Social Media Strategist

define social media and outline types of sites, trace the evolution and growth of social media, and summarize benefits, career opportunities, the strategist role, certifications, and strategic operations stages.

Define social media as electronic communication platforms including websites where users form online communities and relationships and share content such as messages, ideas, news, images, and videos.

Explore the main types of social media in business contexts: blogs, micro blogs, image sharing, social networks, social bookmarking, geo location sites, video sharing, podcasts, social news, and knowledge sites.

Explore how marketing evolved from local, traditional methods to true digital and social media marketing, leveraging blogs, personalized advertising, and a global, interconnected audience.

Expand your organization's presence by posting news, articles, images, and videos across social media to drive traffic to your website. Build your reputation as a thought leader by sharing insights.

Leverage social media to conduct market research, listen to audience opinions, analyze competitors, and tailor targeted marketing campaigns to increase engagement, reach new audiences, and win customers.

Build brand awareness and advocacy by expanding your online presence, driving traffic to your site, and boosting search engine indexing through valuable posts and positive peer feedback.

Improve customer support and relationship management with easy access to 24/7 technical help on social media, enabling quick issue escalation and engaging employees through connected involvement.

Explore the growth of social media, user engagement, and why businesses can't ignore it due to low entry cost, ease of use, and the desire to share and connect.

Social media growth creates career opportunities across tweeting, Facebook management, campaigns, blogs, and videos. Budgets for social media marketing are projected to double in five years, signaling demand for jobseekers.

The social media strategist tracks trends and keeps a pulse on online technologies. They create policies, develop strategies, train teams, coordinate campaigns with editorial calendars and key performance indicators.

Explore platform- and vendor-neutral social media certifications, including the National Institute for Social Media's social media strategist certification, emphasizing fundamental training and practical experience to pass the exam.

Conduct market analysis of your social presence and competitors to guide a strategic plan with KPIs. Develop, implement, and analyze content, campaigns, and community engagement across channels.

Explore the rise and definition of social media, its types, and the evolution of marketing, plus benefits, career opportunities, the social media strategist role, and certifications.

Assess organizational readiness and analyze market segments, targeting strategy, positioning strategy, and social media competitors to guide a data-driven market analysis.

Conduct a readiness assessment to evaluate internal capacity for social media, including current use, team skills, resources, and leadership support, then identify the target audience.

Apply STPI analysis to segmentation, targeting, and positioning: segment your market, select target audiences, define a value proposition, and develop a suitable marketing mix.

Segmentation groups people by similarities to enable targeted marketing. Use behaviors, demographics, geography, psychographics, and media usage to narrow audiences, for example female Diet Coke drinkers with Facebook accounts.

Use a segmentation chart to visualize market targets for social media, mapping food service firms, manufacturers, and supermarkets to restaurants, pizza stores, franchises, and independent stores.

Identify target groups after segmentation by choosing among three strategies: undifferentiated, concentrated, or multisegment, and tailor marketing approaches to each segment.

Explore social media targeting strategies—undifferentiated, concentrated, and multi-use segment plans—and learn how to decide which audience to target based on value proposition and resources.

Position your product by crafting a value proposition that resonates with your target market segment. Evaluate perception, competitors, pricing, and brand loyalty to refine your positioning strategy.

Apply a perceptual map in the analysis phase to plot your product on key dimensions, revealing current perception and guiding how you market or reposition for your target segment.

Apply STPI analysis of competitors to understand their market and product moves by examining corporate blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and interactions across all social media platforms.

Analyze competitor online information to beat them on social media by examining keywords, content trends, and viral posts, plus personas, tone, sentiment, and product positioning.

Master market analysis by assessing organizational readiness, analyzing online market segments, crafting targeting and positioning strategies, and evaluating competitors in social media.

Audit social media in the market analysis phase by reviewing channels and metrics, while adding social media elements in lesson three.

Identify and evaluate your organization's current social media activity through auditing and social listening, document findings in a spreadsheet for trend analysis, and identify areas of success and improvement.

Explore social listening tools for large operations, including Google alerts, Google trends, Social Mention, Topsy, and Trends Map to monitor topics globally or by region.

Explore social listening tools to monitor trends and brand conversations using Google Trends and Trends Map. Compare topics over time to spot spikes and plan data-driven marketing.

Audit your organization's Facebook and Twitter presence by tracking activity-based metrics (posts, comments, likes) and results-based metrics (leads and sales) to establish baselines for future campaigns.

Explore grading tools such as marketing grader from Hubspot, nibbler, and wew rank. Analyze metrics, establish baselines, and assess consistency, keywords, audience engagement, and cross-channel shareability.

Demo of the Nibbler grading tool analyzes Red Cross dot org, highlighting metrics on usability and general experience, marketing, popularity, and improvement priorities across Google Plus, Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.

Learn to audit your organization’s social media presence by measuring influence, sentiment, and volume to assess audience size, how they feel, and the buzz around your posts.

Apply sentiment analysis to measure brand attitudes using positive, negative, and neutral polarities, shown by a chart of 142k December 2010 posts, highlighting a mix of positive and negative comments.

Decide how to conduct sentiment analyses in your organization, weighing manual tracking against using free tools like social mention and twangs up and paid services with dashboards that auto-index polarity.

Explore how sentiment analysis evolved from document-level to entity-level, revealing mixed emotions within articles—positive for environmental concerns but negative for pricing.

Audit unsolicited feedback across all channels, including Yelp, Google Places, industry forums, and Amazon reviews. Integrate this feedback into your baseline to influence future social media plans.

Audit social media by using social listening tools to track platform performance, employ grading tools, and conduct social media sentiment analysis, while learning analysis tools to handle unsolicited feedback.

Set goals and select platforms as you enter the strategic planning phase of social media campaigns.

Explore how corporate culture shapes social media success, highlighting customer-centric cultures, leadership buy-in, budgeting, and skilled staffing to drive long-term, goal-driven social media initiatives.

Explore five barriers to social media adoption—resistance to change, sensitivity to costs, fear of damaging content, fear of sensitive information exposure, and fear of web attacks and malware.

Overcome resistance to change by reframing social media as essential to business practice, illustrating that customers, competitors, and the next generation expect a voice even if the organization refuses.

Assess how cost sensitivity impedes large organizations from building strong social media presence. Pilot a high-ROI, budget-aware initiative to prove value and secure future funding.

Address the fear of damaging content by building a voice on social media that responds to concerns and demonstrates that you apologize and fix issues proactively in a one-on-one way.

Train social media staff to prevent sensitive information exposure; appoint a release manager; implement a privacy and information policies–aware, legally informed response plan to minimize risk.

Address the fear of web attacks in social media by implementing firewalls, strong passwords, backups, staff training, and prepared responses. You can't guarantee safety, but you can mitigate risks.

Align your social media goals with the organization's mission, vision, and long term and short term goals. Assess department goals and momentum to ensure social media strategies drive business objectives.

Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to concrete company goals, such as increasing blog posts or followers. Write them down, align with goals, and motivate the team.

Define clear, measurable goals using the SMART framework—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound—to align with organizational aims and set deadlines.

Learn to convert vague social media goals into smart targets on Twitter by defining specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound KPIs that boost followers and conversions.

Align goals and KPIs with the right platforms by selecting entertainment via video on YouTube and information distribution via a blog, ensuring platform choices fit each goal.

Identify platforms that align with your social media goals, determine content types, and assess demographics to select the best channel. Adapt strategy continually as goals and content evolve.

Explore the main categories of social media platforms, including blogs, image sharing sites, geo location services, micro blogs, and podcasting sites.

Explore the types of social media platforms, including social bookmarking sites, networks, news and knowledge sites, and video sharing sites, and how they offer exposure and content advantages.

Prioritize platforms by current popularity; Facebook leads at about 60% usage, YouTube around 20%, with Google Plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn well below 5%.

Evaluate platform choice by popularity and hard user numbers, as of December 2014. WordPress dominates blogging, Twitter dominates microblogging, Instagram dominates image sharing, and YouTube dominates video sharing.

Apply goal-based platform selection by rating platforms on five points across goals like traffic, communication, and brand exposure, using a grid with Digg and LinkedIn as examples.

Select platforms using content-based criteria that match your content, imagery needs, in-house skills, and YouTube's audio-visual requirements, then assess costs and update frequency to meet goals.

Be an active social media user to tailor content to each platform's audience, understanding videos on Google Plus and Pinterest, links on Twitter, and Pinterest's graphical focus with infographics.

Target audiences by demographics to select platforms, considering age, gender, education, income, and race; for example, choose Instagram over Facebook to reach a larger Hispanic user base.

Set clear social media goals and choose platforms aligned with business objectives, and identify adoption barriers. Map smart goals to social platforms and measure progress with KPIs, reflecting corporate cultures.

Develop a social media policy by outlining disclosure best practices, truth in advertising, online endorsements and testimonials, and defining intellectual property, brand abuse, privacy, and defamation.

Explore common social media legal terms and situations that can lead to litigation. Recognize that this overview is not legal advice; consult a lawyer with social media experience for guidance.

Define a clear, written social media policy that guides employees, vendors, and brand representatives on acceptable use, confidentiality, ethics, and blogging, safeguards legal risks, and demonstrates mitigation through monitored responses.

Explore contexts where social media policies matter, including employee or competitor influence on reviews, disclosure of affiliations, and brand protection across forums and blogs.

Explore how to build a compliant social media policy with a checklist toolkit from social media.org, covering disclosure and truthfulness, monitoring conversations, correcting misstatements, and training programs.

Explore social media dot org's best practices toolkit and open-source checklists to shape your organization's social media policy, from disclosure of identity to personal participation and advocacy programs.

Explore truth in advertising under the FTC, focusing on truthful endorsements, disclosure of expected results when proof is lacking, and disclosure of any relationship between endorsers and marketers.

Develop an online endorsements and testimonials policy requiring employee identification, regular audits of posts and comments, and an umbrella policy disclosing material relationships to ensure truth in advertising.

Understand intellectual property and the laws protecting creative works, inventions, and marks. Learn how copyrights, patents, and trademarks safeguard creators and how registration provides verifiable records in social media.

Educate your team on copyright law and legally use protected content on social media by buying rights or licensing, while considering fair use limits and platform usage policies.

Explore how to legally use online content by licensing stock photos, understanding standard and extended licenses, and using sharing tools and Creative Commons to avoid copyright issues.

Explore how Creative Commons licenses empower content creators to share works freely by applying attribution, specifying use and modification, and setting noncommercial terms.

Explore visual indicators of Creative Commons licensing, including circle with a person inside signaling attribution, and learn spectrum of licenses—narrow to broad, all free to use by a nonprofit organization.

Demonstrate how Creative Commons works by licensing content and sourcing CC-licensed images for commercial use and modification; empower social media policy with stock photos and CC imagery options.

Guard against brand abuse by monitoring social media for brand jacking and cybersquatting, including typo squatting and domain name abuses.

Discover what constitutes trade secrets, why organizations must protect proprietary information, and how social media policies ensure reasonable safeguards against leaks, given information’s rapid and permanent spread.

Identify and safeguard proprietary information on social media by avoiding insider scoops, customer data, and financial insights, and implement a release manager or strict policy to mitigate leaks.

Create a privacy policy for your social media strategy, detailing data collection, usage, sharing with third parties, training your team, cookies, mobile data, and children's online privacy protection act.

Learn how defamation works on social media, including libel, the responsibility of posters over platforms. Discover how to craft and enforce a policy with monitoring, rapid removal, and legal cooperation.

Develop and apply a social media policy using the disclosure best practices toolkit. Cover truth in advertising, endorsements, testimonials, intellectual property, brand views, trademark issues, trade secrets, privacy, and defamation.

Explore brand marketing as part of strategic planning and learn to use keyword research tools to develop successful keyword strategies. Apply content tagging to organize and optimize your marketing content.

Learn how brand marketing coordinates brand identity across social media through a formal style guide, aligning colors, logos, fonts, tone, and messaging for consistent public perception.

Observe how Progressive Insurance uses the fictional character Flo across website, ads, and social media to maintain consistent branding, color, logos, and theme across platforms.

Master online brand creation by linking across platforms and driving traffic from your website to Twitter and Instagram, using content links, signature logos, and promotions or contests.

This lecture shows how brand-specific social campaigns, like Junior Mints contests on Facebook, drive engagement and audience growth through cross-marketing and distinct brand identities.

Pick specific keywords, like 'German Shepherd dog breeders' or 'Victorian bisque antique dolls', and weave them throughout content to boost search engine indexing and ranking.

Explore how keywords drive search engine optimization and use tools like Google Keyword Planner to analyze performance, generate ideas, and tailor research by region and date range.

Explore Google keyword planner to generate keyword ideas, check search volume and CPC, tailor results from your product or landing page, and refine with target market and negative keywords.

Think like your customer by talking to them and researching their searches to identify needs; create long-tail keywords (four to eight words) and group them for web and social content.

Create landing pages focused on specific keywords to optimize ads and content, use keywords as hashtags and tags across blog posts and social posts, and track performance to refine campaigns.

Use your keywords everywhere in your content, intermingling longtail keywords, and label them as Blogger labels or tags to boost search engine indexing and visibility.

Tag blog content with broad categories and long-tail keywords, and embed brand keywords in tags and copy, using examples like fly fishing vacations with father.

Identify core topics for your business, develop long tail keywords with tools like keyword planner, test CPC and results, and optimize content to rank higher for city-specific queries.

Integrate marketing strategies by applying brand marketing concepts, mastering keyword research tools, and building a successful keyword strategy with proper keyword usage and content tagging.

Explore content marketing strategies, content types, and trends, plus content origination and the shift to outsourced or in-house production. Compare branding and common-interest content, and master techniques for content development.

Learn how quality content drives social media engagement via content marketing that educates, entertains, or grabs attention, turning audiences into leads, sales, and brand advocates, as Volkswagen's The Force demonstrates.

Explore how high quality, valuable content across blogs, case studies, testimonials, e-books, memes, and videos drives trust and SEO, while matching platforms and resources to audience needs.

explore current trends in content marketing for social media, highlighting the dominance of articles, e-newsletters, blogs, videos, and mobile content in 2014 for business to consumer audiences.

Explore content origination through internal and external curation, weighing original content versus curated assets, licensing and permissions, and building a practical policy with available resources and Creative Commons.

Choose between in-house content production and outsourcing, weighing speed, cost, quality, and team fit, while training existing staff or sourcing external experts to meet your social media goals.

Learn to balance branded promotional content with common interest material using an 80/20 rule, delivering valuable, fresh content that engages your audience and reflects your organization.

Explain how to balance branded and general interest content using the 80:20 rule, showing how Weston A. Price Foundation shares health articles alongside membership prompts.

Develop solid social media content by selecting a topic, writing a title and introduction, crafting the body, and including a clear call to action.

Select topics that interest your audience by building a topic repository for ideas, updates, and fresh perspectives, and use interviews, FAQs, and guest posts to stay current.

Create attention-grabbing titles that match content and include keywords to boost search indexing; use specific topics, how-tos, lists, emotional words, and questions.

Write a concise, engaging introduction that previews your argument and sets a consistent tone, matching your title and content, to hook readers and invite them through the rest.

Craft the body of your content to support the introduction with writing, visuals, video, and audio for audio, visual, and kinesthetic audiences. Aim for shareable, inspirational content with editors involved.

Analyze how trending content pairs a compelling title and opening paragraph with a full written monologue and visuals to accompany a video, ensuring accessibility and discussing a call to action.

Create a clear call to action in your content to prompt visits, trials, signups, or purchases, and track clicks and conversions to demonstrate social media effectiveness.

Explore content marketing foundations, including content types, trends, and origination. Compare outsourced and in-house production and examine branded versus common interest content to drive successful content development.

Explore campaign implementation by blogging with Wordpress and using major platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn for social media strategy.

Overview of the top five social media platforms by active global internet users, led by Facebook around 60%, with YouTube, Google Plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn, from consumer and strategist perspectives.

Explore social media intimacy across platforms, from tweets to face-to-face conversations, and show how younger generations view these channels as personal, contrasting with older generations' impersonal perceptions.

Learn how blogging builds relationships and credibility through rich media, platform choices, and WordPress basics, including hosting, themes, plugins, and monetization.

Explore sample blogs, learn how to set up your own WordPress blog, and master features like posting, sharing, moderated comments, subscriptions, and tagging for discovery.

Create and customize multiple WordPress blogs or sites, choose free or branded domains, apply themes and plugins, publish posts with tags and media, and manage settings via the dashboard.

Explore Facebook, the leading social networking platform used to connect with friends and family, post status updates, share photos and links, and broadcast blog content to a wide audience.

Create a Facebook account, customize your profile, and explore pages and groups to build a brand presence, manage privacy, and engage with fans.

Learn to create a Facebook page for a business, adhere to terms and privacy policies, customize with profile and cover images, and manage posts, groups, and paid ads.

Learn how Facebook ads appear in news feed or the right column, manage campaigns with Ad Manager, set budgets, target audiences, and optimize for page likes.

Explore YouTube, a Google-owned video sharing platform created in 2005 that lets you upload, view, and share videos. Subscribe to channels to fuel your personalized subscriptions feed.

Learn to use YouTube with or without an account, create a Google account with two-step verification, subscribe to channels, manage playlists and comments, and integrate branding across Facebook.

Create a branded YouTube channel using Creator Studio, verify your account, and set a profile picture. Configure branding, monetization options, and channel defaults to optimize video reach and subscriber growth.

Learn how to upload a video to YouTube from any device using Creator Studio, choose visibility (public, private, unlisted), and enhance with tags, subtitles, playlists, and basic edits.

Explore Google Plus, its circles and hang out features, and learn how a Google account enables posting updates, following people, and using four default circles: family, friends, acquaintances, and following.

Learn how to sign in to Google Plus, create profiles, manage circles, post updates, and use Hangouts and business pages to boost visibility in Google search results.

Learn how to navigate Google Plus, switch feed layouts, manage circles and mentions, and engage with others through hangouts and page posts for personal and business branding.

Explore how Google Plus advertising uses plus post ads integrated with AdWords to extend brand reach by embedding posts on other sites, where users can plus one, follow, or comment.

Explore LinkedIn as a professional platform to build a career profile, generate job leads, and connect with partners through two million interest groups and peer endorsements.

Launch LinkedIn, set up a professional profile with a photo, education, and skills, and learn to connect with others, join groups, and explore job opportunities.

Explore the business side of LinkedIn by setting up a company page, reviewing followers and analytics, and learning ad creation and audience targeting.

Twitter functions as a micro-blogging information network, with tweets up to 140 characters feeding a real-time stream you follow to stay informed and share your products, services, and ideas.

Explore Twitter basics: personal and business handles, hashtags, and posting with images and shortened links. Understand optimal posting times, and the difference between personal and business accounts for consistent messaging.

Learn how to use Twitter ads to reach new customers, set budgets, target audiences, and analyze campaign performance, while meeting follower thresholds and policy requirements.

Explore popular platforms and blogging with WordPress, including Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Compare traditional and social media advertising to optimize campaigns, leverage native ads and contacts, run contests with platform software, and set an editorial calendar, action plans, and tool selection.

Learn to launch targeted campaigns on Google and YouTube with paid ads and organic content. Configure budgets, delivery methods, scheduling, and device and country targeting in Google AdWords.

Traditional website advertising moved from banners to social media, showing how audience targeting and paid social ads accelerate conversations and snowball engagement around a product.

Explore how inline ads blend with social media feeds by embedding promotions within the content stream, like promoted posts in a twitter feed that are harder to ignore.

Deliver native advertising in feeds, targeted by demographics, offering value through relevant content, while enabling integrated paid advertising on major social platforms.

Explore native social media advertising, where promoted, inline ads engage users with graphics, call to action, and options to reply, retweet, or favorite, as illustrated by a British Airways example.

Explore how native ads in the Facebook feed use friends' likes and social proof to drive clicks, including sponsored posts, sweepstakes, and extremely effective personalized, targeted advertising.

Capitalize on users' contacts to extend ad reach to fans, their friends, and the broader network. Build trust with solid content and quality products to prevent negative word of mouth.

Explore how social media contests boost audience interaction and brand goals through hashtags, giveaways, quizzes, and photo or video entries, with platform-specific tactics for engagement.

Select the right social platform and set up a contest with clear entry actions. Plan the theme and timeline, design graphics, decide the prize, and outline rules and data tracking.

Explore social media contest management software, data collection for entries, and how to choose tools for contest management and scheduling, with examples of four platforms.

Explore online contest platforms for brands and agencies, review viral and Instagram contest options, pricing, and analytics, and learn how campaigns from Offer Pop and vote to go drive engagement.

Document and schedule social content and campaigns in a centralized repository to manage assets and tasks across platforms, boosting efficiency and consistency with calendars, project management software, and dashboards.

Create a written action plan that clearly lists the steps, time estimates, resources, responsibilities, and deadlines, organized as a spreadsheet or table in a word processor or Excel.

Use an action plan template to define smart campaign goals, break them into small tasks with clear resources, key performance indicators, and responsibilities, and align quarterly milestones for social growth.

Learn to build a consistent social media presence by using an editorial calendar to plan content, voice, look, delivery platforms, accounts, and posting times for multiple brands.

Use a visual editorial calendar tool to map platforms, topics, and posting dates with logos for quick recognition. Switch between list and calendar views to stay organized.

Explore Content D.J., a web-based social media editorial calendar tool that runs in a browser via an online account, enabling drag-and-drop scheduling to build your own calendar.

Use content d.j to curate, search with hashtags, and schedule posts across multiple accounts, drag items onto the editorial calendar, share now or later, and analyze performance trends.

Discover how project management software, such as Microsoft Project, documents social media activities, tracks tasks and milestones across editorial calendars and projects, and flags over-allocated resources for complex campaigns.

Use a performance dashboard as a central place to view key details at a glance, track what's trending, and get a quick overview of what's happening, even under deadline pressure.

Learn how to use performance dashboards to track social metrics, featuring a practical walkthrough of simply measured to show how dashboards can assist a social media strategy.

Discover how performance dashboards display KPI metrics such as followers, likes, and comments, show sample reports you can download to Excel or PowerPoint, and help refine your editorial plans.

Explore social media campaign management tools that centralize content creation, scheduling, analytics, and collaborative workflows, enabling role-based access, multi-platform monitoring, and targeted, automated publishing.

Explore popular social media management tools like Radian6, Sprout Social, TweetDeck, and wildfire, and learn why Hootsuite offers a free, certification-enabled option for managing multiple clients.

Discover a free, all-in-one social media content management tool that lets teams manage multiple networks from a single dashboard, schedule and publish posts, and analyze results.

Compare traditional website advertising with social media advertising, capitalize on contacts through native ads and contests, and use contest platform software to support social media editorial calendar and tool selection.