Alternatives To Social Media Marketing Courses

Previously we shared why the latest craze of social media marketing short courses isn’t exactly the “best” option for everyone. And no, we’re not gonna leave you hanging high and dry, with no solution in sight. So today, we’ll go through the alternatives, the practical options.

Snapshot of a smartphone's homepage, showing the app icons. There are alternatives to paying to learn how to market on social media.
Social Media Smartphone Apps. – Image by Pixelkult / Pixabay

Understand What Social Media Platform Is And Isn’t

(1) Social Media Is A Platform To Reach The Masses

It’s true that social media is really far reaching. Here, we can see just Facebook alone already reaches out to a-third of all human beings on earth. That alone is more than all other media channels, whether online, electronic or printed. It’s a no brainer to see why everybody simply wants to jump onto the Facebook bandwagon. Facebook users, as far and wide as the eye can see… The only “problem” is that you simply can’t reach out to all of them, despite the apparent appearance. If you really wanna reach out to all of them, well, you simply have to pay for the access. It’s called “boost” your reach.

(2) Social Media Isn’t A Content Repository

Despite its appearance, social media isn’t exactly the best place to host your contents. It’s a quick way to reach out to the masses, but definitely not a place for you to host and share your contents. Of course, many people are already doing it, and it kinda seem pretty impressive too.

For bite-size chunks of information, like a single image, maybe a paragraph of text, sure, you could use it. But if you’re thinking of posting up full-fledged articles, it’s not gonna work. Full-fledged articles complete with several images, and maybe several paragraphs of text are simply too large to host there.

A new post window on Facebook, on a laptop computer, on a work table, showing that posting on social media is no alternative to a proper full-fledged story.
Sharing a post on Facebook is more like a summary of what you’re sharing, not the full-fledged story. – Image by Kaufdex / Pixabay

Plus, don’t forget that you’re not the only party vying for attention on these social media platforms. Practically millions of others around the world are doing exactly the same thing as you’re doing at the same time. Your “unique” message will be nothing but a small voice, drowned out by the white noise of the rest of world. The audience will be oversaturated with a world full of noise. So you’ll need to work even harder to appeal to their attention, even for a short duration.

So What Are The Alternatives?

If may look bleak, but there are alternatives. We’re not suggesting that you avoid social media completely, but to use it for what it’s good at. And as mentioned above, hosting your contents there definitely isn’t one of them. So here’s what you can and should do :-

(1) Have A Proper Content Repository

You need a secure and permanent repository to host your contents. Some place where all your contents are archived, and easily searchable. One large enough to hold full-fledged article sized entries. You need an anchor to hold all of your stories and articles. And there’s no better content anchor than a blog, preferably with your branded web URL. Create contents regularly. Publish them on your blog. Make it attractive to the audience in general, and to your target audience specifically. It’s okay that not many people will know when you publish something new. That’s where the next part comes in.

A screen image of WordPress, indicating a blog activity. A blog represents full-fledged story telling, not merely a social media post. Alternatives to merely sharing on social media.
There’s no better anchor for your contents than a blog. – Image by pixelcreatures / Pixabay

(2) Active Social Media Presence

Despite what was mentioned earlier, you still do need social media presence. Just don’t use it for what it wasn’t intended to do in the first place, namely hosting your contents. Instead, use it as a projection of your activities. Every time you publish new content, share it out on all of your social media channels. Short and sweet, bite-sized chunks will work best. One featured image, an exciting title, and a short synopsis of the whole story. Give the audience barely enough information to whet their appetite and pique their interest. Make it exciting enough that they’ll want to follow your breadcrumbs back to your anchor, your blog.

(3) Leverage Off Your Network’s Network

Let’s face it, you’ll never have a wide enough network completely on your own. Or at least have deep enough pockets to buy enough “boosts” to reach out farther than right now. But it’s okay, that’s not the end of the world. What you need to do is to leverage off your existing network. Encourage the people that you can reach out to, to continue spreading it on their own networks. If your contents are interesting enough, your connections will do it without you even asking them to.

Infographic showing how people are network to each other, and beyond. Alternatives to reaching out only to your personal network.
You can never have enough contacts. Always leverage off your network’s contacts, and their contacts. – Image by GDJ / Pixabay

(4) Keep It Coming, And Keep It Consistent

The toughest thing to do is to keep the momentum going once you have started to roll. Tough, but not impossible. If you want to be successful, you’re gonna have to make it work. Keep on creating new contents, and writing new stories. The more contents you share, the more trustworthy your brand identity will become. And that’s the ultimate goal of any branding exercise.

Alternatives To Paying To Learn What You Already Know

It may be enticing, to simply pull the trigger, and pay to attend social media marketing workshops. After all, most people are already doing it, and the asking price isn’t exactly very steep anyway. In fact, that’s exactly the reason why these social media marketing workshops are priced that way. It’s priced cheap enough so that you won’t really think twice about signing up for it. And telling you that social media is huge, that if you don’t start now, you’ll be left behind. Well, that’s information that you already know.

But the problem is that what you actually learn in workshops like these are simply information that you already know… And why would you want to pay to learn something that you already know in the first place?

Come to think about it, these alternatives isn’t exactly alternatives at all. It’s the mainstream method. The issue is that not many people even realise that they already know about it. So some of the more enterprising parties take the advantage to “teach” you what you otherwise already knew… Easy money, right?…

Image showing a user handing money over to an abstract person, through a computer monitor.
Easy money, offering to “teach” what most people already know. You’ll never run out of gullible consumers to essentially give away money to you. – Image by Bruno Glätsch / Pixabay

In Conclusion – What Are The Alternatives?

If there’s one thing that’s worth paying for, it’s content creation. You may not realise this, but many business owners are experts in their industries. But not many of them are experts in telling their own stories. So if you’re gonna pay somebody to teach you something, then pay somebody to teach you how to create contents, not how to publish them.

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