Social Media Marketing is a great digital marketing channel for growing your brand and engaging with your customers. While once people perceived this as a hobby, social media has become the focal point of internet users worldwide. It offers a number of opportunities for businesses to build and strengthen their brands online. Using social media you can promote your business, build your target audience, spread the word about your company’s upcoming events or product launches, increase your online visibility, start a dialogue with prospects, and drive traffic to your blog or website (or all of these things). But to make the best use of social media, it is important to learn about social media in depth. For this, the Social Media Marketing Professional credential can be quite useful.
Follow this blog below to learn about the important steps involved in learning all about Social Media Marketing. Here, we will go through all the information that you’ll require to excel in the field of Social Media Marketing.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is a head-first dive into the world of online communication. It is a great way to strengthen customer bonds and reap the best possible results from your current audience. Needless to say, a successful social media marketing campaign will improve your brand’s reputation. Also, it will increase its visibility among multiple target audiences.
Social media is more than just your cache of photos, videos, and status updates. It is more than an online community you visit to get more “likes” or fix the grammar on your latest tweet. Social media is a digital marketing platform that offers an opportunity for everyone to build their reputation and influence their audience.
Let us now look at what roles and responsibilities a social media marketer is expected to carry on during his job.
Social Media Marketing – Roles and Responsibilities
Together with the development of different social networks, a special type of service has been appearing lately – social media marketing. Its goal is to monitor each post, page, and group created on a specific platform for possible customers. If such a potential client is found, an advertisement will be displayed to attract their attention.
Social media is a rapidly-changing community where new skill sets are essential to succeed. As a social media marketer, you need to be able to leverage your knowledge of social networks, engage in conversations with your audience, develop and execute time-sensitive marketing campaigns, and track the effectiveness of your efforts.
Social Media Marketing requires having a solid foundation in understanding how social platforms operate. You need to be able to interact with your audiences, post timely updates, and monitor the effectiveness of your efforts. You’ll need to develop campaigns with clear goals in mind and then measure progress regularly. Social media marketing involves a lot of moving parts, but it’s essential for marketers looking to reach potential customers.
There are certain skills that any would-be social media marketer should master before setting your foot into this field. Let’s check them out, one by one, below.
Skills required to become Social Media Marketing Professional
Social media marketing is one of the most important Internet marketing skills to master in the current age. According to estimates by eMarketer, 2.45 billion people will be using Facebook by the end of 2014, making it necessary for stragglers to learn how to use it as a strategic business tool. And that’s just Facebook. In addition to that behemoth, there are 1 billion users on YouTube and about 400 million registered users on Twitter. And those are just the major platforms; there are other social media outlets such as Instagram, Pinterest, and even Snapchat.
If you’re considering a job in social media marketing, or you need to add these skills to your repertoire as a digital marketer, a certification will help prepare you for the challenge. Below are the important skills any would-be social media marketer should master before pursuing certification, along with advice on where to learn more.
Excellent Communication
To take the first step in the domain of social media, you need to develop strong communication skills. When done right, social media is an opportunity for businesses to connect with their customers and fans. However, companies that have botched campaigns can attest to the fact that it’s more challenging than it may seem at first glance.
Creativity
Social media marketing has now become an integral part of digital marketing. You should be continuously trying out new ideas, campaigns, and initiatives to expand your reach and connect with a larger segment of your target audience. It is not easy, but it will surely help you achieve your business goals faster.
Writing Ability
Words have the power to captivate, convert, and motivate. Although it’s necessary to think about images and videos when crafting your social media marketing content, it’s essential not to forget the importance of writing. Writing is the backbone of social media marketing and promotion. If you’re a beginner, it can be tricky to get the hang of it. But once you know the basics, you can begin creating marketing materials that will catch attention and convert leads.
Content Curation
Content curation is a skill that is currently in demand. It is the process of collecting, arranging, and sharing online content to draw traffic and increase exposure for your business. With regards to social media marketing, many experts believe that content curation can be used instead of creating original content and has become an important skill for digital strategists as they help their client companies generate a significant volume of leads and generate organic SEO value for their products.
Project Management
With all of the aforementioned responsibilities, social media marketers must be efficient with their time to ensure their hard work doesn’t go to waste. The best social media managers know where to spend their time: they always invest their time in meaningful conversations versus simply publishing content and building quantity. It’s difficult to stay in the loop of what is going on in your community when juggling multiple platforms. But the best social media manager is constantly monitoring activity and engaging with customers verbally. Also, he is making sure their content is optimized and published consistently (without publishing too little or too much).
Marketing
Social media is a tool and as a result, it does not require any specific education. However, social media does present some unique marketing challenges, such as communicating to a broader (and sometimes fickle) audience and creating more informal content. Social media is all about engagement and building relationships, which means social media marketing requires solid foundational marketing knowledge. To be a successful social media marketer you need to understand the basics of marketing like branding, packaging, positioning, and creating a value proposition.
Flexibility
Social media marketing is a very robust field where you need to make quick decisions and adapt on the fly. Sometimes you might not know what kind of content works or what tools you should use. There may be something major going on in your market that will affect the way you handle social media. All of these force you to keep reading, listening, testing, and learning until you get it right. Keeping agile is a must-have social media skill.
Strategic Thinking
Strategic thinking is essential for success in social media marketing. There are so many moving parts to a successful social media campaign, that you have to be able to keep a lot of information right at the forefront of your mind simultaneously. If you’re not a natural strategic thinker, don’t let that stop you. Like many other aspects of successful social media marketing, effective strategic thinking can be learned over time with the right training.
Relationship Building
Social media marketing is about relationship building. The most obvious target market for your business is the people who already follow you on social media, but gaining attention from new audiences can only happen when you get noticed by the influencers in your space. Social media marketers also need to reach out to influencers and that makes relationship building a crucial skill to develop.
Community Management
There’s no social media tactic that comes without getting to know your audience, building relationships, and connecting with those who matter most. Building an online following is not just about your website or social profiles. It’s about engaging in conversations with your industry peers and other community members. Social media marketing is about building connections and an online community. And that means you’re going to have to work.
Analytical Skills
You want to see if your content is resonating with your audience, and what type of content will be most effective. There are also lots of other factors to determine the success and effectiveness of your social media marketing. You need to analyze what you’re doing every step of the way, so it’s important to know how metrics and reporting work. Metrics and reporting are just part of the equation. Analytics is so much more than that.
Proper analytics will help you learn how to collect data from different sources and combine it into one reliable report. You don’t have to be a data scientist or know how to code to be analytical. But you do need to realize that numbers can tell you a lot more than just where you rank in the SERPs, what your engagement rate is, or what your bounce rate is.
These were the basic skills that’ll help you in building a foundation for developing Social Media Marketing skills. The next very important step towards learning social media marketing on a professional level is getting certified. So let us check out a certification that will help you get validation for your skills and also allow you to learn various aspects of this field in depth
Become Certified Social Media Marketing Professional
The Certified Social Media Marketing Professional certification is created to provide a socially, marketing, and technology savvy benchmark for online marketers with an emphasis on social media integration.
The Certification course is a unique program designed to test and validate your core competencies and knowledge as it pertains to social media marketing tactics and campaigns. The program consists of three core elements: an exam that will prove your proficiency, proctored exams, and an experiential learning track.
This course is designed to help students understand the major benefits of using social media, how businesses can use social networks to promote themselves and their products/services, and how students can apply social media to their own jobs.
Areas that you’ll learn in Social Media Marketing Professional course –
- Firstly, Social Media Basics
- Secondly, Case Studies on Social Media Usage
- Thirdly, Getting Started with Social Media
- And Lastly, Social Media Channels Overview
Best Books to learn about Social Media Marketing
Books can be a great resource tool as part of your preparation and learning. There is no substitute for hands-on experience. However, books can augment the knowledge you get from testing and help to bridge your gap between real-life experience and theory. Here is a list of books which we think are must-reads for working towards Social Media Marketing Professional –
- Firstly, Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding Using YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Blogging for SEO, Twitter, and Advertising
- Secondly, Social Media Marketing by Tracy L. Tuten and Michael R. Solomon
- Thirdly, Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach by Barker
Social Media Marketing Professional – Vskills Online Tutorial
Vskills Online Tutorials is a collection of tutorials that can help you in preparing for the certification exams. The tutorials cover various certifications, and it is an ideal set of tools to use in order to prepare for the exams. The extensive coverage provided by these tutorials will definitely be a valuable learning tool to have, and they are available completely free as well.
Free Practice Tests
Practice is the best way to judge your performance. By answering these sample papers and test series you will identify your weak and strong aspects in your study sessions. If you want to excel in competitive exams then do the practice. There are various websites where you can find free practice papers. It will help you a lot to overcome your weak areas. Try a free practice test now!
Market Demand
Social media skills are highly valued in the marketing world and today’s job market. 79 percent of recruiters use social networks to find talent. In addition, it is predicted that nearly $100 billion will be spent on social media advertising by 2021. What does this mean for you? A social media job is going to be one of the top digital marketing jobs in the near future!
Facebook and Twitter have shown themselves as powerful channels of communication, and their users – their effectiveness in the popularization of a product. This field is ever-growing and developing. There are numerous stories about how social networks have allowed small start-ups to improve their position in the market.
It’s a big world out there that we operate in, and it’s hard to cut through the noise and find which social media networks are the best fit for a business. Ideally, businesses would want to achieve organic growth of follower count that is targeted for their brand. They obviously don’t want to simply buy followers. It is because this is meaningless in the long run and can harm their brand as well. And here arises the tremendous demands for skills Social Media Marketing professionals who can take the businesses to greater heights.
Conclusion
It is an exciting time to be a social media marketer. As the world shifts towards more social channels, consumers are becoming more interactive and active on social media. Businesses need to find ways to connect with their consumers through these platforms, and that requires you, a social media marketer, to be able to leverage your knowledge of social networks, engage in conversations with your audience, develop and execute time-sensitive marketing campaigns, and track the effectiveness of your efforts.
