5 Free Social Media Courses to Boost Your Marketing Game 👍
Since the inception of Facebook back in 2004, social media platforms have taken our world by storm. Be it catching up with friends through Facebook and Instagram, passing the time on YouTube, or networking through LinkedIn, most of us would have used social media one way or another in our daily lives.
In fact, according to We Are Social and Hootsuite’s Digital 2020 report, 79% of Singapore’s population, are active users of social media, with the average user spending over 2 hours per day on them.
Just on Facebook alone, 3.7 million people can reportedly be reached through adverts on the platform. Others such as LinkedIn are also steadily catching up, with a growing userbase of 2.7 million people.
This outreach is enormous. And it is no wonder that brands and businesses are heavily tapping on social media to reach potential customers.
Long gone are the days of newspaper ads and TV commercials. In today’s day and age, social media is king.
But how can you market your business on social media?
Unlike posting a quick life update, marketing and promoting your brand through social media requires a deeper understanding of what your viewers like and the tools that allow you to reach them.
For those hoping to build up your brand’s presence through social media or improve your brand’s marketing, here are hence five completely free courses to guide you along your social media marketing journey:
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HubSpot Academy’s Social Media Course
Level: Beginner
What it teaches: How to build your Social Media strategy
Format: Videos, Quizzes
An inbound marketing company and one of the pioneers in content marketing, Hubspot Academy’s Social Media Course offers a comprehensive range of free online marketing courses for all. Their Social Media Course is one classic example, providing a series of bite-sized video lectures on how you can develop an effective Social Media Strategy to extend your reach and maximise your returns.
Exploring topics such as social listening, customer relationship nurturing, increasing outreach, and measuring ROI, the 5-hour course provides a good introduction on how you can pursue your social media marketing.
Should you wish to explore more targeted strategies for specific social media platforms, you can also check out their other short courses available (such as their YouTube Marketing Course or Instagram Marketing Strategy Course) for a more tailored lecture.
Lastly, a bonus for marketers: Hubspot’s Social Media course also comes with a free certification upon completion, giving you something to add to your LinkedIn profile and resume when you are done! It doesn’t get better than this!
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Learn with Facebook Blueprint
Level: Beginner, Intermediate
What it teaches: Everything you need to know about Facebook Marketing (and Instagram)
Format: Videos, Guides, Quizzes
Who better to learn Facebook marketing from than the very company itself?
A collection of videos and guides on how you can market and advertise on Facebook, Facebook Blueprint covers a massive range of topics, ranging from getting started for beginners to managing and conducting ad testing for the more advanced.
Unlike Hubspot Academy, which offers a guided lesson flow for its courses, however, Facebook Blueprint offers all its tutorials and guides separately, making it more challenging if you’re starting to identify how you should proceed with learning.
One solution would hence be to view a more structured Social Media course (like Hubspot Academy’s) before viewing tutorials from Facebook Blueprint. As Facebook Blueprint provides tips on the more operational aspect of Facebook marketing (e.g. how to Create Facebook Ads, or how to Target Core Audiences), this helps to supplement the knowledge provided from other courses, focusing on the more strategic aspects of marketing.
[Alternative, check out: Our Guide to Learning with Facebook Blueprint]
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Social Media Advertising by University of Colorado Boulder
Level: Beginner
What it teaches: How to effectively advertise on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
Format: Videos, Quizzes or Assignments (may not be applicable)
Paying for a university course can often be a huge cost to many of us. University Colorado Boulder’s free to audit Social Media Advertising course on Coursera is hence a saving grace when it comes to free education.
A part of their four-course Digital Advertising Strategy Specialisation, the course takes approximately 16 hours to complete and is conducted 100% online. Unlike typical university lectures, you can hence have the flexibility of learning this course at your own pace, making it suitable regardless of your schedule.
If you prefer learning through case studies, Colorado Boulder’s course also caters extensively by unpacking small business use cases of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter advertising. Like the other courses mentioned earlier, Social Media Advertising also offers basic campaign ideas for the various platforms and teaches you how to execute your social media advertising campaign through effective social media targeting.
A class most certainly worth attending.
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Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content by University of Pennsylvania
Level: Beginner
What it teaches: How to craft contagious content, build stickier messages, and get any product, idea or behaviour to catch on
Format: Videos, Quizzes or Assignments (may not be applicable)
If you’ve always wondered what classes were like in an Ivy League school, the Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content course offered by the University of Pennsylvania is your chance to find out.
Also free to audit via Coursera, the course is conducted by the author of New York Times bestseller “Contagious: Why Things Catch On”, Professor Jonah Berger, who explains the principles behind what makes ideas sticky and why certain ideas catch on.
A more content marketing-based focus when it comes to social media marketing, this course helps you to identify how you can be more effective at marketing your ideas, brands, or products – and ultimately, how to create a viral campaign of your own.
- Social Media Analytics by Quintly Academy
Level: Beginner
What it teaches: Basic principles of social media analytics
Format: Videos, Guides, Quizzes
While the idea of data analytics may seem daunting and not entirely relevant to marketing at first glance, social media data plays an increasingly important role in businesses today.
Drawing upon the data gathered from your social media platforms, social media analytics enables you to track the online conversations taking place about your brand and business, and take actionable steps to improve brand perception or move closer to your goals.
Beyond providing insights into what customers are satisfied or dissatisfied with, social media analytics also enables you to create more targeted marketing campaigns for your audience segments, inadvertently improving your marketing results.
Quintly Academy’s Social Media Analytics course mainly introduces the basic principles of social media analytics. As such, further studies would be required for those wishing to explore the area more in-depth.
Nonetheless, if you are new to what analytics is, the course offers good fundamental knowledge on how social media analytics can aid your business, and how to automate reports from the various social media channels. So why not just give it a go?
