Course Curriculum

Social Media Marketing Strategies

9sections
34lectures
2h 35mtotal

What you’ll learn

  • Learn to understand your customer and prepare your social media presence

  • Content is critical! Build a content strategy utilizing valuable industry frameworks

  • Strategies for building a following, interacting with your customers and implementing advertising

  • Learn to focus on the data that matters to your unique goals; how to use the metric tools; and how to measure what is and what is not working

  • Define your target audience, select the best social media channels for you and decide on your tone of voice

  • Create your social media profiles, plan your content, create content your customers want and manage your content calendar

  • Successfully engage followers, effectively advertise to reach beyond your initial customer base

  • Use the right metrics and reports to evaluate and optimize your social media marketing

01

Course Introduction

2 lectures • 4min

  • Course Introduction

    Discover how to build a following, choose channels and tone, create profiles, publish content, and measure metrics to optimize your advertising budget.

    2:39

  • Instructor Introduction

    Meet your instructor, a digital marketing expert with Yahoo! experience, startup founder of Aptly, and UCLA adjunct professor, who brings real-world web analytics, advertising, and revenue optimization insights.

    1:40
02

Build Your Social Media Strategy Foundation

5 lectures • 19min

  • Introduction

    Define your target audience, select the right social channels, and establish your tone of voice to build the fundamentals of your social media marketing strategy.

    0:54

  • Course Workbook

    0:33

  • Planning for Social Media Marketing

    Plan a six-step social media marketing strategy by understanding your target audience, setting smart goals, selecting channels, creating consistent content, engaging followers, and evaluating insights to optimize growth.

    5:36

  • Defining Your Target Audience

    Define your target audience using demographics, interests, goals, barriers, and motivations; create a persona to guide social media marketing and messaging.

    7:00

  • Understanding Your Customer's Journey

    Understand your customer's journey across awareness, interest, desire, action, and advocacy, to deliver the right message at the right time and guide them toward purchase.

    4:50
03

Prepare Your Social Media Presence

3 lectures • 15min

  • Selecting Your Social Media Channels

    Identify the right social media channels for your business by reviewing major platforms and their categories. Understand audience demographics to tailor your strategy.

    4:54

  • Establishing Your Tone of Voice

    Define your brand's authentic tone of voice and ensure consistency by mapping four dimensions—funny or serious, formal or casual, respectful or irreverent, enthusiastic or matter-of-fact—and selecting 5–7 guiding adjectives.

    5:29

  • Create a Social Media Policy

    Develop a practical social media policy that empowers employees and protects the brand and legal risk. Outline responsibilities, conduct standards, and crisis response to turn staff into advocates.

    4:26
04

Create a Strong Social Media Profile

2 lectures • 10min

  • Participating vs. Marketing

    Engage in authentic conversations on social media rather than direct promotion. Identify and speak to your target audience, monitor brand conversations with social listening tools, and respond promptly and courteously.

    5:14

  • Creating Your Social Media Profiles

    Set up brand storefronts by creating social media profiles with a clear identity, profile picture, and call to action, and tailor background images and essential info per platform.

    4:47
05

Develop and Manage Content

5 lectures • 23min

  • It All Starts with Content

    Learn to participate in social media channels with audience-focused content across five categories—inspirational, entertaining, informational, promotional, and community building—and choose platform-specific formats like video, blogs, and infographics.

    5:50

  • Using the Hub and Spokes Model

    Adopt the hub and spokes model to structure content: own the hub on your website or blog, then distribute via select spokes and monitor conversations.

    3:13

  • Conducting a Content Audit

    Conduct a structured content audit to map existing assets across channels, identify gaps along the customer journey, and plan targeted content to move audiences from awareness to action.

    5:24

  • Repurposing Existing Content

    Repurpose one blog post into quotes, graphs, infographics, videos, and e-books to multiply your social media content across platforms.

    4:58

  • Developing a Content Calendar

    Create and manage a yearly social media calendar by identifying internal and external events, holidays, and industry moments. Plan topics by channels and schedule posts for consistent, high-quality content.

    3:39
06

Optimize Your Content

4 lectures • 23min

  • Create Content Your Customers Want

    Create educational, aspirational, entertaining, and beautiful content that aligns with what users seek on social media, teaching, inspiring, and showcasing your product with authentic, simple visuals.

    5:19

  • Create Shareable Content

    Identify six factors that boost shareability: social currency, triggers, emotion, public signaling, practical content, and storytelling, to enhance your social media strategy.

    6:31

  • Adapting Content to Your Social Channels

    Adapt your content for each social channel by applying platform-specific tips for quality visuals, concise captions, storytelling, trends, and engagement on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

    6:23

  • Tools for Content Creation

    discover affordable tools to create standout social posts on your smartphone, polish copy with Grammarly and Hemingway, and design images and videos with Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud Express.

    5:13
07

Establish and Manage a Following

3 lectures • 14min

  • Building a Following

    Grow your social media audience by starting small with friends and family, sharing links across your website, and using Berger's six shareability features with hashtags to build an authentic following.

    6:15

  • Interacting with Customers

    Master seven rules to confidently engage customers on social media within 24 hours—human responses; public complaint recognition; private resolution via DMs; and consistent, respectful brand tone.

    4:31

  • Use Insights to Build on Success

    Use social media data to gain insights on follower growth and post performance, then optimize reach and engagement by emulating successful posts and leveraging free insights.

    3:42
08

Create and Target Your Social Media Ads

5 lectures • 24min

  • Deciding When to Advertise

    Expand your reach beyond followers and target the right people at the right time with paid advertising, once you have built a core audience, using geographies, demographics, and interests.

    4:12

  • Establishing Your Advertising Goal

    Define your advertising objective by selecting from awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, and sales to guide your messaging through the five stages—awareness, interest, desired, action, advocacy.

    4:15

  • Creating Effective Social Media Ads

    Decide the ad goal along the customer journey, then craft a focused visual, concise copy, and a strong call to action with a matching landing page, then test and iterate.

    4:52

  • Targeting Your Social Media Ads

    Identify and reach your ideal audience using demographics, geographic, interest, behavior, and connections targeting on social platforms; then leverage custom and remarketing audiences to move prospects along the customer journey.

    5:07

  • Optimize Your Ads

    Learn how to set up and run split tests to optimize social media ads, evaluating ad creative, copy, targeting, and placement to identify winning variants and improve results.

    6:02
09

Measure What Matters in Social Media

5 lectures • 21min

  • The Metrics that Matter in Social Media

    Structure social media reports to monitor growth, assess post performance, and evaluate advertising results using reach, engagement, and cost per result metrics.

    5:22

  • The Right Metrics for the Right Goal

    Identify your goal and choose from three campaign types—awareness, engagement, and conversions—measuring reach, page visits, video views, leads, and sales with proper conversion tracking.

    6:01

  • Evaluating ROAS and ROI

    Learn to evaluate campaign profitability using ROAS and ROI by comparing revenue to advertising costs and total investment, and discover strategies to improve ad performance and profits.

    5:00

  • Optimizing Your Marketing Strategy

    Analyze marketing metrics to optimize campaigns by channel, compare content performance with likes, comments, and clicks on Twitter and Instagram, and use ROAS, AB test, to refine budgets.

    3:30

  • Conclusion

    Conclude your social media marketing journey by leveraging a practical blueprint to launch or accelerate campaigns, while staying current through newsletters, blogs, and ongoing learning.

    1:15