The Power of Social Media Advertising: A Case Study with 3 Finalsite Schools Andrew Martin Social media has quickly become the go-to method for modern marketing and communications for independent schools and districts. It delivers your message directly to your targeted audience its always readily available and easy-to-use for consumers and its oftentimes free all things that schools love when marketing their culture, community, events, and more. Fortunately for schools, social media is also a place where prospective, current and former families spend a lot of their time. But despite the promise of social medias ability to reach your audience, earning their attention and engagement has gotten increasingly more difficult, as social media networks morph into pay-to-play platforms, forcing brands to invest in ads if they want their content to be seen. Whats more, social media has become a battleground where youre not just competing with other schools for attention youre competing with yourself. Just think about the sheer amount of variety in content your school is likely to publish on any given day. Recruiting new applicants, engaging active alumni, distributing daily and weekly news, releasing event information, managing and maintaining the schools brand, and continuously building an active social media community. Your ever-growing catalogue of social media content looks amazing, but all that time and energy spent creating it is wasted if it ends up buried under a mountain of other posts, or goes unnoticed by the target audience. This phenomenon explains why social media advertising has become so useful and impactful, cutting through the ocean of content (including your own), and providing what is essentially a front-row ticket for everyone viewing your social media accounts. Ads can nearly guarantee that someone viewing your Facebook or Twitter feed is going to see the content that you need them to see, much more so than if published in a regular post amidst a daily stream of a dozen or more other posts. To help you decide how to approach social media advertising, weve selected three Finalsite schools that increased website traffic through social media advertising. Finalsites social media consulting team helped these schools develop their advertising campaign at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. Source: https://www.finalsite.com/blog/p/~board/b/post/social-media-advertising-case-study Question 1 (10 Marks) With reference to the case study, define social media marketing and critically discuss 2 ways that marketers can use social media. Question 2 (20 Marks) Critically discuss the advantages and challenges of social media marketing. Make reference to case-study and provide examples.