Information in this blog post was obtained from the Semrush Blog, the University of South Florida: Career Charge Blog, the HubSpot Blog, and "Essentials of Social Media Marketing" by Michelle Charello from Stukent. All links in this blog post open a new tab.
Picture this: You're a student entering the workforce or a working adult looking for a new job. You've found a listing for an interesting opportunity, one that would benefit from knowing how to advertise products or announce events on social media. Knowing about social media marketing would give you an edge during the hiring process. Even better, it's a skill you're more than willing to pick up. There's just one problem: You're not a marketer. You didn't major in marketing, and you've never had any formal training in the subject. Does that mean you have to give up your hopes and dreams of landing this new job? No! Social media marketing can seem scary and intimidating to non-marketers, but that doesn't mean it's out of reach, and this blog post will help you get started.
Learning About Social Media Marketing
When you first think about social media marketing, you might have a few questions about it. What do you need to know about social media marketing? What skills might you need for it? How can you learn those skills, and how can you learn how to do social media marketing? What resources are out there to help you? Before answering questions like this, though, we first need to ask ourselves one more question: What is social media marketing?
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is exactly what it sounds like: It's marketing that uses social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. You might be marketing a product, an event, or a company, and you might be using one platform or all of them. Either way, it's all social media marketing. Social media marketing has multiple advantages. First off, it's relatively inexpensive as far as marketing goes. According to "Essentials of Social Media Marketing" by Michelle Charello, social media marketing has an average cost of $2.50 per thousand people reached. More traditional marketing methods are more expensive, with the least expensive being billboards at $5 per thousand people reached and the most expensive being direct mail with a cost of $57 per thousand people reached. Alongside being inexpensive, social media marketing is also an easy way to reach a lot of people. Social media has become increasingly prevalent in our society, with an estimated 4.76 billion active social media users according to Charello. Finally, social media marketing is versatile. A blog post on Semrush points out that social media marketing can work for businesses of any type.
What do You Need to Know to do Social Media Marketing?
There are a variety of skills that can be useful to a social media marketer. In "Essentials of Social Media Marketing", Charello lists nine skills that you should have to be a good social media marketer:
Community Management
Creativity
Organized and Efficient
Adaptive
Good Writing Skills
Sales and Customer Service
Strategic Focus
Decisive
Analytical and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Driven
A post from the University of South Florida (USF): Career Charge blog lists ten skills required for digital marketing, a broader term that includes social media marketing:
Data Analysis
Writing and Editing
SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Listening
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Basic Design
Social Media
Social Media Advertising
Email Marketing
Mobile Marketing
If you don't have these skills currently, that's okay! You can still learn them, and even once you learn them, you'll probably continue to develop and practice them in your new job.
How Can You Learn How to do Social Media Marketing?
There are a few different ways to go about learning how to do social media marketing. You can study real examples of companies and people doing it on the social media platforms you use. If you're still a student, maybe your university offers a course you can take even if you're not a marketing major. According to USF: Career Charge, there are also free online certifications you can earn covering different topics within marketing, some of which they list in their blog post. They are hosted by a variety of companies including Google, Microsoft, Hootsuite, and HubSpot. These certifications will not only help train you in social media marketing, but they will also look good on your resume and give you more of an edge during the hiring process.
Basic Elements of Social Media Marketing
Now that you know generally what social media marketing is, what skills you need, and how you can learn more about it and get some practice, it's time to talk about some of the basic elements of social media marketing. These elements are vital to all social media marketing efforts, and they will influence your decisions going forward.
Social Media Platforms
There are a lot of different social media platforms out there. The Semrush Blog lists seven popular social media platforms used for social media marketing:
Facebook
Instagram
TikTok
X (formerly Twitter)
LinkedIn
Snapchat
Pinterest
These different platforms will all have different audiences, uses, and policies on ads. For example, the Semrush Blog points out that Facebook's ads allow you to set various goals and objectives for your marketing campaign, while X and TikTok both have a variety of different ad types to choose from. They also state that LinkedIn is useful for advertising to professionals as well as for doing business-to-business marketing, while using Snapchat for social media marketing is going to target younger audiences due to 90% of the platform's users being 13-24 years old.
With so many different and unique platforms, it can be daunting to try and decide which ones you'll use for your social media marketing. Your marketing goals and target audiences will have a major impact on that decision. As the HubSpot Blog points out, the marketing strategies that work for one business may not work for another. This applies to social media platforms, too: What works for one business or even for one marketing campaign may not work as well for another. Carefully considering what you want to achieve, what audiences you want to target, and what resources you have will be a big help in determining which social media platforms to use.
Types of Social Media Marketing Content
Which social media platforms you use isn't the only thing you need to decide. You also need to figure out what type of content you'll be putting on those platforms. There are multiple types of content used in social media marketing. The Semrush Blog lists two main content types, paid content and organic content. Paid content is content that you pay to have up on social media platforms, such as video ads and sponsored posts. This type of content can reach a lot of people. Organic content is a little bit different. Organic content is the unpaid content that you post to your platforms that will be seen by your followers. If your followers share your posts, then their followers may also see it. Other people may also see your organic content if they search for any hashtags you used in your post. A third type of content, user-generated content, is mentioned by the HubSpot Blog, which stresses the importance of connecting with and engaging with existing and potential customers on social media. Making use of user-generated content is one way to do this, but they also suggest interacting with customers and starting conversations.
Metrics of Social Media Marketing
Knowing which platforms to post to and what type of content to use is the first step, but how do you know how well your social media marketing is performing? That's where analytics and metrics come in. There are a few different metrics you can use to judge how well a given post is doing, known as key performance indicators (KPI). The HubSpot Blog lists email open rates, click-through rates, and subscribers as examples of KPIs for an email marketing campaign. The Semrush Blog lists ad engagement, ad cost, and the cost per result as metrics that you can view for your ads on Facebook. You can also look at more specific metrics like the number of likes, shares, re-posts, views, and followers. According to the Semrush Blog, most social media platforms have built-in analytics and features to help you determine which of your posts have been performing well and which ones have been performing poorly.
Social Media Marketing Tools
If all of this has seemed a little daunting to you so far, don't worry. You don't have to work completely on your own. There are a variety of tools out there to help you keep track of your social media marketing efforts. I've already mentioned that a lot of social media platforms have tools to help you measure the performance of your content and posts. The Semrush Blog also mentions its own in-house tool, the Semrush Social Analytics tool, that lets you track the performance of your posts across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn altogether. They also mention Google Analytics as being a tool that helps you discover who is engaging with your content based on a number of user attributes. You can then take this information and compile it into audience personas using Semrush's persona tool, which is linked to in their Semrush Blog post. You can find out more about when people are engaging with competitors' posts using Social Tracker, a feature in Semrush's social media management app, which can help inform you on when you should post your own content. Alongside these analytical tools, there are also tools out there to help you organize, plan, and schedule your posts, such as one available through Hootsuite. Some of these tools may be free while others are paid on a subscription basis.
From the skills you need to have and how you can learn more and get practice to the basic elements you need to keep in mind and the tools that exist to help you stay organized and informed, you now have some of the knowledge you need to get your start with social media marketing. Despite not being a trained marketer, you can still develop your skills in social media marketing and make use of them in your next job, no matter what your major or previous job was. To help you get started, you can check out this blog post from my colleague Rita, where she discusses five tips and tricks for both beginning and advanced social media marketers. If you always keep learning and practicing, then you'll do fine regardless of your level of experience, non-marketer or not.
Resources
Beveridge, C. (2023, July 21). The Beginner's Guide to Social Media Advertising in 2023. Semrush Blog. https://www.semrush.com/blog/social-media-ads/.
Carlevatti, J. (2020, August 7). How to Get into Digital Marketing Without a Degree. University of South Florida: Career Charge. https://corporatetraining.usf.edu/blog/how-to-get-into-digital-marketing-without-a-degree.
Charello, M. (2023). Essentials of Social Media Marketing. Stukent.
Rodrigue, E. (2023, September 6). Marketing 101: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners. HubSpot Blog. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-101.
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