A 2018 survey by Buffer found that only 29% of businesses have effective social media marketing plans.
A recent consumer survey by Tomoson found that:
92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people more than brand content.
70% consider consumer reviews the second most trusted source of information.
47% read blogs written by influencers and experts to discover new trends and ideas.
35% used blogs to discover new products and services.
20% of women who used social media considered products recommended by bloggers they knew.
Today, businesses and consumers use social media to make purchasing decisions.
About the series
Created in 2014, this series is updated quarterly to ensure you receive the most up-to-date training.
The Social Media Marketing course series is designed to achieve two goals:
Provide you with the tools and training for social analytics, to help you become a social media influencer.
To provide you with the knowledge and resources to build a social media marketing strategy that includes consumer understandings and end-to-end metrics.
In each course you will also receive special toolkits with up-to-date information.
When you pay for the final course, you will receive a marketing planning kit.
Each of the individual courses can be taken for free.
Course List
1- What is social media?
2- The importance of listening
3- Customer acquisition and growth strategies
4- Content, advertising and integrated social media marketing
5- The business of social media
Details of the courses that make up the specialization
What is social marketing?
Course 1 • 7 hours • 4.6 (4,154 ratings)
Course Details
What will you learn in the MOOC course “What is Social Marketing?” Suitable for business owners, managers, and marketing professionals who are interested in significantly improving their ability to develop social marketing strategies using effective and proven methodologies.
This program, designed for practice, will not only explain how to develop your professional image in social marketing, but will also make you do it in practice!
This course is the first of six in the Social Media Marketing Specialization Course: How to Profit in the Digital World.
Although the course can be listened to for free, paid participants will receive additional content beyond the course basics.
For MOOC 1, your set includes a special video from Alessandro Acquisti on data science and a set of studies conducted by IBM on engagement strategies and social marketing and profits.
This course is designed to give you the tools, insights, knowledge, and skills that will immediately impact your organization.
In addition, we will help you connect with opinion leaders in the field of social marketing.
After completing this course, you and your organization’s team will be able to locate, engage, and build relationships with your most valuable consumers.
What you will learn in the second course in the Social Marketing specialization – “The Importance of Listening” – You will delve deeper into the data science of social marketing and gain a more complete picture of what can be learned from interactions on social sites.
You’d be surprised how much information can be extracted from a single post, image, or video.
In this course, guest speakers from Social Gist, BroadReader, Lexalytics, Semantria, Radian6, and IBM Analytics will guide you through the variety of tools and analysis options available to you and how to maximize their use.
The best part is, many of them will be available to you through the MOOC for free!
Those who purchase the MOOC will receive special tools, templates, and videos to enhance your learning experience.
By the end of the course, you will gain a deeper understanding of data and be able to improve your content strategy by making better decisions and identifying crises before they happen!
Bonus content in MOOC 2 includes access to Semantria’s analytics system to extract and analyze data on emerging markets.
As students in this course, you will be given the opportunity to access a free trial of IBM Bluemix® for six months.
Note: By enrolling in the course, you will be given access to IBM’s Bluemix technology for one month for free as well as the Semantria system.
For those who receive a course certificate, you will receive an additional five months of Bluemix and three months of Semantria at no cost with a special code.
Additional lecturers in MOOC 2 include:
Steve Dodd (SVP of Business Development, Effyis)
Seth Radmore (CMO, Lexalytics)
Chris Grover (Social Media Analytics Solutions Architect, IBM)
Russell Birdol (Cloud Architect, IBM)
Tom Collinger (CEO of Spiegel Research Center and Distance Learning Executives, Medill)
Tracy Lieberman (VP of Digital Innovation, Taco Bell)
Skills you will learn:
Social marketing
Social media marketing
Social media
Influencer Marketing
Engagement and nurturing strategies
Marketing engagement and nurturing strategies
Course 3 • 8 hours • 4.8 (1,175 ratings)
Course Details
What you will learn in the third course in the Social Marketing specialization – “Engagement and Cultivation Strategies” – You will learn two of the most effective social strategies used by organizations today.
You will see real-life examples and learn what metrics they use to assess success.
You will also learn about the importance of infographics and how a well-designed landing page can impact business results.
All the social skills you’ve learned so far will come into play with a multimedia blog you’ll create to demonstrate how social marketing can enable real-time marketing results.
After this brainstorming, you will have a plan to reach your consumer markets and know when to use or avoid certain social marketing strategies.
Additional lecturers in MOOC 3 include:
Randy Krum (Data Visualization and Infographic Designer)
Stanford Smith (CEO, Pushing Social)
Andy Krastodina (Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Orbit Media Studios)
Alan Valentine (Veteran Marketing Leader, Silverpop, IBM)
Skills you will learn:
Social media marketing
Social media
budget
planning
Integrated content, advertising and marketing
Course 4 • 8 hours • 4.7 (1,091 ratings)
Course Details
What You’ll Learn Want your content to go viral? Who doesn’t! It takes a thoughtful and integrated approach to create content that stands out in a crowded world.
In the fourth course of the Social Marketing specialization – “Content, Advertising, and Integrated Marketing” – you will learn how marketers successfully navigate today’s communications field.
You will learn why developing engaging content for your audience is an essential component of effective social marketing.
A panel of experts will solve the conundrum of paid/owned/affiliated media and replace it with an integrated who/what/where approach that leverages platform-dependent messaging to increase market share.
This course also includes an overview of an integrated social media marketing strategy and how it is designed to be implemented globally, including tips for gamification to keep audiences engaged.
Additionally, you will learn the secrets to advertising on Facebook and other social sites.
What you’ll learn In a 2014 survey of CEOs and CMOs, IBM found that 63% of them want social marketing strategies that generate transactional metrics, while only 20% of businesses worldwide have them.
This means strategies that not only increase your company’s social presence but also link it with your marketing and sales systems.
With this critical link, your social and lead generation strategies will allow you to reach consumers on a personal level and measure your social investments in terms of costs, revenue, profits, and return on investment.
In the fifth course of the Social Marketing specialization – “The Business of Social Marketing” – you will learn how to transform your organization’s social marketing from an unmonitored investment to an integral part of your company’s marketing strategy.
You will also learn about the legal considerations involved, as well as the proven performance metrics and management tactics for success.
Additional lecturers in MOOC 5 include:
Rich Gordon (Professor and Director of Digital Innovation, Medill, Northwestern)
Tom Collinger (CEO of Spiegel Research Center and CEO of Distance Learning, Medil)
Seth Radmore (CMO, Lexalytics, Inc.)
Jeff Dudoff (CMO, Donuts.Domains)
Matt Carroll (Business Unit CEO, IBM Security)
Frank Mulhern (Social Dean, Department Chair, and Professor, Integrated Marketing, Northwestern)
Skills you will learn:
Social marketing
Social networks
Social media marketing
Social media
Final project in social marketing
Course 6 • 5 hours • 4.9 (335 ratings)
Course Details
What you will learn: Your markets are on social media and you need to be there.
At the same time, your social strategy should be based on the engagement metrics that define your success.
The final project in the Social Marketing specialization will examine the methodologies, tools, and insights you have learned in order to create a multi-dimensional plan to ensure that effective social marketing is an integral part of your business strategy.
Whether your company has an advanced engagement strategy or you’re a new startup, you’ll learn to harness the power of social marketing to increase proven market share and build stronger relationships with your high-value markets.
To succeed in today’s digital world, you absolutely must have a plan for integrating social and lead generation marketing strategies into your business strategy.
In this project, you will use the practical skills you gained during your internship to demonstrate your ability to integrate social and lead marketing strategies into the company’s business strategy.
Schedule for the 2016 final project:
The first meeting begins on February 29 (29/02/16).
It will be held again on May 23 (23/05/16), August 29 (29/08/16), and November 28 (28/11/16).
