’m Tara 

Aubrey: Clays. And I’m Aubrey Bursch. Today we’re joined by Carl Bohm. Carl is a longtime marketing strategist for independent schools. He runs several companies dedicated to serving private schools, including Help 100 Schools and Everest Private School Growth Group.

He has helped hundreds of brands grow over the years, including John Hopkins, Westminster School, Friends Meeting School, just to name a couple. He frequently speaks on how schools can increase their enrollment from growth programs, including digital advertising, SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, and by aligning the enrollment journey with their digital marketing funnel.

Welcome Carl. We’re so excited. You’re here with us today. 

Karl: Thank you, Aubrey. Thank you, Tara. So happy to be here. 

Tara: Yes. Thanks for joining us. It’s nice to see you again. Um, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself beyond what Aubrey just 

Karl: shared? Sure. Happy to. And thank you for the introduction. Thank you for having me on.

It’s absolutely a pleasure. Um, so I’ve been a 20 year marketing strategist. That’s You know, plus 20 plus years now that my whole career has been threaded around marketing strategy. So I’ve been inside of marketing departments. I’ve been in consulting, I’ve worked for other agencies and then for the last.

10 plus years, there’s been this, this emphasis, at least an inclusion on private schools. But in the last couple of years, my team and I decided we really need to just Make a dedicated focus on helping independent schools. So from that effort, we’ve actually started a couple of businesses that you mentioned, the Everest private school growth group, which is the service arm where we act like a marketing communications agency, and then the help 100 schools where we run programs.

We have our own podcast of the same name of which I’d love to have you both on. And then we did the enrollment challenge together, which you, of course, we’re both a part of. through help 100 schools. So, um, you know, we’re really focused and, uh, and helping as stated in the name, many schools. 

Aubrey: That’s fantastic, Carl.

And I’m so excited that we’ve all had the opportunity to hang out beyond this podcast, um, in our professionals groups and just in the, you know, The ways that we’ve been working together with the challenge you mentioned and so many other things. Um, so Carl, I’m so excited to dive into this topic today and you’re the person we definitely wanted to talk about with this and on a very specific topic that our audience is interested in and that’s social media auditing.

So for those in the audience who might be wondering what is social media, like what’s a social media audit and why is it important for schools? Um, I’d love for you to explain a little bit more about that. And then also like, What are some key elements that independent schools should consider when initiating a social media audit and how does that kind of, you know, impact their online presence and engagement with their audience?

Karl: Sure, it’s a great question, and it reminds me of, uh, an earlier chapter of my career where I was, actually, this was for a trade association that was involved with education, but not, uh, not a school, but lots of similarities with, uh, within this particular story where they had a board that was Trying to understand why they should invest more resources in social media.

And so they brought me in and had me describe why social media was worth doing and why it was worth investing to do at a greater scale. And I helped them understand that whether they, they like it or not, uh, social media is. An increasingly important pathway. Then you, you both know that. Um, and, and schools know that.

However, what if, if they don’t get more advanced on taking and making the most of those efforts, then they’re losing opportunity that other schools that would, there’s the students that are going there would normally potentially go to the your school are missing out on that opportunity. So, what? An audit is a way of getting a good handle on how your channels are performing compared to the competition, the marketplace at large best practices.

And then, you know, getting into even more advanced players, the best in the business, how you can, you know, take it up a notch. So, um, I might’ve missed part of your question in there, but, um. The, the tools that I use and the, the systems I, I, I like to categorize them into, to different buckets, entry level, intermediate, advanced.

So can I, should, should I, should I move on to, to those buckets or should I, I wanna answer your question. My apologies. 

Aubrey: Oh, absolutely. So I’m curious, like, so in terms of online presence, how do you think, like, how does running an audit kind of impact 

Karl: that in terms of managing an online presence running an audit?

Okay, so it’s generally I think it’s pretty smooth because it can be done by your computer on your computer and within a group and there’s a There’s varying levels of integrations that can be helpful, but you can do a lot with very limited integrations so you can use a lot of different scans and technologies and you can input various things, including your.

Connecting your Google Analytics, connecting the actual channels in order to get better analytics, or you can really just use your eyes, right? And then there’s going back to the buckets of entry, intermediate, advanced, there’s varying levels of data that you can gain from the various efforts in order to derive value.

And I often Um, we don’t really talk about how progress in marketing is iterative, so we’re sort of continuously leveling up and as the channels change and best practices change and things just generally get more complicated, so to do our, our efforts as we get more sophisticated. Yeah, I 

Tara: think that this sounds really intimidating to me.

Like if I were in a small school and I was hearing this, I think it would be, it’s a little scary because I mean, data in general is hard. It takes a lot of time to figure out, first of all, how to even get it and then to analyze it and then to implement it. So I think there’s a lot we could talk about.

But I mean, let’s start with the basics in terms of like what metrics Thanks. School should be looking at and let’s just I mean, maybe we can even talk specifically about a couple of the most popular channels that schools use like Instagram and Facebook, right? So what are what are the metrics that they should be looking for and looking at?

And then, um, we can move on from there and to where they go after they figure out how to get that information. Where is that located? And 

Karl: what is it? Absolutely. And I hear you on the potential intimidation but I assure you that if I could get that board, which was all post retirement and very little.

Interaction with social media or knowledge to to understand that we we can we can chip away at the understanding and intimidation of listeners out there. So we’re going to level them up. Absolutely. Okay. So to answer your question on the entry level side, it’s it’s things that you probably hear get talked about the most.

So the first is Are they populated properly? Or is somebody, has somebody even filled out the profile? And they, do they have the profile image? Do they have the, the banner? Do they have the different fields populated? So that when somebody lands, they’ll know where, that they’re in the right place. They’ll get the correct information.

And that’s the completeness portion of it. The next is Frequency. So how often is somebody posting and that that can kind of blend into different levels of intermediate and advanced and I’ll get back to that. But for this level, you can do a gut check of does it seem like it’s abandoned. Right. You we’ve all seen the channels where somebody a school hasn’t posted in years.

And so you have to wonder at that point, is it even the right place? Has it been abandoned? Is there something wrong? Um, is there some reason why the information is no longer up to date? So the frequency is one gut check and checkpoints on the vibrancy out there. The next is the level of engagement. And so if you are getting a certain number of likes, a certain number of comments, shares, then you can start to feel out how healthy the response is to those.

And that is sort of the surface level or entry level items to go for. So how, how does that feel to you, Tara? Yeah, I 

Tara: think that’s getting me a little closer to feeling a little bit more comfortable. Yeah. 

Karl: Okay. And so it, it’s worth noting here that these items that I’m describing, I actually put them into a spreadsheet and then score them.

So That that is what some of the parts that comprise the audit. So the completeness, the frequency, the engagement, their actual fields that get scored as part of the audit. And the next, which is the bridge to the intermediate strategy is how unique each channel strategy is. So the example there. Is if you go to somebody’s Twitter, for example, or their ex, and you see that the same posts are coming to X that are going from to Instagram that are going to Facebook that are going to LinkedIn, then that is, that would be a low score on the unique channel strategy, because they’re doing a number of things there.

They’re not speaking to the medium and each one of those channels has their own separate behavior and use that real users actually want to see. They’re training the audience that they don’t need to go to multiple channels because they’re all exactly the same. And, uh, which Generally reduces the content interest in general.

If you’re talking to all channels at the same time, and then three, it’s bad for any SEO and opportunity, right? Because it’s duplicate content. So there’s less reason to have different high value links that Google would see and link back. So, uh, that’s, it’s kind of, um, it’s the tide that, that lowers all ships.

If somebody is not have a, if somebody doesn’t have a unique channel strategy. That makes sense. Absolutely. I see 

Aubrey: this all the time. So I’m so excited. You’re like, this like report card concept is awesome because who doesn’t want a good grade? Like, and this makes you work harder for it. Second, these are things I see all the time when I’m reviewing schools online presence.

So I’m so glad you’re tackling this because those are the ones I’m like, Oh, why, why are, why do they have this abandoned, like Twitter X, You know, feed going on. They haven’t posted since, you know, what, 1999. I’m just kidding. But like, you know, something like that. So that’s fantastic. Is there anything else you wanted to add to that?

Karl: Thank you. Yes. I don’t want to bore everybody with the attributes here, but this is actually, I think this is kind of fun. And it’s a story that I have told in a lot of meetings because it’s actually rather non intuitive, but it’s very actionable. So Nice. I like that combination, right? Um, so it’s on the intermediate side.

There are four reasons in general why a brand would do social media. Why they, why they would do marketing on social media, right? So one is to monitor the health of their brand. You, if you have a new logo, you post it up, see what the response is like. You may put your mission statement out there. You may.

Start a new program launch a summer camp, and then you can start to get the feedback for how that how those brand attributes are perceived by the audience. So you have that opportunity. The other is networking. And I find that this is actually rather poorly done by most schools, and so it’s it’s an opportunity to capitalize on more.

And that is where you’ve got partners, you have vendors, you have influencers, and you’re Tagging them. You’re communicating with them. You’re mentioning them. You’re including them so that you have the opportunity to direct the conversation with them, and then maybe more importantly, their audience, so that you can grow your audience and increase the distribution.

So that’s the networking side. Then the next is influencing, which is a rather broad topic, which most brands overdo where thought leadership, we’re, we’re pushing out thought leadership, we’re pushing out education. We’re pushing out entertainment that all kind of falls under. And it’s great. There’s so much good, inspiring or influential content that comes out of schools.

This includes fun things that are happening. So it’s, it’s absolutely an important inclusion, but the point. Here is that you want to blend of these things. And the next is promoting and whether you like the word selling or promoting, I will let I won’t have a bone in that in that dogfight, but, um, that’s that’s moving towards action, right?

So Looking for registrations for those summer camps for open houses, scheduling a tour, whatever that action looks like for your school. And so having that blend of those items is one. Actually, I’ll share that earlier in my career, we had a simplified audit where it was just those four things. We, we would go down and score those items and it actually got a pretty helpful relative scoring because it’s rather if, if somebody is doing, if a school is doing those four activities well in a nice blended approach, it means that they are thinking outward and inward and more cognizant of overselling.

Or cognizant of talking down to the audience or cognizant of receiving feedback and then growing their distribution through the networking piece.

That’s 

Aubrey: awesome. I mean, I think this is something that is so helpful to, to all schools, um, because you have a lot on your plate and to, to try to, you know, unpack what it means to have, you know, to, to have, I guess, healthy social media, like, um, you deemed an audit like this with all those different components.

So thank you so much Carl, for sharing. Now I’m curious, Carl, can you tell us a little bit about like where do schools get hung up in this process and or do you have like. Maybe you can tell us a story about a school that went through this and some of the common challenges that they faced or that you found when you were delivering the audit.

Karl: Sure. And we, we can leave an open loop because there’s still the advanced features. We could circle back to that if you like. Yeah. 

Aubrey: I don’t know. Do you want to cover the advanced features and dive in or advanced features? We circle back. 

Karl: Ooh, open loops are fun. I’ll leave it up to you. You 

Aubrey: go with it, Carl.

Karl: Haha. Okay. All right. Well, Then, well, a breath of fresh air will close the loop, right? So, uh, the features and trends Are two more buckets of the audit, and this harkens back to one of your questions previously, which was how things are changing and how people who are more advanced set themselves apart.

You’ll see a lot of focus on trends that I’m thinking of reels. So, you know, in a year, this, this trend might not be as interesting, but right now there are still reels are trending hard. And even beyond that, you’ll see folks, not, I don’t think too many schools follow Gary V, but a lot of marketers do. And you’ll see on Gary V’s, he has a lot of carousels where there’s.

A cover image that says are you interested in whatever or you need to pay attention to whatever and then you Slide that first slide over and then there’s a more detailed video and that’s something that’s trending right now. That is a uh that specific strategy Now that i’ve said that on air you’re we’ll all go to social media and you’re going to see that over and over again by some of the most trending um So, uh, that’s, that’s one example.

The other is advanced scheduling. So if you look at Mr. Beast or hear, um, about some of his techniques, you’ll see that he actually pays quite a lot of attention to how the algorithm is cycling and perceiving the timing. Of his posts, and if something doesn’t catch fast enough, then he’ll actually take it down and post it at another time to try and hit the scheduling better so you can actually catch waves of the algorithm, and that that’s much more advanced and.

Um, it’s it’s in general, less necessary. But if somebody is really looking at the data, then they’re going to start to look at patterns for when their posts are performing the best what days what times and, of course, that’s available on various platforms, but you you’ll start to see how that will work for you or not, depending on your particular brand scenario.

So those those were the some of the advanced items that I wanted to include and mention.

Does that does it? So can we go back into your question? 

Aubrey: Yes, that would be great. So now I’m, now we know all these amazing different, I mean, there’s just so many different stages and things to think about. So where do you see as you’re working with schools, where do you see that? Like that common challenge or that common pitfall where they’re like, they struggle or as you’re doing the audit with them, you’re like, Oh gosh, like 90 percent of the schools like totally miss this piece.

I’ll be great for you to talk about. 

Karl: Sure, sure. Well, I would say that most schools don’t seem to be measuring. They don’t really seem to be measuring the effectiveness. So unless they’re working with a marketing agency, then they probably have a less of an understanding of how much traffic they’re actually receiving from their efforts and how many conversions, whether that be open house registrations or whatever it is that they’re that they’re Aiming to get more of in terms of actions and registrations, inquiries, et cetera.

Um, So, uh, I find that rarely are schools tracking that at the level that they should if there’s a marketing communications person in house, then they might be. And in that case, then what I see is that they still get really busy. And because even though they’re just marketing communication, they’re still wearing a lot of hats and between online and offline marketing, they’re, they’re pulled in multiple directions.

So it’s easy to lose perspective in those cases. And then the audits always uncover something interesting. And usually it’s, That they’ve lost focus on a blended approach between some of those items. So, for example, we did an audit very, very recently, and there was almost no influencing, excuse me, almost no networking.

So, uh, they, they weren’t tagging anybody. We looked back. A year worth of posts and we didn’t see any tags, no mentions. And so they’re really kind of stuck in their own bubble of distribution that is only going to grow incrementally. And then. I also see that schools aren’t putting as much emphasis that they as they really need to on increasing the distribution through advertising, and that just makes a world of difference, because the platforms love to be paid and advertising is the most common way that they are getting their dollars.

So, uh. There’s a lot of research to show that if you don’t advertise, then only 10 to 20 percent of your community will generally see your posts, which is absurd enough, but then adding the opportunity of new prospective families that could be seeing your content, given the advertising, there’s a lot of opportunity there.

So, you know, that’s, that’s usually that that’s more in the place of planning, um, and more. analysis that would be done less quantitatively, more qualitatively on how your strategy relates to your funnel. So, um, maybe that goes outside of the realm of this conversation, but if we’re, I’ll just say that if you’re wanting to get more new people through your channels, then that’s, that’s something that Should be part of the discussion, and a lot of times that is evidenced by very low amount of likes, very limited engagement, limited shares, or just a flat line.

You know, you see 15 likes on the last 20 posts, and it’s the same 15 people.

So I, 

Tara: um, going back to like one of my first questions, which is that this is sometimes overwhelming, right? I like the report card idea and all this, this getting all this data. Um, but I’m, I would like to get specific in terms of the tools that you’re using and where is this information? Like I have tried to get clients to log into their Facebook meta.

Business. There’s like a biz. There’s a there’s a suite and there’s a advertising section and there’s all these different things and instagrams connected to Facebook. And so I find it very frustrating. And I think clients schools find it that way, too. So wait, like, do you use Google Analytics? Where? What specific things are we using to find this 

Karl: data?

Sure. Absolutely. Well, most, the good news is that most of what we’ve discussed can be seen visibly from the public profiles. Mo most of it can when with the likes and the post types. That can be done without looking deeper into the platforms itself. So there’s the only tools that I’ve mentioned that are required would be a spreadsheet.

Unless you’re really good at calculating and remembering the numbers, or you really 

Tara: love the paper. So you’re just looking at like So you’re just looking at, like, the number of likes that’s showing up on the thing, you’re not, like, are you, are you getting, like, is there a, is there a report feature somewhere that people should be looking for, or they’re actually manually going and looking at the post and pulling the numbers, is that what you’re saying?

Karl: A little so let one one by one of what you’re describing so the it’s it goes back to the entry level the intermediate and the advanced right so you can do a lot of the entry level and the intermediate without getting too deep into the analytics. However, The Once you get into, once you get deeper into the intermediate and into the advance, we can absolutely talk about tools so you can get into Facebook and look at the insights.

The insights analytics are very helpful and they will have a lot of data that will give you more. segmented data about who’s looking at your posts, who’s liking your posts, where are they, what categories do they fall under, how does it compare, and then you can also look at more trend lines in there. So that’s available inside of Facebook and the back end when you’re logged in under insights.

The, uh, X has has analytics involved. So you just log in and look at your analytics. Um, Instagram can be a little bit complicated because if you have a creator account, then you have slightly different analytics than a normal account. And if you’re looking inside of, uh, the business manager, as you described, described, there’s also slightly different metrics available.

Um, so, uh, you kind of need to Decide what it is you’re measuring and then look for the best way to do that. Um, and what I have found is. When you, when you decide on a metric and you find where it is, you document it and then you create a relative index because what measured tends to grow. Um, so that’s, that’s, I think that’s part of the answer to your question.

The next is that there are, of course, ramifications on analytics in for Google Analytics to see how the traffic is resulting. On from the social channel to your website and into conversion, which basically means that somebody filled out a form and then you can segment those efforts further and start to understand a return on your investment, whether it’s money or time efforts.

So, um, that would be the three. Lenses to, or three places to look for the, in general, the, the native platform. I mean, you can use sprout social, for example, they have great analytics. Um, I think HootSuite still has some pretty decent analytics and there are many systems, but I’ll, because the native platforms change so much, a lot of times me and my team will just.

Continue to try to stay good at logging in and finding what we need in the native platform. So we, we subscribe to tons of tools, but a lot of times they’ll even lose certain functionality because the API has changed slightly. The, the features have changed slightly. So you still have to go back into the native platforms to find what you’re looking for.

But the reason that I came back to the. Looking at what you can see is because I think it’s really important to be able to put categories that you agree with. Your team are important for the health of your brand and that you, that represent what you want to be doing. And then having a way that you can look at it without having to go too deep into data every single time.

Tara: Thank you. That, that actually makes me feel a lot better that you can actually just look at it. Um, Look at the post itself. So thank you for clarifying that. 

Aubrey: My pleasure. Now, Carl, I know we’ve talked a lot about social media audits and everything like that, but we’re going to switch gears a little bit.

Are you, are you up for that? Let’s do it. All right. So, um, as you know, our podcast is called the mindful school marketing podcast. Um, and you’re a marketer. So that’s awesome. Um, so we’d love to hear, like, how do you kind of define mindfulness or how do you see that incorporating the work you do with digital marketing?

Karl: That’s a great question. Mindfulness is that’s so interesting because there’s I may have to introduce you to a gal who wrote the book called The Mindful Marketer. Um, she’s that she’s local to she and she’s brilliant. Um, and it’s great work. I once upon a time I interviewed her on the topic and. A lot sticks with you and discernment, taking the time to discern thoughts from feelings, the important versus the urgent and priorities I think are very helpful for the marketer.

The other piece that I have to remind myself very often as a marketer related to mindfulness is to be confused before getting upset.

Tara: Wow, that’s good. Yeah, I 

Aubrey: like that. And we definitely want the name of that author. 

Karl: Lisa Norell. That’s Lisa Norell. Yes, she’s brilliant. I’ll be happy to connect you two. The it might be obvious, but I think it could be worth just expanding that when rather than getting confused before angry is relevant with marketing because things happen and it’s very easy to assume that they happened for a certain reason.

Somebody, somebody made a mistake or, um, somebody’s comment means something that it doesn’t or, um, Yeah, there’s there’s just things that happen. And they’re there. Why did the website go down? Did somebody take it down? Were they attacked? Or was it just an outage? Or did somebody just make a simple mistake?

There’s that and could could be on the internal could be someone at the school could be an agency could be a third party could be a plug in. It could be all kinds of things. So we’ve That’s become one of my mantras, is to become, be confused before getting angry. I 

Tara: love that. Thank you for sharing that.

We are going to move on to rapid fire questions right now. What’s one of my favorite things that we do? And this first question is my favorite question, which is if you could put one book as mandatory reading on a high school curriculum, what would it be? 

Karl: Okay. I have a few and I know it’s one, so I’ll, I’ll go quickly.

One is the richest man in Babylon. Has that come up? No, no. Okay. It’s, it’s, it’s interesting because a boy, those teachers and particularly the English teachers are going to have a heck of a time with it because it’s not the best written book, but the content is just, oh, you really wish that we had the kind of financial education that we get as adults.

As. Students, so that it’s mostly story based and it’s a great story and it helps with financial education. So The Richest Man in Babylon, I will often tell especially, um, ambitious folks who are looking for advice. I often tell them about another old book, which is how to think and grow rich and how to win friends and influence people.

Those are all 

Aubrey: great. Thanks for sharing, Carl. My question is, what is one app you can’t live without? 

Karl: Oh, gosh. I feel like it’s controversial to say chat GPT, but boy, do I use it a lot. 

Tara: Yeah. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned that yet, but I think we’re going to start hearing it a lot. Yes. Perfect. Awesome.

All right. Next question. What are you reading right now? 

Karl: Atomic Habits. 

Tara: Love that book. That is definitely on our 

Aubrey: goodreads list. I know that’s one of Tara’s favorites. I love it too. I just haven’t implemented everything from it. I 

Karl: wish I had to read it as soon as it came out. It’s one of those books like, Oh, I should have read it the day it came out.

Aubrey: It’s a really good book. Um, okay. What is one great piece of advice you’d like to leave us with?

Karl: I think folks really need to give themselves grace. Um, I think that marketing is hard for anyone. It’s hard for schools. It’s hard for professional marketers. It requires empathy. It requires strategy. It requires critical thinking and it’s There’s an infinite amount of work that can be done at any given point.

So I think it’s just good to give yourself grace that if you’re moving forward, then you’re moving up. So I have a lot of empathy and appreciation for everyone listening that they are taking this opportunity to improve and focus on providing more impact for their school. So, uh, uh, that’s what I would say.

Give yourself grace. 

Tara: Thank you. Thank you so much. This has been great. I hope that this information I’m sure it’s going to be very helpful to people and maybe take away some of the fear that comes along with data. Where can people find you online, Carl? 

Karl: Oh, thank you. Well, EverestPrivateSchoolGrowthGroup.

com and Help100Schools. com are both. You can, you can absolutely find me there. I’m on LinkedIn and, well, name it. I’m on one of the, any of those channels. So, you know, Instagram, Facebook, less so the X. It’s just not, not quite my personal cup of tea, but when, when we have to help clients where we help them there.

Aubrey: Thank you so much, Carl. This was amazing. I know our audience is going to love this. So thanks again for being our guests on the show. Thank you. 

Karl: Thank 

Tara: you, Carl. Have a great day. Bye. Bye 

Karl: bye.