A tutoring centre's summer enrolment plan: 18 posts, zero ad spend

Summer classes are not sold in summer. By the time the holiday starts, a parent has already given July to somebody else.

So count back six weeks from the day your first summer lesson runs, and post three times a week on the same three days: Monday teaches one thing, Wednesday shows a face, Friday asks. Eighteen posts, HK$0 of media.

This is the plan we would run, not a case study. We have not run it for a tutoring centre, so there are no enrolment numbers here — only the calendar, the captions and the platform rules the plan is built on.

First, fix the date and get five things ready

Week 1 is not this week. It is six weeks before your first summer lesson. Classes starting in the first week of July put week 1 in the last week of May, while end-of-term marks are still raw and a parent is still upset about them.

Before you write a single post, have these ready:

• The date you count back from. The first lesson, not today.
• Three fixed lanes. Monday teaches one thing. Wednesday shows a face. Friday asks. Same three days every week. Most centres stop in week two because every post is a fresh decision, and the grid is what removes the decision.
• The comment keyword, set up and tested. In Meta Business Suite: Inbox, then Automations, then Create automation, then Comment to message. Two traps. Keyword automations exist only in Meta Business Suite on desktop, so this cannot be done on your phone at 11pm. And keywords are case-sensitive and have to match exactly, so register PLAN, Plan, plan and 計劃 as four separate keywords inside one automation. The cap is five.
• The one message that keyword sends. On Instagram a private reply to a comment can be sent within seven days of the comment, and only one message can be sent; the thread carries on only if the parent replies. That message therefore has to hold the timetable, the price and your WhatsApp number. "Thanks for your interest" burns the only shot you get.
• An hour a week in the diary. Eighteen cells, about twenty minutes each. Write the six Friday posts first: hardest to write, and the ones that pay.

Save this six-week posting plan

Read it as a grid rather than a list. The three columns never change. Only the week's theme moves forward.

Week 6 is the one most centres waste. The parent who books a summer class is the parent who books the September term, and September is where the money is.

Week 1: introduce the centre, and start the keyword

Monday: take one question your students get wrong every single year and work it through, slowly, in your own handwriting. Wednesday: thirty seconds of the tutor who will actually stand in front of the class, saying their name, what they teach and one thing they are strict about. Friday asks for the first time, and asks for something free.

Summer revision timetable for [form and subject], free. It covers [what it covers] between [dates]. Comment PLAN and we will send it to you. Classes at [centre name], [district], start [date].

Say what will arrive and who sends it. If nobody will send it, do not promise it — answering by hand is fine, and better than a rule you did not test.

Week 2: publish the syllabus and the timetable

A parent comparing three centres is comparing what she can see. Publish the whole thing: lesson by lesson, dates, times, class size, and what a student leaves with.

Our [subject] summer syllabus is published: [number] lessons, [dates], [times], maximum [number] students per class. It covers [topics]. Comment PLAN for the full timetable and the fee.

Week 3: open the early-bird price, and name the closing date

Use a real cut-off, not a rolling one. If you extend it, you have taught every parent to wait for the extension.

Early-bird fee for the [subject] summer course: [price] until [time, date]. After that it is [price]. [Number] places per class. Comment PLAN for the timetable and how to hold a place.

Week 4: put the policies in plain words

This is the post that separates you from the centre down the road, and almost nobody writes it. Missed lessons, typhoon and black rainstorm days, withdrawals, refunds.

Before you book, here is what happens if your child misses a lesson: [make-up arrangement]. If a class is cancelled for weather: [arrangement]. If you withdraw before [date]: [refund policy]. Comment PLAN and we will send the timetable, the fee and these policies in writing.

Week 5: places left, and why you are allowed to teach

Name real numbers. "Almost full" means nothing; "four places left in the S4 class, two in S5" moves a parent who has been thinking about it for three weeks. This is also the week to show your registration.

Places as of [date]: [number] left in [class], [number] in [class], [class] is full. We are registered with the Education Bureau, school number [number], and [tutor name] holds [qualification]. Comment PLAN for the final timetable.

Week 6: last call, and open the September term

The week most centres skip. Bookings close, and the September regular classes open on the same day, to the same audience, while they are still paying attention.

Last call for the summer course: bookings close [time, date]. September regular classes open for booking today — [day and time] for [form], [day and time] for [form]. Comment PLAN and we will send you both timetables.

Copy this reply when a parent comments the keyword

Hello! Here is the [subject] summer timetable: [link]. [Number] lessons, [dates], [times], at [address]. The fee is [price] and includes [what it includes]. To hold a place, [your actual process — a WhatsApp message to this number, a deposit, a form]. The place is confirmed once [your actual confirmation step]. Happy to answer anything here.

Replace every bracket before you use any of these. A parent can tell.

After the summer, check what actually happened

Keep four numbers, week by week and lane by lane:

• Comments carrying the keyword.
• Parents who replied to the message the keyword sent.
• Trial or first lessons actually attended.
• Paid enrolments, and how many of those carried on into September.

An enquiry stays an enquiry until the fee is paid. Ask at the point of enrolment how the parent heard about you and write the answer down, because six weeks later nobody remembers.

Then keep the posts that produced comments, and rewrite the ones that produced silence. Most of the silence will be on Mondays, and the fix is usually that the post taught something nobody was worried about.

Hong Kong dates and channels that change the plan

Two mornings own the Hong Kong summer. Both are results days, and on both of them a parent goes looking for a centre before lunch.

WhatsApp is the funnel; the feed is what gets forwarded into it. Instagram says its most important predictions are how likely you are to reshare a reel, watch it all the way through, like it, and go to the audio page — so write Monday's post to be forwarded into a parents' group, not admired. The WhatsApp Business app is free to download and carries a greeting message, an away message and up to 50 quick replies. Put the timetable in a quick reply before week 1.

Google Business Profile is the most under-used free traffic in this trade. A parent typing 太子 補習社 gets a map result, not your Instagram. A service business lists Services rather than Products, and a profile takes up to 10 links per category, including "Book an appointment". Posts are archived after six months unless you set a date range, so give a summer post its dates.

Facebook is still the bigger room for parents. Hong Kong shows 4.70 million Facebook accounts against 4.05 million Instagram accounts on October 2025 data — accounts, not people. Primary parents are on Facebook and WhatsApp. Secondary students pick the centre themselves, and they are on Instagram.

Five hashtags, not thirty. Instagram's own help page now reads that you can use up to 5 tags on a post, and that a comment with more than 5 tags on a single photo or video will not post. Meta's developer documentation still says 30, and so does nearly every marketing blog here. Posting by hand also gives you 20 carousel slides against 10 through the publishing API, which matters on the Monday a worked question runs long.

Your registration number is a trust signal that only exists here. Under section 3(1) of the Education Ordinance, a body providing an educational course to 20 or more people in any one day, or 8 or more at any one time, is a "school" and must register with the Education Bureau. Put your number in the page bio as well as the week-5 post.

Who sits the DSE is changing. In 2026, 12,143 people sat it as private candidates, up about 19.5% on 2025, while school candidates rose about 2.2%, to 46,344. Repeaters and self-study candidates are the fastest-growing part of that audience, they choose the centre themselves, and they are not reachable through a school.

What the media costs: HK$0. Meta Business Suite, the WhatsApp Business app and Google Business Profile are all free. To make the arithmetic legible — and these two figures are an illustration, not a result of ours — a six-lesson course at HK$1,800 filling eight extra seats is HK$14,400 against about six hours of your time. Put your own numbers in. The denominator here is time, not budget.

What we would skip

This plan will not fill a class from a standing start, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If your page has almost no followers and you hold no list of current parents, six weeks of organic posting reaches close to nobody, because organic distribution rewards reshares from an audience you already have. What the six weeks buys a new centre is the assets — a syllabus post, a tutor post, a policy post, a set of answered questions — which you can hand out at the school gate, paste into a WhatsApp group, or put behind a small paid boost. Zero budget plus zero audience is not a strategy, and nobody, us included, should sell it as one.

We would skip posting daily. Eighteen posts in six weeks is three a week, and it is deliberate: a centre that posts every day about one summer course teaches parents to scroll past it.

We would skip quoting a comment-to-enrolment conversion rate. Every confident-looking figure we could trace was published by a company selling message automation, with no method and no sample size. Count your own comments against your own reach, for one summer, and you will have a number that is true for your centre.

We would also skip 小紅書 (Xiaohongshu) this summer for a centre teaching local-curriculum families. Its presence here is real — it opened its first office outside mainland China in Hong Kong in June 2025 — but nobody has published a Hong Kong resident user figure, and its pitch here is built around mainland consumers and visitors. The parent looking for a centre near her flat is on Google, WhatsApp and a district Facebook group. If your intake is newly arrived mainland families that flips, and it is a separate plan.

Run the free audit before week 1

Eighteen posts all end on your own page, and that is the part nobody checks. This calendar assumes a parent who taps through can find your address, your timetable and a way to message you. Paste your website into WITTI Grow and the free marketing audit tells you whether she can: a score, the checks you fail, and a seven-day action plan. No sign-up, no credit card. Fix what it finds, then start counting back six weeks.

Next guide: Comment-to-DM or link in bio: which one actually books appointments?