Facebook Tips for Child Care Centers and Preschools
If you run a child day care center, nursery school or preschool, you can be sure that many of your parents are on Facebook — an estimated 70 percent of the social site’s audience is between the ages of 18 and 35. And those parents expect you to be there, too. We took a look at active Facebook pages for 10 child care centers and came up with these tips on how to maintain a successful Facebook page that will engage your clients and attract new ones. (Also, at the end, we talk about how to protect yourself and the children’s privacy.)
The preschools and day care centers are: Bergamo Academy (Denver, Colorado), Bright Horizons (national chain), Cholla Montessori Preschool (Mesa, Arizona), Christian Day Nursery School (Collingswood, New Jersey), The Goddard School (national chain), Growing God’s Children Preschool (Mustang, Oklahoma), Loving & Learning Family Daycare (North Branch, Michigan), St. Vincent’s Day Care Center (Evansville, Indiana), Stepping Stone School (Austin, Texas) and Sunrise Preschool (Tempe, Arizona).
For more tips on Facebook for local businesses, join our webinar on March 7. Get the details.
1. Show activities with images
Here are some tips on posting images to Facebook.
2. Show activities with video
You can post videos directly on Facebook. Here are the instructions.
3. Be a source of news about child-raising
4. Be a source of recipes or activities parents can use at home
5. Ask for donations
6. Ask questions as conversation starters
7. Make time-sensitive offers or announcements
8. Answer client questions
9. Give parents opportunities to say “thanks”
10. Show and explain your teaching style
11. Show your facilities
12. Create a special Welcome tab
“Tabs” is Facebook-speak for other pages besides the Wall that you can create to display a customized look that resembles a page on a website. Take a look at this tab from Bright Horizons. The Welcome tab comes as a standard item on your Facebook business page and you can create tabs with any name. You can also set your Facebook page so that first-time visitors will land on a tab instead of the Wall. Often, Welcome tabs appear on first viewing, promising an offer (for instance, a discount coupon). When the user clicks the Like button, a second version of the tab displays the offer. These customized tabs are a good way to display links to your website, as in the Bright Horizons example. In order to get this look on your Facebook page, you’ll need to use an app that grabs a web page and displays it in the Facebook frame. There are many free or low-cost apps available to do this (some popular ones are from Pagemodo, SocialAppsHQ, Wildfire, Static HTML and Tradable Bits) or you can hire a local Facebook developer.
13. Get a signed media consent form
If you plan to show children’s faces or their artwork or mention their names on a Facebook page (or any other publication for your center), you should create a media consent form that specifies your policies (here’s an example). Give parents a chance to sign off on a range of choices for how their children can be shown (for instance, individually or in a group only, or not at all) or identified (such as by first name only or not at all). Two Facebook rules to know: 1) The parent or guardian of a child under 13 may request the site to remove an image of the child. 2) No child under 13 may have a Facebook account.
For more tips on Facebook for local businesses, join our webinar on March 7. Get the details.
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