Digital Marketing Skills: Social Media Management - Emir Al Kafadji

Digital Marketing Skills: Social Media Marketing

Digital Marketing, Resources / / By / 4 minutes of reading

If you’re thinking of working with digital marketing, you need to make sure that you develop the right skill-set and Social Media Marketing is one of the top skills you will need. If you’re just joining, make sure to check out the other parts of the series (links will be updated as the articles come out):

  1. Graphic Design
  2. Social Media Marketing
  3. E-Mail Marketing
  4. SMS Marketing
  5. Web Design
  6. Using CRMs (coming soon)
  7. Google Analytics (coming soon)

Social Media Marketing (Social Media Management)

Social Media Marketing is absolutely crucial if you want to have a successful digital marketing presence. The amount of people you are able to reach is like no other platform or channel. With good content that can potentially go “viral” and spread around the world, the opportunity on social media is limited only by your creativity and perseverance (it might take you some time to hit gold a.k.a. a viral post, but it will totally be worth it). Although most of the platforms have matured enough to make the reach much lower than a few years ago, it’s still a must. In my experience, if your business is not present on social media, it might as well not exist at all.

The data

In today’s world, social media is a part of life. It’s no longer something that only the young people use. Over 50% of people over 50 years of age reported that they use social media in the US. According to a research paper by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford done throughout 2013-2016, over 75% of people in the UK get their news online, out of which 40% is through social media.

What you need to know

When it comes to managing a social network, you need to make sure that you treat every platform differently. Consider the medium and how people consume it. For example, Twitter is mainly focused on a few short and simple sentences (the old character limit was 140 characters, which was increased to 280 characters last year), while Facebook does not limit you to such a small number of characters. Tumblr is a graphic-heavy platform. Snapchat is almost purely image and video-based, similar to Instagram. Pinterest is another graphic-heavy platform. LinkedIn on the other hand is a professional networking platform, so you would expect to target business-people, job seekers and companies. All of the platforms are unique and if you treat them the same, you will surely fail your campaign, or at least you won’t get the best ROI you can.

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Learning the demographics of each platform, how they deliver ads and in which format, what type of people would you expect to use that platform, when and where they would use it, how to format your content to be appropriate for social media, all of these things need to be taken into consideration

Where to learn

There is a plethora of online resources where you’ll be able to learn more about social media marketing. One of the best places to start, in my opinion is on the platform’s knowledge base itself. Most of these platforms have a lot of tutorials, videos, examples and even certificates you can obtain directly on their websites.

Other than the official sources, these are some great places to learn, see examples, best practices, and everything else you might need:

These are just a small fraction of the ways you can learn more about social media marketing, but I find the best way to learn is through running your own projects. Getting your hands dirty will sometimes get messy and you’ll make mistakes, but you will learn how the tools work, what works and what doesn’t work. The key is to always upgrade your skills, keep reading and keep experimenting. Make sure that you try out every feature that these platforms provide and you should be on a good path to knowing how to properly manage your social media pages.

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