Social Media Marketing Certification
If you’re interested in learning more about social media marketing either for your own business or in order to offer it as a service to others then hop over to Hootsuite. They offer a free online course with the option of taking an exam at the end. The exam comprises 58 questions to be answered in 60 minutes and costs $199. If you don’t pass first time you can take it again.
The free online training consists of short video lectures and some notes to download in pdf files. You can learn at your own pace, but it’s easy to follow and only takes a few hours to complete. So for the purpose of continuity, especially if you intend to take the exam, I recommend you complete it within a two or three days.
The course teaches you how to make best use of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, and Instagram for business. Perhaps you’ve tried all of these already and you think you know how to use them all, but I learned a lot despite having opened accounts years ago.
Social Media Marketing Course
The course is divided into six sections:
- Introduction to Social Media Marketing
- Optimizing Your Social Media Profiles
- Social Media Strategy – From A to Z
- Growing Your Online Community
- Content Marketing Fundamentals
- Social Advertising Fundamentals
Some of the things you learn will inspire you to pause the learning and head off to implement them on your social media profiles, but it’s probably best to wait until you’ve completed the course. Take a step back and review what you’ve learned. Then develop a strategy.
One of my early mistakes was to create too many profiles. It became too time consuming to manage them all and to find content to share in each of them. So my first task was to consolidate them down to a more realistic number. Then, having developed a strategy and calendar, implement it and review the results on a monthly basis.
Outsource Your Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing requires planning. You have to consider your business goals and objectives, formulate a marketing plan that’s in line with them, put it in to practice, review the results, and adjust as necessary.
If you’re a business, one person or larger, this takes time and effort to learn and do. It’s one of those tasks that is often best outsourced to someone like me who can get on with it for you while you concentrate on what you do best. Contact me for more information and to discuss how we can use social media marketing to attract more leads and clients, build your brand, and help your business to grow.
