Using Social Media to Market Your Language Education Services

Whether you’re a single person running a language education service as a side hustle or you’re a large company offering language teaching at different levels and across a range of languages, establishing a social media presence can improve the uptake of your services and your bottom line.

As an intangible service, or something you can’t physically see, you might not have considered using social media platforms to promote your business services – we’re here to change your mind.

Below, you can find out all about how and why you should harness the power of social media as a language service. Keep reading to learn more now!

Content Ideas for Language Services

As a language learning service, what you’re offering isn’t something easily captured through imagery. But this doesn’t mean that you should be averse to putting content out on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. 

Below are some of our ideas are ways to use social media’s power as a language service.

9 marketing ideas to help you get started

• Sample lessons: As a language teaching service, you might not want to put all of your lessons on YouTube where people can access them for free, because if they can get it for free, why would they pay for it? While creators can monetise their YouTube channel, this might not be the way you want to run your business. So, rather than putting all of your lessons online, you could instead put a sample lesson on YouTube so that clients can try it before they buy.
• Language learning tips: For people looking to learn a language in their free time, you can offer tips for doing so. This can be in the form of a video where you speak directly to your customers. Or you might turn your tips into graphics and post them weekly.
• Daily vocab content: This is a great one for establishing a consistent posting schedule and is great for language teachers who focus on one language. It can include a video with a pronunciation guide or could be in written format for platforms like Twitter.
• Grammar guides: Whether you break it down in a long-form video for YouTube, or you create quick guides on TikTok, grammar is often a confusing topic in language learning. Language learners all over can use this content meaning good engagement levels on your content!
• Interactive content: Making content interactive is really easy for a language teacher. You could create quizzes or polls–a feature you can apply to content on nearly every social media platform now. You might also boost engagement by creating particularly tricky questions that get your followers thinking. Interactive content often ensures that followers actually engage with your content–usually through likes, click-throughs, comments, or shares–and this engagement signals to the algorithm that your content is valuable. Valuable content is much more likely to perform better across platforms.
• Student success stories: As an intangible service (in the sense that you can’t do much to document the process), testimonials and success stories are fantastic options for content for your social media marketing strategy. Success stories are real-life proof that your services actually work! Consider getting past students to discuss their experiences or even show them in action speaking the language fluently.
• Resource recommendations: Often, when someone begins learning a language, they can feel overwhelmed with choices when it comes to teachers, apps, books, and other resources. As a language teacher, you’re in an authoritative position, giving you credibility when you recommend resources. These videos are likely to be saved (one of those positive reactions that boost your engagement rate) and can establish you as an authority in your sector.
• Q&A sessions: Ask Me Anything sessions are a fun way to interact with your clients and followers and it allows them to get personalised responses to their most burning language-learning questions. It also boosts your community engagement, making sure your followers feel seen by you as a business.
• Language challenges: Lastly, discussing challenges that you and other language learners have faced is not only a valuable source of information for new language learners, but it humanises your account and makes you much more approachable. As a smaller business, you might find followers react more positively when you show your humanity too. This is because it sets you apart from large language learning apps and services.

This is not an exhaustive list of social media content ideas, and you might find some of these ideas simply don’t work for your business style. However, there are a few basics when it comes to social media content that you should keep in mind, no matter the content you’re creating. These include ensuring the content inspires engagement, is valuable, and establishes credibility for your business.

Key Challenges for Language Service Promotion on Social Media

As with any industry, there are challenges that those in the education sector face when it comes to utilising social media for promotion. Below, we’ve looked at some of these challenges for language services and offered ways to overcome them.

• Language diversity: This is a key issue that large businesses face. Language diversity means picking and choosing which languages to focus on for promotion. This might however mean clients aren’t aware of all the languages you teach. Solutions to this issue could include: separate profiles per language, brand colours for each language to ensure followers know which language the content pertains to, or individual days per language, i.e., Mondays are all about French while Tuesdays focus on Spanish.
  
• Establishing trust and credibility: As a language teacher, your clients are going to want to trust you and feel that you can improve their language skills. Social media is a really easy place for false promotion which is why you might find clients are tentative to employ your services. Content in which you offer tips, advice, and lessons can establish your ability to teach. Additionally, you might consider listing your credentials on your profile or your website to reassure potential clients that you’re trustworthy.
  
• Competition and market saturation: Unfortunately, there are many other language educators out there. This means your content needs to stand out. Ways to ensure that your content gets seen can include compelling storytelling, i.e., exploring why you teach, how you learn languages, and the challenges you have faced. You might also cater for a specific niche. For example, are you teaching students going for language qualifications? or do you want to help adults looking to learn a new language as a hobby?

Final Thoughts

Social media is an incredible marketing tool. We recommend all our clients use it to gain new leads and improve their bottom line, but we totally understand how it might be intimidating. Language services may struggle to come up with content ideas that really promote their services.

If you’re a language educator looking for support with your digital strategy, then Rokir has you covered. We’ve worked with clients across the education sector and have tried and tested methods of improving your presence on social media.

Contact us now for more information on the services we offer and how they can benefit you.