Marketing Courses, The Latest Social Media Craze

Social media evolved from what used to be private journaling just a short decade ago. But today, they have collectively intertwined with the very fabric of society. From a personal collection of stories and albums, into a choreographed, full-fledged, variety show to share with your friends. As well as with total strangers too… And if it can help an individual to spread out to reach the masses, so too can business entities. With that, the demand for social media presence became the rage of the day. But follows is an even bigger impact – courses for social media marketing.

The Social Media Marketing Courses Craze

You’ve heard of it before, perhaps even being advertised to you on your own social media profile. Short courses that purportedly help you spread your reach to hundreds, or even thousands of others on social media. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling memorabilia on social media as a side hustle, or operating a factory manufacturing them. At the end of the day, you only want people to know your business’ existence, and hopefully buy from you.

You already know the powerful reach of social media. And you have also come to accept that you need to be present in social media too. So the logical next step is to jump into the bandwagon, and start advertising your products and services on them. After all, social media is “free”, isn’t it?… Except, you don’t exactly know how to “play the game”… So what can you do?…

So what can you do indeed?… Hmmm…

Meanwhile, On The Other Side Of The Coin…

While most business owners ponder upon how to best play the social media game, something interesting starts brewing… A handful of “experts” lay out a plan to milk this situation for what it’s worth. After all, if there’s a demand to learn social media marketing, somebody will rise to teach this knowledge. As the old saying goes, if there’s a demand for it, then people are willing to pay for it.

The “skills” are actually pretty basic, and easy to teach. One only needs to know their way around their chosen social medium channel, and maintain a presence there. It’s as simple as sharing information there, perhaps even displaying the goods or services that you’re selling. Besides, sharing these content out to your “followers” are already free. And if you need to reach out to more audience, you only need to pay a token sum to do so. Most social media platforms charge only from a measly tens of dollars onwards (convert to your own currency) to do just that. It’s much cheaper than engaging an advertising agency to design your material, and purchase media space in the traditional sense. Waaaaaaay cheaper!…

So it’s not surprising to see a whole new sub-segment of industry suddenly mushroom to cater for these demands. Short, two or three-day courses, usually held at hotel function rooms, or even the organisers’ offices. They’ll probably cost you two, perhaps three thousand dollars (again, convert to your own currency) for such short courses. And guess what, the fee often includes refreshments too. What more can you ask for, right?

Letting The Cat Out Of The Bag

While these short, social media marketing courses are indeed legitimate, the participants often don’t achieve their objectives. The number of paid participants who successfully build their social media presence after attending these marketing courses are really low. And this begs the question – Why?…

The majority of people who signs up for marketing courses like these are business owners or marketing managers. These people are generally busy with their own responsibilities. The main (or only) reason to sign up for these courses is to learn to maximise their already limited time. They want to learn how to be active on social media, and accomplish their work at the same time.

The problem however, is that participants only taught the “how”, and not the “what”, which is often neglected. They’re taught how to run a social media marketing campaign on their own. But in order to run a campaign successfully, they need to know that the what more than the how…

The What?… The Content, That’s What!…

That majority of these social media marketing courses teach skills that are already known to most people. They mostly teach participants how to organise a marketing campaign, and how to convey your marketing message to them. I suppose the most valuable take away from such courses is learning the ins and outs of their chosen social medium channel. But aside from all these, they literally learn nothing of value… And why do I say that?… That’s because at the end of it all, they’ll tell you that you still need to create your own contents…

So why is that a problem?… Well, the people who pay good money to attend these courses are busy people. They attend these courses to learn how they can best share their message out. So telling them that they still need to create their own contents is as good as telling them that they’ve just wasted their time and money by attending these marketing courses. You see, creating content is the most time consuming and the most expensive endeavour for them.

It’s like you want to enter a funfair, but are unwilling to pay the exorbitant ticket price. So you seek out this counter at the back of the funfair, conducting courses to teach people how to enter the funfair like a boss, at a fraction of the ticket price… But upon completing that course, the main takeaway from it is that you still have to purchase the ticket…

Social Media Marketing Courses Actually Teach You What You Already Know

Yes… Content creation is expensive. But you don’t need to attend any social media marketing courses to learn that you still need to pay for content creation. Of course, they’ll always present an alternative option for you to create your own contents… But the fact that you’re attending such a course already indicates that you don’t have the time nor budget to create contents. So why would you want to pay somebody else to tell you exactly what you already knew?…

The FREE Social Media Marketing Knowledge

In the next article, we shall go through some of the useful knowledge and tricks on social media marketing. And the best of all, it’s completely FREE… So make sure you come back for the next article.