7 Classes and Certifications to Sharpen Your Social Media Marketing Skills

These days 97% of businesses are actively using social media, only 20% are seeing great results. Your social media skills can help produce the best results that every business dreams about. In order to survive in this fierce business world, honing your social media skills is key.

There are a number of online marketing resources and social media classes available, but where you can for go for the best? If you are struggling to become a social media expert and looking for some ways to hone your social media skills required stay competitive, here, I’ve curated a list of marketing and social media classes that you can enroll in to become a better social media marketer.

Let’s dive in.

1. Hootsuite Academy

Hootsuite Academy has educated more than 200,00 professionals and certified more than 30,000 individuals so far. Courses are offered on a variety of topics required to social media marketing success, such as basics to data analytics and measuring ROI. Best of all, courses are free for all and offer a lot of video content that will make it an intuitive experience for learners.

Courses offered:

• Social Selling Training and Certification
• Advanced Social Strategy Training & Certification
• Social Marketing Training

2. Introduction to Social Media Strategy

Buffer offers a Skillshare class on social media marketing strategy that helps you create a solid foundation for your brand on social media. No matter if you want to increase your brand awareness, boost user engagement, gain loads of website traffic or drive conversions, this 45 minute Skillshare class helps you to craft a perfect social media strategy to achieve your marketing goals. From finding your brand voice to paid advertising, you’ll get everything for crafting custom social strategies.

Topics Covered:

• Getting started with social media
• Finding your voice
• Creating content
• Curating content
• Using the right marketing tools
• Paid advertising strategy

3. Digital Marketing with Udacity

When it comes to honing your digital skills, Udacity is the best option to go for. Partnered with many industry leaders such as Hootsuite, Facebook Google, MailChimp, Udacity bring you the Digital Marketing Nanodegree program.

This program is tailor-made to polish the skills of individuals in order to get them hired in this highly-competitive job market. Udacity offers platform’s proficiency for the most relevant marketing platforms, so that you can fully understand the basics of digital marketing to content strategy to paid advertising and analytics.

With Udacity’ course, you’ll get to know how to run live campaigns on major marketing platforms how to create a strategy, how to purchase and sell ads and more.

Topics include:

• Content Strategy
• Search Engine Marketing
• Display Advertising
• Social Media Advertising with Facebook
• Measure and Optimize with Google Analytics
• Market Your Content
• Run a Facebook Campaign
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit
• Run an Adwords Campaign

4. “What is Social” by Northwestern University

“What is Social” is a massive open online course (MOOC) for entrepreneurs, executives, marketing professionals and business owners who are willing to improve their social media marketing strategy using proven techniques. This hands-on class gives you an action-based introduction to social media and ways to grow your professional persona.

Topics include:

• Social trends
• Defining target audiences
• Data analysis

5. Facebook Blueprint Certification

Facebook certification program offers an advanced level of Facebook and Instagram marketing techniques. Facebook Blueprint teaches you how to get the most out of Facebook’s tools so that you can meet your business goals. It is a perfect course for digital marketing agencies, advertising companies, marketers, and small businesses as it offers everything you need to running a successful advertising campaigns using Facebook page.

Facebook Blueprint is free, self-paced social media classes that covers case studies from real businesses, in-person training, and knowledge checks. Most of all, the course is too flexible, conveniently accessible and cover all best practices and top strategies used by top brands.

Topics include:

• Campaign Optimization
• Creative Best Practices
• Purchasing Ads
• Ad Targeting
• Facebook Terminology and basics
• Best Practices for Facebook & Instagram Posting
• Optimizing Facebook & Instagram Advertising
• Creating a quality Facebook Page and experience

6. Marketing in a Digital World

“Marketing in a Digital World” is a free marketing course offered by Coursera that has educated more than 100,000 students to this date. This course is taught by University of Illinois and focuses on the transformation of marketing strategies and tactics into a digital world.

This course is perfect for online marketers looking to understand the basics of marketing industry stands today and how your business can leverage advanced strategies to entice more and more customers.

Topics include:

• How smartphones and 3D devices are transforming the marketing field
• How power is shifting from brands to consumers
• A variety of product ideas that work best in a digital world

7. Google AdWords

If you are struggling to rank higher on the first page of Google, then Google AdWords certification is the perfect way to go. Increasing the discoverability of your social media content, increasing your user-base, driving traffic, and meeting your business objectives is what you’ll learn from this course.

Google AdWords certification helps you learn the basics and intermediate SEO skills, ensuring your content gets higher position on search engine results. With this certification, marketers also learn how to create, execute and manage an advertising campaign using AdWords Google.

Courses include:

• AdWords Fundamentals
• Search Advertising
• Display Advertising
• Mobile Advertising
• Video Advertising
• Shopping Advertising

Your Turn

It takes time, effort and patience to achieve mastery in a field. With these great online social media classes and certifications, you’ll become a social media expert that can devise a strategy that works and converts.