5 Tips to Catch Students on Facebook (and make them ♥︎ you)

Through hitting the right audience on Facebook, with the right messaging, and a great customer experience, you will begin to see your results improve drastically. But, the Facebook algorithm is an enigma that few people really understand. At House of Education we have been marketing to students using Facebook for the last 10 years, here are our 5 tips on how to improve your performance.

It's not all about the money.

First things first: Facebook is all about showing ads that users want to see and engage with. It is therefore not all about the money. Your ads are distributed on Facebook based on a number of factors including your bid type, target audience, ad performance history and competition. It’s pretty logical, if one advertiser monopolizes the feed, users won’t return to the platform. As part of the algorithm’s goal of driving more authentic interactions, advertisers are expected to promote quality content that drives real engagement.

How does the Facebook algorithm work?

1. Initially, Facebook looks at each post in a user’s network (the “inventory”), and scores the posts according to predefined attributes, like type of post, recency, relevance and so on. 
2. Next, Facebook discards posts that a user is unlikely to engage with, based on the user’s past behaviour. They also demote content that users don’t want to see (such as clickbait, misinformation, or content that they’ve indicated they don’t like).
3. Then, they look at the remaining posts, score them in a personalized way, and rank them in order of value. For example: Rebecka is 20% likely to watch alumni videos from her university, but 95% likely to post a heart reaction to a photo of her sister’s kids.
4. And finally, arrange a nice cross-section of posts so that a user has an interesting variety to scroll through.

Our secret recipe - 5 ingredients on how to reach students

1. Target the right people who are likely to find your message relevant. You find a range of tools in Facebook to define your targeting. You can choose to target people who show interest in the degree level or study related websites like study abroad or english proficiency tests, as well as age and location. To excel even further, you can also use data retrieved from your site or a lead capture tool that captures rich data to create “lookalike audiences”, or optimise on conversion events that match your ideal lead profile.
2. Present a compelling message to this audience that they are likely to engage with (like, comment, click, or just spend some time reading or watching). If you hit a person who’s actively thinking about which study programme to apply to, a useful tool to help them decide or learn more about a specific programme will be seen as highly relevant! Don’t forget to be succinct with the value offering in your ad.
3. Make sure that what happens after clicking the ad is relevant to the user. Optimise your landing page with relevant content so users spend some time here. A clear CTA like “download the brochure” or “take a quiz” that drives conversions will also improve your quality ranking. Facebook doesn’t like a high bounce rate on your landing page.
4. Don’t forget to work with your entire ad account, and keep track of the engagement of your ads and messages received. Facebook will look at how well you interact with users who comment on your posts or send you messages. Make sure you keep an eye on comments and messages and reply to them swiftly.
5. Test! A/B testing everything, even a little smiley can push your engagements by a percentile and make your quality score improve! Also, what worked in market 1 may not necessarily work in market 2. And what worked yesterday could have different results next week.

We like to speak about the high conversion rate in our lead capture tool when used for lead generation on Facebook and Instagram. But to be fair it’s not just the amazingness of the product that drives the result. How Facebook chooses to evaluate the user experience it provides, and then dictates the placements of our ads plays an equal, if not greater, part.

Want to know more about how our lead capture product can help improve your Facebook marketing results, or how we can work to generate leads for you? Get in touch!