We love social media at Snipply, but we were anything but experts. Social media allows you to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase your following and sales, and drive product awareness and website traffic. While we all typically understand what these networks are and how they work, extracting the full value these networks can provide takes a deeper understanding of available tools, metrics to be tracked, hacks and basically and a breadth of knowledge that requires some extra (and continuous) learning.
Let’s dive into 10 FREE ways we can start increasing our skill-set and understanding of social media marketing.
Intro Courses
- HubSpot Academy — Social Media
HubSpot designed their course to help you develop an engaging and effective social media strategy that grows your bottom line. The course contains 9 lessons, 40 videos, 34 quizzes, and should take a bit under 5 hours to complete.
Some of the specific topics include social media listening and monitoring, extending your reach, building one-to-one relationships, and measuring ROI. If you’ve used HubSpot Academy in the past and liked it, it would make sense to check this out as well.
2. Buffer — Introduction to Social Media Strategy on Skillshare
Brian Peters (Digital Marketing Strategist at Buffer) walks through not only an intro to setting up your social media strategy, but goes pretty deep into topics around finding your voice, choosing the right platform and tools, and even a dive into running Facebook ad campaigns.
3. Quintly — Free Social Media Analytics Course for Beginners
This is a free class that covers the basic principles of social media analytics. It’s great for both beginners and for semi-experienced marketers who want to refresh their skill-set. Some of the topics covered include situational analysis of your existing social footprint, data collection, competition analysis, finding the right KPI’s, and automating reporting.
It’s a pretty exhaustive free course for analytics and has a nearly perfect review score, so it’s definitely something to check out if interesting in upping your analytics game.
Intermediate Courses
4. Google — Google Analytics for Beginners
While it says beginner in the title, this course is a bit more advanced than the previously listed courses and should serve as your first step into utilizing analytics.
You’ll learn to set up data filters, navigate the Google Analytics interface and reports, and set up dashboards and shortcuts. The course will also demonstrate how to analyze basic Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior reports, and set up goals and campaign tracking.
And because the Google Analytics course is extensive, you’ll have plenty of ways to move forward in expanding your skill-set after completion.
5. Social Creators — Video Storytelling for Social Media
This is a one hour course that should be able to give the foundation for creating awesome videos on your mobile device that you can share via various social platforms. It covers how to find the right gear to film with your smartphone with better audio and lighting, basic storytelling structures, and building out an actionable plan to regularly produce high-quality content.
6. LinkedIn — Social Media News And Trends
This is a biweekly series, led by marketing and social media expert Martin Waxman, that explores the newest tools and techniques that marketers are using to reach their customers. Every two weeks he explores a new topic, including mobile, voice search, video, live streaming, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, the evolution of social media, and regulations like GDPR. It’s an effective way to understand what’s current in the world of marketing and how you can leverage these trends to grow your following.
7. Northwestern University via Coursera— Social Media Certification
This certificate course will teach you to use social media tools to design, manage and optimize social campaigns. It also includes a hands-on project to help you create a comprehensive social marketing strategy. The specialization is divided into multiple courses — Introduction to Social Media, Importance of Listening, Social Media Engagement, Content Marketing and more. This is an ideal choice for agency owners, social media professionals, and entrepreneurs who are looking to master the subject.
However, you must note that this is a serious course — it’s estimated that it takes about five months to complete with their suggestion of devoting four hours per week.
Platform Specific
8. Facebook — Facebook Blueprint
Facebook offers a ton of free resources broken into easy to digest five-minute lessons. Some of their latest courses include the Essential Guide to Facebook Ads, How to Create a Facebook Page to Grow Your Business, How to Select the Right Ad Objective for Your Business, and The Essential Guide to Finding Visuals for Your Ads. Considering it’s done by Facebook and offered in an intuitive format, it’s probably the best place to start when learning the ropes of Facebook marketing.
9. HubSpot Academy — Developing an End-to-End Instagram Marketing Strategy For Your Business
HubSpot designed this course to help you learn how to build and implement a successful organic Instagram marketing strategy. It’s a relatively short and “to the point” course that is broken down into three main sections — The Elements of a Successful Instagram Marketing Strategy, Creating Remarkable Instagram Content, and How to Get More Instagram Followers. It’s a great place to start when trying to understand and implement your initial Instagram strategy.
10. LinkedIn — Making LinkedIn Work For You
By LinkedIn itself, this course covers how to maximize exposure and reach, as well as spark new sales conversations. Topics include Building a solid profile, Creating a company page, Optimizing for search, Standing out as a solo business owner, Creating a content strategy, Writing posts that perform, and Posting videos on your LinkedIn profile.
So those are the top ten places to start building your foundation of knowledge for social media marketing. If interested we’ll be setting up our own guides and tutorials, complete with templates and actionable steps to take to grow your following, so make sure to sign up here.
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