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About Social Media Marketing
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing uses digital channels such as Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, X (formerly known as Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook to tell a story, build a brand, connect with an audience, and generate traffic. Billions of people use social media every single day. Figuring out how to use these platforms to reach a large number of people will help build your business. Social media marketing includes two types of strategies: unpaid and paid marketing. Unpaid marketing entails organically building a following by generating content that reaches and resonates with many people. Paid marketing involves paying outside organizations or individuals to help reach your target audience.
Regardless of your marketing strategies, leveraging social media networks for marketing, advertising, branding, and general communication is an effective tool to increase visibility. Social media marketing is an asset for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and even large companies. It combines social media’s reach with marketing techniques to connect with people and create campaigns that excite and engage them. To be a successful social media marketer, you’ll need to be familiar with each type of social media platform, voice, and tool.
Facebook Marketing
As the third most visited website on the planet, Facebook has billions of global daily users, so it makes sense that it’s a sought-after location for both paid and unpaid marketing. Facebook’s massive platform can help you reach your professional goals. Users voluntarily share demographic data such as life events, interests, age, profession, location, and relationship status with Facebook by using Facebook Ads. This makes it easy for social media marketers to build campaigns around this information to create targeted ads. Facebook also offers a variety of formats for advertising. Think about the various ads you’ve likely seen pop up on your own Facebook feed. There are video ads, text/image ads, collection ads, slideshow ads, and carousel ads. Facebook also offers a “boost” feature that allows you to make an ad from a previous post. Stories are another feature that allows you to connect with your audience. If you want to learn how to create and manage successful ad campaigns on Facebook, take a look at Noble Desktop’s Facebook Marketing class.
Instagram Marketing
Instagram is owned by Meta but has a different, more visual format, which can be an excellent way to build brand awareness, find customers, showcase your product or portfolio, and give followers access to buy your products. Instagram has become a global platform where both brands and people can interact with friends, celebrities, influencers, and potential customers. Those looking to expand their brand’s scope using Instagram can check out the Instagram Marketing class offered by Noble Desktop. Like Facebook, Instagram also has billions of daily users, which makes it ideal for those wanting considerable product reach. You can create compelling content to grab followers’ attention on Instagram using photos, text-based images, videos, stories, reels, IGTV, and even regrams.
Another popular Instagram marketing tool is user-generated content (UGC), which is a way to create trust and promote authenticity within your brand, sharing how other people use and engage with your products often feels more organic than a targeted advertisement or carefully curated content. Working with aspiring and professional influencers, social media marketers can use Instagram to create an authentic brand experience and reach audiences who might be warier of targeted advertising efforts. In a social media marketing course, you’ll learn how to take advantage of this platform aspect without causing rifts between yourself and other content producers.
LinkedIn Marketing
LinkedIn is a powerful online networking tool. Because it’s already set up to be a place where companies and professionals intersect, LinkedIn is a natural choice for business-based social media marketing. Noble Desktop’s Social Media Marketing: Business & LinkedIn course provides crucial insights for those who want to leverage LinkedIn for building a business. Using LinkedIn as a social media marketing tool can help with building professional credibility, networking, and generating leads. Since 660 million professionals use LinkedIn, there is already a built-in base of possibility for new followers and a chance to make connections, both personal and professional. LinkedIn also offers campaign manager tools for those looking to create and manage ad campaigns.
X Marketing
The conversation on X matters for both individuals and brands. Driving results 280 characters at a time, X has become a fun, thoughtful way to interact online. X is essentially millions of people having a conversation through text, and these conversations can create trends, increase downloads, make change, and drive sales. Trending on X can lead to results and upticks on other platforms as well. Writing quality text-based content is what X is all about. Individuals who want to learn the fundamentals of content marketing, how to set goals and metrics, and how to establish a brand through written content in addition to other marketing strategies specifically for X can enroll in Noble Desktop’s Social Media Content Marketing: Blogs & X course.
TikTok & YouTube Marketing
Video content is one of human beings' favorite ways to engage. YouTube has been around since 2005 (and who hasn’t accidentally spent an hour or more watching cute baby animals or earwax extractions?), but now it’s grown into more than just a place to watch silly or over-the-top videos. As of 2023, it is the second most visited website (and the most frequently visited non-search engine website). It has now become something social media marketers can use to leverage brands and campaigns. There are two major ways to do this: branded content and YouTube ads. It is easy enough to pay for pre-roll advertising, but savvy social media marketers understand how to utilize paid video content. The most effective way to advertise on YouTube is to work directly with content producers to sponsor video content that synergizes with your business or product. Learning how to work alongside content creators and optimize your sponsored content is a great way to expand your social media marketing footprint.
TikTok is relatively new to the social media scene and continues to grow more popular by the day. Because of its prevalence and number of users, businesses and brands of all sizes have turned to TikTok as a way to engage younger users and employ organic, user-generated, and paid campaigns. As TikTok continues its meteoric rise, understanding how it works is a crucial skill to have when embarking on a career in social media marketing. Taking Noble Desktop’s Social Media Marketing: TikTok & YouTube course can help you learn how to navigate both platforms and figure out how to use them to amplify your digital marketing strategy.
Why Learn Social Media Marketing?
Although social media marketing may be a relatively new frontier, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. The internet, and especially social media platforms, continue to grow at an astounding rate. With seven in ten people using social media every day, these platforms provide businesses the chance to engage with existing and potential customers, help build their brands, and generate leads. Whether you’re an entrepreneur trying to amplify a new business or a well-known brand looking to increase traffic and sales, social media marketing can work for you. Since the field continues to evolve, it’s important to stay on trend and know what’s happening across the industry.
Hootsuite’s Digital 2021 Report states that 90% of brands want to build brand awareness through social media, 77% of them use it to maintain brand reputation, and 71% of them use it for building and managing an engaged community. These recent statistics confirm that mastering social media marketing and understanding how different social media platforms work is a sought-after skill set. Because of how intertwined we have become with social media, the future of marketing relies on social media. Social media marketing is a smart and lucrative career choice for current marketers who want to switch gears or even those with no marketing experience looking for something new.
Social Media Marketing Careers
Billions of people around the world spend some amount of time on at least one social media platform every day. Because of this incredible reach and possibility for organic and paid marketing, those who have skills in the field are in high demand. Knowing the ins and outs of the industry, as well as knowing your way around the various platforms, can lead to jobs in digital marketing or social media marketing. Social Media Marketers can work in-house for a large company or on their own, often contracting their services out to companies large and small. Because all you need is a computer or even a phone to do this work, the career path offers flexibility as well. If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner doing the work on your own, these tools can be used to your advantage to build a business.
Based on salary rankings from Glassdoor and recent job postings from Indeed, there are a variety of paths that those working in social media marketing can take within the field. Though these salaries can vary depending on location, the amounts provide a framework of average salaries nationwide. Social Media Strategists design social media plans that might include drafting posts and creating text, graphics, and video content to achieve a client’s marketing targets. Social Media Strategists earn around $57,000 a year. Marketing Analysts can expect to earn a bit more, pulling in about $66,000 annually. These professionals bring marketing expertise and provide analytical support, helping with strategizing, finding the right audiences, performing competitive analyses, and optimizing channels.
Those with a background in online marketing and strategy can find a career as a Digital Strategist, earning around $65,000 a year. Digital Strategists work on digitally rich projects like websites, social media, SEO content, and digital marketing. They identify opportunities for growth and help clients with website creation, branded content, and advertising campaigns. If you’ve had past experience leading a group of marketing professionals, look for a job as a Marketing Manager and bring home around $71,000. Marketing Managers oversee teams that find ways to grow business, execute growth ideas through campaigns, and analyze and report on those campaigns.
How to Get Started in Social Media Marketing
If you’ve figured out that you want to create a career using social media skills, the next step is to work on sharpening them. One of the best ways to learn digital marketing with an emphasis on social media is by enrolling in a class, bootcamp, or certificate program. Both face-to-face and live online classes provide valuable hands-on learning opportunities. You’ll have the chance to learn from experienced digital marketers and collaborate with other students interested in pursuing a career in social media marketing. Those attending a class online can learn skills for a new career without even leaving their home or office. Taking a course is an affordable and flexible way to jump-start a career in social media marketing.
Noble Desktop has been at the forefront of both in-person and online tech education for over three decades and offers all kinds of social media marketing classes for first-timers or experienced marketers who want to upskill. Noble’s Social Media Marketing Certificate is a comprehensive program that focuses on marketing strategies across a variety of platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, and YouTube. Students will learn how to create successful ad campaigns, both paid and unpaid, on various platforms. The certificate program also teaches how to identify and market to your target audience, convert leads, and develop business-based social media strategies. It will also walk students through video-based marketing and teach them how to master X marketing. Designed for beginners, anyone taking this certificate program will come away with a foundational knowledge of the major platforms and how to leverage them to meet professional goals.
Noble Desktop also offers an intensive Digital Marketing Certificate. This program digs into understanding the role of digital marketing in today’s business landscape. Participants in this comprehensive certificate program will study how to create a successful digital marketing strategy and create the kind of content that will engage your audience and drive traffic to your site. The Digital Marketing Certificate covers everything in the Social Media Marketing Certificate and also teaches search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, Google Ads, and Google Analytics. This 78-hour bootcamp is taught by a top digital marketing expert, and students will have plenty of chances to ask questions as well as collaborate on real-world projects with other students.
Why Learn Social Media Marketing at Noble?
Look to Noble Desktop for help jumpstarting your career in social media marketing or upskilling by learning about the ins and outs of a specific platform. With classes specializing in Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, and YouTube marketing, Noble has all kinds of courses, bootcamps, and certificate programs from full-time options to more flexible ones for those working or in school full-time. After taking a class, if you decide to continue with your social media marketing education, you can apply the individual courses you took to a more rigorous certification program in the future.
Affordable, comprehensive, and skills-focused, Noble Desktop’s social media marketing classes are a must for anyone thinking of embarking on a career in the industry. Each class comes with a custom workbook to keep after completing the course, the chance to collaborate with other students, and even free retakes. Additionally, in many classes, Noble provides opportunities for students to have one-on-one coaching sessions with expert instructors. Each of these social media marketing courses is offered virtually, and if you’re in New York City, you can select a face-to-face learning experience. Whether you’re looking to change careers to keep up with current trends or you need to brush up on some new skills, Noble Desktop offers a class that will help you reach your personal and professional goals.
4 Reasons to Use Social Media Marketing
Improve Brand Loyalty
Using social media and posting relevant content can keep your customers engaged with your brand and sharing your content with their audiences. Think about some of the great business accounts you follow on social media. They post helpful, relevant, or funny content that keeps you engaged with their brand. They grow a following organically and build trust with potential customers. Whatever product they are selling or new offerings they have will be much more well-received by their following.
Consumers will eventually stop thinking about your advertising presence as some intrusive force, making them more likely to provide you with free second-hand advertising through the same social media platforms. This can further increase the reach of your online presence, particularly if that second-hand advertising isn’t imagined as something like product placement. This is especially useful if you can attract content creators or other notable users to your side, since their reach can further expand your own reach.
Generate Engagement
Post updates about your business, useful information, or something funny related to your business to keep customers engaged. Always deliver engaging and useful content in whatever way you can. You can get creative about how you engage your audience and find your niche. For example, if you sell nuts online, you could offer valuable content about health and fitness or test out other strategies to see what works best.
By using social media platforms, you can keep your audience returning to your social media accounts day in and day out, maintaining consumers' attention on your product and making it easier for you to direct them to other advertising efforts. They may even share some of the content they are engaging with elsewhere, further expanding the reach of your social media marketing campaign (consider how much free advertising is generated by users mass-sharing a viral tweet, for example).
Prospect New Customers
Social media marketing can be used to prospect new customers with various paid social strategies. You can find potential customers who might be interested in your brand using various targeting features. Social media marketing is one of the most commonly used prospecting strategies these days, and for a good reason. Think about the last time you were scrolling on Facebook or Instagram and saw a cool ad for a new product you had never even heard of. These prospecting strategies can be a great way to reach a large audience and generate buzz at a relatively low cost. Draw new prospects in with creative and engaging ads, and make sure to use targeted strategies to find the prospects most likely to engage with what you’re offering.
Target audiences similar to your existing customers with lookalike audiences or target your competition to bring in new customers. Audience strategy is key to running efficient and effective campaigns on social media. Say you are launching a new healthy snack product targeted toward highly active people. You’ll want to target those highly active people through various targeting methods. You can target by age and location, but more importantly, you can target by interests. You can find people who like health and fitness, running, CrossFit, or any other form of exercise. As you build up your data, you can further segment and target and tailor your ad content toward specific sub-segments.
Drive Sales
You can use both organic and paid social media marketing to drive sales for your business. Posting new products or offers to existing customers (organically) or to new prospects can help drive buzz and revenue for your business. That is why building a good following or knowing how to do paid social marketing is critical. When you have a new product, you can leverage these skills to drive interest and sales for the product. You can promote an existing product by offering a discount or bundling offerings and pushing it out there with social media.
Run promotions or feature your various products in an ad to drive new revenue. There is so much content out there, and it can be hard to stand out. Discounts, limited-time offers, and other promotions are a great way to get people’s attention and drive sales. While these are effective, you can also get creative with the way you promote your products so you don’t always have to drive your price down. Leverage influencer marketing, collaborations, social impact campaigns, and other creative strategies to drive interest and sales with social media.
