Social Media Marketing Courses Online

Social media typically refers to any website or application that helps us stay connected with other individuals and the various features they provide; we can update exclusive content and get daily news and additional information. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, are among the types of social media.

Over the years, with innovations in technology, various brands have emerged into the market. To stay ahead of the competition, more and more brands are harnessing the power of social media to boost their marketing strategies and interact with their target customers.

Social media marketing is using the popularity of social media to promote the products or services offered by a particular brand. Customers use social media like Facebook and Instagram daily. Therefore, using these platforms to connect/interact with the target audience and customers not only helps to increase visibility for your brand but also provides several other benefits like increasing sales and driving website traffic.

Social media marketing provides the brand owners with valuable information, which they use, to come up with new strategies for marketing as well as track the success rate of the existing ones. Depending on the social media used by your target audience, you can easily choose a plan that works best for your social media advertising.

2006 marked the beginning of social media, with Google acquiring YouTube, followed by Facebook and Twitter becoming popular platforms. Before this, there were a few other social media sites, but none had the same popularity as Facebook. They included LunarStorm, Flickr, and Photobucket.

YouTube grew exponentially in 2005. The company’s take over by Google took it to the new heights of success. Content creators, partnerships, and collaborations gave a new trend for business growth.

The facebook boasts of two million users and three billion user platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

In this age of competition, any brand must stay ahead of its competitors to survive. That is where social media marketing plays the most critical role. Here's why social media marketing is necessary

Helps Build Brand Awareness -

Brand awareness refers to how familiar consumers are with the products or services offered by a particular brand. A brand is successful when it has strong brand awareness in the mind of its target audience and customers. To achieve this goal, social media marketing is essential. To increase visibility, business owners need to post exclusive content on their social media handles for their target audience to know they exist. Interacting with the target audience with the help of various content marketing strategies is another crucial aspect that brand owners need to look into to turn potential customers into buyers.

Stay Head Of The Competition -

In this world of technology, the availability of information is no longer a problem. As social media websites like Facebook and Instagram have joined the bandwagon, information is now available much faster and easier. As a business owner, you must know how to use this to your advantage. Thoroughly scrutinizing and analyzing your competitors' social media advertising strategies can be effective. It is also essential to look for the posts by your competitor brands with the highest reach and how to implement the same in your existing marketing strategies. Studying the latest trends and comparing the customer service provided by your brand with that of your competitors is very important for a brand to stay ahead of its competitors.

Enabling Customer Satisfaction -

As a brand owner, it is essential to know what kind of effect your product or service has created in the mind of your target customer base. Therefore, having a social media presence where the customers can easily interact with your marketing team helps build a good brand image. With the help of social media profiles, customers can now directly reach out to the brands of their choice and even get automated replies. It creates a sense of importance in their minds and conveys that the brand values its customers.

The primary thing a brand needs to ensure running smoothly is to let its target audience know it exists. Thus, social media marketing helps a brand build visibility and widens its reach to a larger base audiencecost-effectivelyr. Once you have established your presence in your audience's mind, as a brand owner, you can create various new and exciting content to interact with the customers and thus create a positive image of your brand. Another advantage of having a social media account is that it shows authenticity. Gone are those days when customers choose a particular brand based on only the quality of the products or services offered. Instead, they want to know the brand's story, the people working behind it, and what more they could offer compared to the competitor brands. Social media marketing targets all these factors and paves the way for a direct interaction between the consumers and the brands.

Now that we have established what social media marketing is and why it is essential, let's look at the other benefits.
Increases Sales - As more and more visibility is created with social media presence, it becomes one of the factors behind turning your potential customers into buyers, which further leads to increased sales. Social media marketing also widens your reach to customers, making more people aware of your brand.

Helps To Tell Your Brand Story - A brand story refers to how your company came into being. It includes both the vision and mission statement of your brand. A brand story helps build a connection with the target customers and incites feelings of relatability, empathy, aspirations, ego, and emotional state in their minds. A brand that can create positive emotions in the minds of its audience is successful. With the help of social media, brand owners can now easily share their brand stories and get feedback on the products and services. Based on the quality of this feedback, they can then make the desired changes and thus increase customer satisfaction.

Increases Credibility - When you, as a brand owner, regularly share posts on your social media about your brand and reply to your customers, clearing all the doubts they might have about your product or service, it automatically increases your credibility among the consumers. Every day, hundreds and thousands of people use social media. They come across various such brands. Hence, it’s challenging to remain the number one choice in the consumers’ minds. However, once you have built a positive brand image among the audience, it becomes easier to retain brand loyalty.

Social Media Marketing Helps To Validate Your Brand - Brand awareness and brand recognition are two aspects of marketing that every brand thrives for. Having a compelling social media presence can help achieve both of these targets. With the help of social media optimization, you can reach a broader base of customers more efficiently and quickly. It can also lead to brand loyalty, where a customer develops positive feelings towards a brand and chooses the product or services offered over any other competitor brands.

Use Social Platforms To Directly Connect With Your Audience And Provide The Type Of Content They Want To See - If used correctly, social media can be one of the most efficient ways to interact with your audience directly, get their feedback, and get information about them. Based on the information, which includes their demographics, behavior, and likes and dislikes, you, as a marketer, can start to design your content to generate maximum engagement. Furthermore, social media optimization also helps brand owners identify the problems that their customers might face with their products or services and implement the necessary changes. Coming up with various types of fun contests can be a great way to boost brand awareness. This will take your brand to those who previously were unaware of your existence. Social media contests also help to increase engagement, as more people will like, share and follow your posts. If your posts are relevant to your audience, they might visit your page regularly to check for updates.

Social Media Marketing Is Cost-Effective - One of the greatest advantages of social media optimization is its cost-effectiveness. Almost anybody can set up their profile on social media platforms free of cost. Even if you opt for paid promotions, they are likely to be much lesser in amount than traditional marketing platforms. Thus, investing a small amount of money and time will guarantee bigger results and higher conversion rates among the audience.

There are a few other types of the social media marketing that marketers use daily to promote their businesses. These include,

1. Influencer Marketing

2. Advertising/sponsorship

3. Reviews

4. Paid Media

5. Content Marketing

For any brand to run successfully, it is essential to be unique. To do so, they need to look into the other forms of social media marketing, aside from the dominant ones like Facebook and Instagram.

So far, we have learned what social media marketing is, its importance, and the various types of social media advertising. Now, let's delve into the multiple factors you as a marketer need to consider to develop the best social media marketing strategy.

Why social media?

Before creating an account page on social media for your brand, the first question that needs to be answered is why you need to be present on social media and what goals you wish to achieve. You may want to drive more traffic, promote your product or service, or offer better customer service. Typically, an excellent social media strategy helps to boost brand awareness, gives a platform to interact with the target audience or consumer base, generates leads, and increases sales. Based on your business type, you can have one to multiple reasons for using social media for business. Once you have chalked out the reasons for using social media, you can move on to the next step.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Based on the type of service or product you are offering, narrowing down the vast customer base to a specific section of the target audience is very important. As the name suggests, the target audience is the consumers you want to target for your particular product or service. After selecting your target audience, you need to gather information like their age, demographic metrics, likes and dislikes, and even the time when they come online. Once you have chosen your target base, you can plan the required social media strategy and develop content that adheres to it.

Understanding the market

This is a crucial step, especially for startups aspiring to make their presence on social media. To understand the latest trends in the market, you need to do thorough research, followed by a scrutiny of the strategies used by your competitor brand. The customers continuously look out for 'what new a brand has to offer. So to fulfill this consumer demand, you need extensive research and then design your own social media strategy accordingly.

Which social media to use

A brand does not need to be present on every social media platform for it to be visible. Instead, after understanding your target audience's needs and behavior, you can automatically choose the platform that will work best for your brand. For example- if you are a brand that wants to target teenagers for your product or service, Instagram might be the best platform for you to use. Similarly, if you want to post more video content, Youtube would be a more plausible option for your business. Therefore, once you have identified your target audience and thoroughly scrutinized the market, you can set up your social media account.

When to post

Last but not least, once you have checked all the boxes for building a strong social media strategy, you need to come up with the right time for posting your content to reach the right customers. This can be achieved through experimentation or by understanding the behavioral pattern of your target customers.
Having fulfilled all these criteria, a marketer can develop an excellent social media strategy that will boost success while maintaining the brand image.

Researchers hint that Facebook, YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram are among the top major social media sites business owners use to operate their day-to-day business. Here's a list of the various demographics and advantages of these above-mentioned social media platforms.

Facebook - Launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has quickly made its way to being one of the most used social media platforms. As of 2022, Facebook has over 2.85 billion active users monthly from all over the world.

Various statistics reveal that the majority of the users of this particular platform, which comprise almost 56.4%, are males, falling under the age group of 25-34 years, while the rest, 43.6%, are females within the age group of 18-24 years. (Source)

India is one of the highest consumers of this platform, followed by the USA, Brazil, and Indonesia.

YouTube - YouTube, another popular video-sharing website, boasts 2.5 billion monthly users from all corners of the world. A large portion of users is from India, the USA, Brazil, and Indonesia. As much as 53.9% of the users of this platform are male, while the rest 46.1% are females, both falling under the age group of 25-34 years old.

TikTok - Tiktok is one of the most recent video-sharing platforms that was introduced in the year 2016. Within just six years, TikTok has more than 1 billion users monthly. Unlike the other platforms like Facebook and YouTube, the majority of the population using this platform, 61%, are females, while the rest, 39%, are males (Source). The USA, Indonesia, and Brazil are among the top three countries with the largest audience base on this platform.

Instagram - Introduced by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram started as a photo-sharing app in 2010. Later it introduced the features of video sharing and Instagram stories, which spiked quite rapidly. Instagram boasts of over 2 billion active users monthly. 51% of the audience using this platform are females, while the rest, 49.2%, are males.

Social Media Marketing is not just limited to increasing sales or visibility. It also involves other parameters that one must consider while building a proper social media marketing strategy.

Some of those parameters include -

• Reach

• Impressions

• Audience growth rate

• Engagement rate

• Amplification rate

• Cost-per-click (CPC)

• VideoViews

Social media channels, including Facebook and Instagram, provide marketers with various tools and features that, if used correctly, can bring in more engagement and revenues. Let's see how businesses can improve their social media marketing strategy.

Going Live - Live videos are one of those features provided by these social media platforms that have narrowed the gap between a brand and its customers. With the help of live videos, brand owners can now directly interact with their customers, get immediate feedback, and identify and rectify the problems that customers might face. Various reports hint that as much as 80% of the audience likes watching live videos of brands rather than reading their blogs (source).

Using Relevant Hashtags - Hashtags have proved to be one of the easiest and most affordable ways to improve a brand's visibility. However, while using a hashtag for any post, it is equally important to develop the most relevant or specific hashtag for the target audience. This demands extensive research and survey. Marketers can also use a mixture of both generic hashtags along with specific hashtags for more visibility and higher engagement.

User-Generated Content - User-generated refers to the reviews, social media posts, blogging, feedback, etc. from other customers of a particular brand. Incorporating this user-generated content into a social media strategy can be one of the most effective ways to increase a brand's credibility. Such content works as social proof, showing that the brand or business is trustworthy. Hence, more consumers are attracted to the said brand, increasing the likelihood of turning into buyers.

Marketers must monitor the strategy's effectiveness, whether it is working in favor of the brand, and if not, what are the key areas the brand needs to focus on. They must remember these pointers to understand the effectiveness of the social media marketing strategy.

Change in the number of followers -

If there has been an increase in the number of followers after implementing the social media marketing strategy, then it is a clear indication that the whole operation has been a success. It is essential to keep in mind that the number of followers on the social media sites of a particular brand reflects the total audience it has managed to capture, as well as the brand's reach among the target audience. Comparing the number of followers during the initial stage of the brand development to the most recent one can be one of the many ways to understand the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy.

Reactions to Posts -

Yet another way of understanding the impact of a social media marketing strategy is to monitor the responses to the posts on your social media accounts. Reactions include mentions, tags, likes, and comments. If more customers have mentioned your brand or tagged you in any post, it shows that your brand reach and visibility are soaring.

Video Views -

If your posts mainly consist of videos, you can look out for the number of views per video. A higher number of views means a larger audience. Simultaneously, you should also watch out for the number of people who have watched the particular video till the last. This helps to understand if the videos contain quality content that the customers can connect with.

With the increased competition in the market, more and more brands are switching to modern social media marketing strategies instead of traditional ones. For any marketer, it is vital to choose the best social media to generate the maximum benefit for their brand. The top 5 social media platforms for social media optimization are

1. Facebook: It caters to a wide range of target audience that offers various ways to share content on the platform.

2. Instagram: It focuses on engaging its users with high- level visual experience.

3. Twitter: The brands and the users can build engagement and relationships that increases the engagement.

4. Linkedin: It provides the direct access to the social media platforms. The users can effectively engage in professional networking.

5. Snapchat: It promotes real and authentic communication between friends.

Social media marketing's massive popularity is due to its' affordable nature and effectiveness in terms of reach and visibility. Therefore, more and more brands are using these platforms to share details or promote their product and service. If you are one of those brand owners looking for interesting ways to promote your product, the following techniques might help you a lot.

Organize Contests - One of the best ways to ensure that your product reaches your target customer without any form of paid advertisement is by organizing contests. This might include freebies, giveaways, or even any attractive prize. By organizing contests, you are drawing in more customers as well as retaining the loyalty of the existing ones.

Deals and Promo Codes - Deals and promo codes are another effective way of promoting your products on social media. You can customize the deals or the promo codes according to the needs of your target audience. For example, if it is the birthday of one of your customers, you can make them feel special by giving them special birthday discounts. This will help to build brand loyalty in the mind of the customers.

Partnership With Influencers and Bloggers - Another way to promote your product via social media is with the help of famous influencers and bloggers. By entering into a partnership with them, they can recommend the products to other customers, thus creating more engagement. It will, in turn, increase your brand's visibility among the audience members.

Engage in Visual Content - One of the most effective ways to promote any product using social media tools is with the help of visual content, which mainly includes images, and videos, among others. By adding creative and fun pictures to your posts, it will attract the customers more and, in turn, garner huge attention for your product as well.

There has been a constant ongoing debate regarding which format of learning is better, offline or online. Many people favor online social marketing courses since they provide many more benefits than offline social media marketing courses.

1. Greater Flexibility of Time And Place - With the help of online social media marketing courses, you can take the classes at any time according to your preferred location or time. This is especially beneficial for all the students and people with full-time employment.

2. You can Record Anything - If you feel you need to go through a specific topic again, you can easily do so by simply recording the entire class and watching it at your own pace.

3. Less Expensive - Unlike offline social media marketing courses, online courses are less expensive and affordable.

With the growth of social media marketing in today's world, many people are switching to this modern form of marketing and turning it into a full-time career. As a result, colleges and universities are also trying to include social media marketing courses in their syllabus.

Below is the overview of a social media marketing course's syllabus:

• Introduction To Social Media Marketing
• What is Social Media Marketing and What isn't
• How To Modify Social Media Marketing Campaign
• Research and Targeting
• Social Media Marketing Tools
• Automated Content Sharing
• Why Repurposed Content is Important
• How To Scale Your Targeting

1. Researchers hint that by the end of 2023, the digital media industry of India will grow by 29% and have a market share of Rs. 35,809 crore (Source). Social media marketing is one of the dominant factors in this vast growth of the Indian digital media industry. It alone consists of 29% of the digital sector and will remain so in the near future. On the other hand, traditional media witnessed a growth of only 12.6%.

As more and more business owners are looking for social media marketers, there has also been a soaring demand for social media marketing courses among the youth of today's world. Some of the best educational institutes in India are now including social media marketing courses in their syllabus.

Social media marketing is one of the rapidly emerging jobs in India and has a lot of room for growth in the Indian digital marketing industry. Reports suggest that the average annual salary for a social media marketing specialist in India is Rs 4.0 lakhs. Based on the candidate's experience, the compensation can also be negotiated accordingly.

A social media marketer's salary in India can range from 2.0 lakhs to 8.1 lakhs per annum (Source). There are various parameters on which this estimate depends. Some of them include

Work Experience - For those who have worked in social media optimization, the salary is automatically higher compared to a fresher. This means the greater the experience, the higher the pay.

Reputation - Yet another factor that can affect the salary of a social media marketing specialist is the individual's reputation in the digital marketing industry. A person who is well-known or has a good reputation in this field can automatically charge a higher amount than the average. Simultaneously, if you are new to this field, you can try to build a good reputation with meaningful blogs. Reputation is directly proportional to credibility. The more credible a person is as a social media marketing specialist, the more their salary.

Location - Location of work also plays a massive role in determining the pay of a social media marketing salary. Your salary will either increase or decrease based on the location of your work. For instance, a social media marketing specialist from Bangalore will have a higher salary than those working in Lucknow.

Performance - Unlike traditional media, everything in the parlance of the digital media industry is measurable. With the help of Key Performance Indicators, company owners can automatically detect the amount of profit an employee has been able to bring. Therefore, if you have delivered a profitable result for your company, it will automatically lead to a hike in your salary.

Qualifications - People with higher qualifications are likely to get a better package than those who have just started working in the field.

Region - The average salary of a social media marketing specialist differs from region to region. This indicates that a person living in Australia and working in this job profile is likely to get a higher amount than a person in the same profile, living in the Netherlands.
Experience - People with prior experience in social media optimization will receive a better salary than the freshers.

People applying for the social media marketing specialist role can expect up to an average salary of Rs. 2.0 lakhs per year, which breaks down into Rs. 20.8k monthly.

The top 5 countries that provide a relatively higher package to social media marketing specialists include Australia, the USA, Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Australia - $87, 418 annually

USA - $48,664 annually

Canada - $52,500 annually

Netherlands - €34,881annually

Factors influencing a social media marketing specialist's salary abroad, include -

Qualifications - People with higher qualifications are likely to get a better package than those who have just started working in the field.

Region - The average salary of a social media marketing specialist differs from region to region. This indicates that a person living in Australia and working in this job profile is likely to get a higher amount than a person in the same profile, living in the Netherlands.

Experience - People with prior experience in social media optimization will receive a better salary than the freshers.