Welcome to our course on social media management.

This is the second course in the social media

marketing professional certification program created with Facebook. Social media is a powerful
channel for businesses to market themselves and it provides opportunities for businesses to connect
with existing and potential clients. Businesses can participate for free and be part of rich
conversations. But to make the most of that opportunity, it's important to carefully manage your
business presence on the social media platforms you choose. That means creating great content,
building and preserving your brands, reacting and responding to comments and trends, and building
an understanding of what content really works for you. If these are things you'd love to learn how to
do, you're in the right place. Here's what you'll do, in the first week, you'll learn how to establish your
business presence: that includes creating a home for your business on the social media platforms
that matter to you and how to create a strong brand. In the second week, you'll focus on creating
social media content. First, we'll dissect social media posts to get a better understanding of the core
building blocks, then we'll take a closer look at a role of each of the core social media content
elements and how to make them work for you. We will put it all together and you'll learn how to
create effective content and you'll work on a project where you create a sample Instagram or
Facebook post for a business. In the third week, the focus is on social media content management.
First, you'll explore how to come up with topics to post about and how to create the associated posts.
Then you'll learn how to manage all your content with a content calendar. Next, you learn how to
effectively create and produce all the content you need and you'll focus on managing your content,
and interacting with your following. At the end of the week, you will create a content calendar for a
business. In the fourth week, you'll learn how to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. First, we'll
focus on how to evaluate the data related to your posts, and next, you'll learn how to optimize your
content based on that data. Social media marketing is all about connecting with people through
content, this course is really at the core of what social media marketing is all about. I can't wait to
see the content you'll build. So, let's get started.

Working in social media is exciting and dynamic. Businesses are clamoring for experts in social
media and the number of jobs that require social media skills, keeps growing. When you
successfully finished this program, you'll receive two certifications. One from Coursera, and one from
Facebook, certifying your mastery of ads managers. These two certifications will be among the first
things many employers look for. You'll have a leg up in your job search. You'll also have the projects
that you completed during your coursework, which will build up to portfolio you can use to showcase
your abilities to potential employers. You're probably curious as to what kinds of roles you'll be
suitable for by the end of this program. Well, nearly every organization now, has a social media
presence, and many of these have entry-level positions available where fresh ideas and a
willingness to jump into new projects are highly desirable traits. Jobs in social media marketing
roughly fall into two categories. First, there are a number of jobs that focus on social media
management. In these jobs, you play a role in crafting a company's voice and social media
personality. Jobs as a social media coordinator and an engagement coordinator, for instance. As a
social media coordinator, you'll post to social media accounts and follow instructions from the
director of social media. You could be working with a well-known brand or company or even a
celebrity. An engagement coordinator is like a social media coordinator, but as well as posting to
social media accounts and messaging followers, they're also responsible for guiding the online
behavior of followers. You encourage followers to interact with your posts and you respond to
comments and react to trends in the broader social media space. This program also prepares you
for a second category of jobs in social media marketing. Namely jobs that focus on creating and
managing paid advertising on social media. These jobs exist both in advertising agencies and on the
client side. Social media marketing associate is one of the types of roles you'll find at an advertising
agency. Working for agencies is a fun and dynamic way to put all you've learned to work. You'd be
involved in creating advertising campaigns for different social media platforms. Agencies have
multiple clients and so you get to work on a wide number of different campaigns with many different
goals and for many different companies, it's a wonderfully exciting way to break into social media
advertising. Working as a social media marketing associate on the client side means you're working
for one specific client or company. This could be anything from big brands like Adidas or Pepsi to
smaller brands that rely heavily on social media. Roles you'll find here are similar as the ones you
find in agencies. But you'd focus your advertising efforts on one brand and you'd often work together
with your counterparts on the agency side. Working on the client side is a fantastic way to really sink
your teeth into one brand and to really focus on how to use your social media skills on that single
brand. Of course, you might find that smaller companies have one person focusing on social media
marketing who has to wear many hats and basically, performs parts of all these jobs or you may
decide to start your own business, in which case, social media marketing skills will come in handy as
you grow your business. In addition to the jobs I outlined so far, there are a myriad of other jobs
available to those who mastered the art of social media, including bloggers, brand ambassadors,
community managers, social media coordinators or associates managers, directors, and social
media copywriters. While many companies are looking to hire social media marketers to join their
team, you could also decide that you'd like to be a freelancer. Social media marketing lends itself
very well to part-time or freelance roles. Say, you could work on writing content for social media
marketing as a freelancer, supporting a larger company who may have an occasional need for some
extra help or you could help out a small firm with the management of their Facebook page and
Instagram accounts on a part-time basis. In other words, social media marketing offers great
opportunities for flexible jobs for those who need or desire them. Finally, great social media
marketers, generally like dynamic environments where they can learn from others. They have a love
of lifelong learning, are keen to work with others, yet also display a knack for rolling up their sleeves
and getting the job done on their own. If this sounds like you, then you could be ideally suited to a
job in social media marketing, and this program will prepare you to start your career.

Social Media Management Syllabus

Course Description

This course equips you with critical content creation and management skills. You’ll learn how to
create effective social media posts and how to create a strong brand to help you build a social media
presence. You’ll also learn how to establish an ongoing process to manage your content. This
includes setting up a content calendar, managing and moderating your posts, analyzing data for
iteration, and how to increase post effectiveness. You will end the course with a real-world
application of your skills through a content management project.
This course is intended for people who want to learn how to create and manage a business
presence on social media, including creating content, interacting and engaging with customers on
social media and evaluating the results of different posts. You don't need marketing experience, but
should have basic internet navigation skills and are eager to participate and connect in social media.
Having a Facebook or Instagram account helps and ideally learners already completed course 1
(Introduction to Social Media Marketing) in this program.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

● Establish and manage a social media presence

● Create a Facebook business page and an Instagram account for business
● Understand how and why to create content for social media
● Create a brand, tone, and voice for a social media presence
● Manage a content calendar for a social media presence
● Evaluate the performance of content on social media and how to iterate on that
performance
● Demonstrate social media content management in a real-world project

Social Media Management Overview

By the end of each week, you will be able to:

Week 1: Establish Your Presence

● Establish a business presence on social media

● Create a brand using the EPIC brand framework

Week 2: Social Media Content

● Understand the anatomy of a "post"

● Understand the importance of text and image elements
● Create effective posts using text, images, and video

Week 3: Social Media Content Management

● Identify what to post

● Create a storyboard
● Manage your content calendar
 ● Repurpose and create content effectively
● Manage and moderate your posts

Week 4: Evaluate Your Efforts

● Find the data insights and link them back to your KPIs
● Evaluate and measure the effectiveness of your posts
● Understand what social media optimization is
● Analyze and iterate to increase your post effectiveness
● Apply these instructions and implement the steps into the real-world as if you had this
role in a company

Projects and Quizzes

Week 1: Establish Your Presence

Create a Facebook Business Page or an Instagram Business Account Project

● For this project, you will create an unpublished or mock Facebook business page or
Instagram business account for your selected business.

Establish Your Presence Quiz

Week 2: Social Media Content

Create a Post on Facebook or Instagram Project

● For this project, you will create a real or mock post on Facebook or Instagram for your
selected business.

Social Media Content Quiz

Week 3: Social Media Content Management

Create a Post on Facebook or Instagram Project

● For this project, you will create a real or mock post on Facebook or Instagram for your
selected business.

Social Media Content Management Quiz

Week 4: Evaluate Your Efforts

Evaluate Your Efforts Quiz

● For this quiz, you will evaluate data from an invented case study and answer questions.

In this lesson, we're going to talk about why having a branding strategy is important for your
business. But first, let's try to define what a brand is, what comes to mind when I say Apple, what
comes to mind when I say Coca Cola or Nike or Shell? Did you think about the products they sell or
services they offer? Did you think about an experience you had with them, maybe a specific color
came to mind, or commercial, or piece of advertising? Or did you think about a certain type of
person? If you associated a combination of elements, a product, a color, an experience or an identity
to any one of those businesses, you have an idea of what a brand is, but let's define it further by
stepping back into history. Brands or branding originates with cattle ranchers who would brand their
name or mark into their cattle so that someone could tell one ranch's cattle from another's. Later, this
method of distinguishing the owner or maker of a particular product became especially important
when a farmer, craftsman or producer would want their goods to stand out on a store shelf. They
would put their name, signature or a logo on it, over time, consumers would come to know and trust
one producer's product over another. Today, we think of a brand is much more than a product with a
name on it. In our example earlier, we saw that there are a number of things that could come to mind
when thinking about a business. And that's exactly what brand is, a combination of elements or
attributes associated with the business that make up an experience about that business. A brand
can consist of the products or services it offers, a brand can also consist of the feeling you get when
you step into that business's location or log on to their website. A brand is also their logo and the
colors or images they use, a brand is also the words they use and the voice in which they
communicate. A brand is also the stories they tell about what they do, a brand is also the business's
principles or the values they stand by. A brand is also the connection they make and how it makes
the consumer feel in relationship to them. David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, once defined a
brand as the intangible, sum of a product's attributes, its name, packaging and price, its history, its
reputation, and the way it's advertised. Ultimately, creating a brand is creating a personality or
identity for your business that differentiates you from your competitors in the marketplace. But we
have to ask an important question is the brand wholly created by the business or is the brand only
what consumers perceive or think of a business outside of the business's influence? The answer is a
little bit of both, ultimately, a business must be deliberate in the brand it wants to create, from the
story it tells, about how it started, to the color pallete it uses, to its voice on social media, to the
audience it wants to engage with. But customers will create their own perceptions and judgments as
well after interacting with your business. We've all tried out new restaurants, and you've probably
gone to one where when you walked in, you knew it had personality. The decor was carefully
chosen, the dishes are the chef's unique creations, the menu has a specific typography to it, and you
just think that place has a cool vibe. Well, that's an example of deliberate branding, compare that to
a restaurant whose furniture is nondescript, artist generic, whose menu looks like it was designed
from a template and whose dishes you could just get elsewhere. This is a place that hasn't put much
thought into branding at all, and because of that, they won't create much of a connection with their
customers. But branding is also created by the customers of a business as well, in the first example,
the restaurant may want specific type of crowd, so they've done the work to cater to certain
demographic or persona. If those customers enjoy the food and the ambiance, they will tell their
friends about the experience and post about it on social media, they may become regulars and
identify with the brand. Because the second brand doesn't have a clear brand, it may not be
attracting the right demographic it hopes. Customers may not like the atmosphere or the food and
 would share that on social media, thereby creating a negative perception of the brand which would
fill in the branding vacuum the restaurant left. You can see this kind of brand creation with more
mainstream businesses such as Coke, Nike and Apple who have all done expert work at creating
the specific look and feel, experience, and identity of their brands. Customers are then attracted to a
brand story and culture and want to be part of that brand's identity. A brand's ultimate goal is to not
only have consumers buy their products, but to identify with the brand so much that they become an
Advocate for it. Now that we've seen the basic importance of how a brands can connect with
consumers, let's explore why you should be deliberate about brand creation.

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5:15

We as consumers may think to buy a product solely on how it tastes or what it does, but there's a lot
more association going on at a deeper, experiential level than we think. Let's look at some of the
reasons why you should have a brand, why you should be aware of what your brand communicates,
and why you should be deliberate about creating your brand. A brand is trusted. Brands tend to have
a history associated with them, with established consistent stories, products, and experiences.
Customers who've had positive experiences with the product or business trust it to be reliable as
well. You wouldn't necessarily think of trusting a condiment, but Heinz ketchup, founded in 1876 and
dubbed America's favorite ketchup, is a trusted brand because of its high-quality consistency and it's
pop cultural mystique of how to get the ketchup out of the bottle. A brand connects through believes
it communicates, and draws in customers who share the same beliefs. An example is Tom's
footwear, founder Blake Mycoskie grew to love a specific design of shoe when traveling in Argentina,
but also found that many children there didn't have footwear at all. He then founded Toms, which
donates a pair of shoes for every pair purchased. Those who want to purchase footwear but also
want to connect to a bigger story will be drawn to Toms. A brands can help consumers to recognize
your product, just like cattle farmers branded their cattle so they could recognize them as part of
their farm. Brands are a signal to consumers about what they can expect from the product and who it
belongs to. A good brand is readily recognisable, and that's the case for Disney. One of the most
recognizable brands in the world, Disney's brands has so proliferated culture that if you see three
interconnected black circles, you probably think Mickey Mouse. Disney has not only built her brand
through storytelling, but through products and experiences. But brand recognition doesn't just help
big players. It can be as simple as knowing that a second location of your favorite cafe will have the
same quality, feel, products and services as the first. Brands also create an ease of selection for a
consumer who has had positive interactions with that brand before. You may always buy Heinz
ketchup because it's a trusted brand, or you may always buy seven generation products, because
you believe in sustainability. Or you may always order from a local pizza chain because you grew up
going there, and have fond memories associated with the brand. Or if you want to grab a cup of
coffee, you may automatically go to the coffee shop you always frequent, even if there might be
others on the street. Branding benefits both the business and the consumer, and it takes the
guesswork out of choosing a product on the consumer side and solidify a returning customer for the
business. Brands communicate certain values and they can present a certain lifestyle. Consumers
may identify with those values and lifestyle or they may aspire to those values. In other words,
consumers may want to be like the people that will typically use the brand. Consumers may buy the
brand because they want to signal that they have the values or lifestyle that a brand presents.
People may buy products of a status symbol brand for instance, like wearing a Rolex or driving a
Lexus. Or it could be buying Under Armour products because of the belief that wearing this products
could make you a better athlete.

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 8:56

A brand can make people want to say hey, I'd like to be like that, and brands can help to signal that
to the outside world. Creating a brand can foster loyalty that become sticky enough that your
customers will follow you to new products and innovations. An example is the Brazilian sunglass
business Chili Beans, one of the most successful sunglass companies in Latin America. Chili beans
doesn't just sell the same product year after year, but releases new sunglass designs every week.
Not only do their customers eagerly await their new designs and buy them when they're released,
the business knows that they have a loyal base who will follow along with the businesses innovation.
Customers loyal to a brand may also have less pricing sensitivity as well. You see this with high
price of Apple products, but you also see it with Starbucks, where some frothed milk in a few shots
of espresso will cost you $5. But customers who are loyal to the Starbucks brand will readily pay a
lot for Coffee, if a customer perceives that they're getting value and the ride branding can convince
them of that, they'll always be willing to pay a premium. Finally, having a strong brand is a benefit for
the internal marketing team, as all decisions surrounding social media communication website. And
in store experience, the way they interact with customers and even new product packaging is filtered
through their branding framework. It becomes very easy to decide whether something as big as a
new business initiative or something as small as a tweet is on brand.

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10:39

You know now what a brand is and why you need one. We have covered the main benefits of having
a strong brand and you'll see later how having a strong brand to rely on especially benefits you in
social media marketing. So given the importance of brands, let's look at what goes into creating a
strong brand and how you can help build one. That's what's next.

Now, we know about the elements that create a brand including; specific stories, colors, voice, and
more. We also know the benefits of having a brand. Now, let's take a look at a framework that can
help a business create their unique brand. Having this framework, will help you develop or
understand the brand, and you'll see that this comes in very handy as you start developing content
to represent your brand in social media. Let's take a look. There are four areas where a business
can build their unique brand; existence, purpose, identity, and connection. Together they make the
EPIC framework. This framework was developed by brand expert at Facebook. Facebook uses it, to
help its clients develop strong brands and prepare them for their social media presence. A
business's existence is how that business got started, and why the world should pay attention. This
includes the business's origin story, and what problem the founders were trying to solve. The
purpose of a business is not only what you do, but why you do it, including articulating a set of
values for the business. The identity of the business, is the visual look and feel from their logo, to
their color palettes, to the images they post on social media, to the typography they've chosen.
Finally, connection is how a brand connects with its customers through the written word. This
includes picking the right voice for the business. In our next lesson, we'll expand upon the elements
of the EPIC framework, and show you how to create a unique brand for a business of your own. But
first, let's listen to one of our colleagues at Facebook to get a better feel for their thinking behind the
framework, and the benefits they've seen when companies adopt it.

Play video starting at :2:7 and follow transcript

2:07
 My name is Marta Mateu, and I work as a global creative strategist at Facebook and Instagram and
creative shop team in New York. I'm originally from Barcelona, and I moved to New York three years
ago to join the creative shop team at Facebook and Instagram.

Play video starting at :2:31 and follow transcript

2:31

We were speaking with a lot of small businesses and we realized that one of the main challenges
that they were facing, was that they were starting to build their businesses and their brands in our
platforms, but they were not receiving any support that was telling them how to do that in a way that
would help them differentiate from the others. We also realized that they didn't have resources to
hire a branding agency that could help them develop their brands. They didn't have the knowledge,
they didn't know why it was important to develop a brand, and they didn't have the tools. They didn't
have any tools that could help them as well to develop that. After doing a deep exploration process
and getting feedback and insights from these businesses, we came up with the idea of building the
EPIC framework which it envelopes existence, purpose, identity and connection. These four pillars
are what we believe what a brand should have. The EPIC framework is composed about different
interactive activities that are very easy to follow for small businesses. That help them to end up with
their brand identity toolkit, and it helps them as well to build that confidence that they need in order
to build content for Facebook and Instagram and that will ultimately help them to drive business
results.

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4:11

Yes, so the way we develop projects at the creative shop team, is through following the explore,
experiment, and release process. The explore phase is where we meet with small businesses and
we try to gather insights and feedback from them to understand what are the challenges that they're
facing and what are the opportunities that we have in front of us to help them grow? After we do that
explore phase, we go through the experimentation, so we build a prototype, a solution and we
experiment with businesses to see if that's something that will help them achieve the goal that they
have and through that experimentation, we test and learn. The goal is to gather as well a lot of
feedback from them, in order to optimize the solution that we're building. Once we have that well-
developed, then the last phase is release, which means that the goal is to bring it to as many small
businesses as possible, so that not only a few of them can learn from it, but that we can reach
millions of small businesses that might need the solution that we are developing. The EPIC
framework was developed following this process of explore, experiment, and release. It stands for
existence, purpose, identity, and connection, and we believe that these four pillars are the pillars that
any business or any branch should follow in order to build a strong brand and bring it to life through
the digital world. Strong brands are important and social media can help you establish and solidify
your brand. To fully benefit from what social media can do for your brand, you should start with a
good articulation of what your brand is all about. Let's dive deeper into the EPIC framework to help
with that.

In the last video we looked at a specific framework Facebook developed that a business can use to
form its brand. It's called the EPIC framework and gives you four foundational stones on which to
build your brand, existence, purpose, identity, and connection. Now we'll look at these four building
blocks in a bit more detail, starting with existence in this video. Existence focuses on why your
business exists. There's brand value to be found in the reason why a business was created. Not only
when in where it was created, but what problem do business was trying to solve and who the people
 are who created it. Consumers today want to connect to the story behind the business, and you can
accomplish that by telling your origin story. An origin story is simply an account of how a business
got started. And a great origin story must include a few key elements, the people involved and a
problem to solve. Intelligentsia Coffee's origin story reads like this. The story begins in 1995, Doug
Zell and Emily Munch just wanted fresh roasted coffee, it was really that simple. After moving from
San Francisco to Chicago, they found that great tasting coffee in their new city was surprisingly
elusive. But instead of complaining or even worse, settling for bad coffee, they hunker down and
wrote the original business plan or what would become intelligentsia coffee. Let's look at some of the
elements of this origin story. First, the founders Doug and Emily are named, so immediately we have
a connection to real people. Second Doug and Emily encountered a problem, they couldn't find a
good coffee in Chicago. Third, they went about solving the problem. Instead of settling, they created
Intelligentsia to solve the problem they had. You may say that that's great and it's cool to hear about
their story, but how does it help create a brand? Because storytelling has the ability to create
connections in a way simple facts can't. If a business can get storytelling right, they have a huge
advantage over their competition. Because we as humans are wired for stories, we love hearing
stories, we love telling stories. We use stories for entertainment or for teaching, and we become
emotionally attached to stories. In fact, studies show that more areas of our brain light up when we're
hearing a story than we're just hearing information. And that when we hear stories, our brains
release certain chemicals responsible for empathy and connection. By telling a story, you not only
have signs on your side to create a connection with your customer, but your customer may see
themselves in your story. There's a powerful, I've been there to, elements that the origin story can
present. That connection can be solidified by having real people associated with the business
instead of a mysterious 'we', or worse yet, an impersonal the company. By telling a story, a customer
comes along with you for the journey. Now let's create an origin story for our business Calla &
Ivy, a flower business that specializes in handcrafted bookcase, founded by Emre. Imagine, she's
hired you to define her brand and create content for her website and social media presence. Starting
with the first piece of our framework, existence, let's put together an origin story. We want to focus
on three things. Who launched the business and when? What problem was trying to be solved? And
how did the business solve it? After talking with Imra and finding out a bit about her history and why
she created the business, we come up with this. Imra always loved flowers, and as a child would
pick them on hikes with her parents and braid them into crowns. But after graduating art school with
a degree in design, she was disappointed to see the same bland kind of bouquets being made
without any kind of artistic passion or unique design to them. So in 2010, Imra began her own flower
shop called Calla & Ivy. In order to offer the unique handcrafted design forward bouquets she
knew could bring joy and inspiration to people around her. After a short time, Imra's shop became so
popular that she expanded her presence online where customers can order her bouquets digitally
and also subscribe for regular flower deliveries. And while her store still exists, Imra uses it to
experiment with new ideas. The majority of her sales come from her website. And what is Calla
& Ivy? The name is a pairing of her favorite flower, the Calla Lily and the Ivy, she loved to braid
as a kid. Now that you know the importance of an origin story. You'll start noticing them more and
more on websites in advertising and on social media. Think about which ones resonate with you
most and ask yourself why?

Play video starting at :5:14 and follow transcript

5:14

The origin story is a way for brands to connect with customers and it is the core of the first
foundational element of our EPIC brand framework, Existence. In our next video we will look at the
Purpose or why businesses do what they do.
 The EPIC brand framework is a helpful tool that can guide you through developing a strong brand. It
has four main building blocks: existence, purpose, identity, and connection. We already talked about
existence and how having a creation story can help you establish that building block. Now let's talk
about purpose. By the end of this video, you'll know how to express why a brand does what it does,
and how that helps strengthen your brand. Purpose goes beyond the origin story to explore why a
business does what it does. Every business is built on a foundation of values and meaning. Today,
customers are seeking to engage with the brands they use, so it's important to articulate what you
stand for. In 2009, author Simon Sinek delivered a Ted Talk addressing this concept, stressing that
we don't buy what a business does, but why they do it. He used the example of computer companies
who tend to start by explaining what they do. "We make computers," and then they state their how,
"We make computers that are simple and attractive." Most companies don't articulate a why or
purpose, and expect to make sales just based on the what and how. Sinek then explained that Apple
does it in reverse. Apple begins with their purpose, to think differently. Then they move to their how,
"We think differently by making beautifully designed products." Finally, they end with a what, "We
happen to make computers." If a consumer has already connected to their purpose of thinking
differently, they'll buy the computers and any other product Apple may produce. By clearly stating
your business' purpose, values, and what you stand for, you're not only further connecting with your
audience, but you're further defining your audience, people who align with your vision. Another
example is Panera Bread, whose Our Beliefs section on their website states that, "We believe in
raising, serving, and eating food that is good and good for you." Because of this, Panera can make
decisions about elements of their business from their recipes to their suppliers based on their
purpose. Customers who want to eat clean, responsibly sourced food will be drawn to Panera. How
does a business actually articulate a purpose? There are a few different ways. Many businesses use
the prompt of, "We believe that," so if you're trying to create a purpose for your brand, jot down some
ways to complete that sentence. Brainstorm keywords around the ideas or topics you care about,
like clean eating, wellness, or even good design. Another way to articulate a purpose for your
business is to state what your brand isn't and what you don't stand for, which can help you articulate
what you do stand for. Let's get back to Imra over at her flower business. We want to help her clarify
her purpose, so we came up with the template to do just that. First, we start out with some of the
basics about Calla & Ivy. It's a flower business that provides flower subscriptions and flower
bouquets. Then we go on to ask what the business is fond of or enjoys. This may seem like an odd
question, but it gets not only to what a brand as a personality enjoys, but explains a bit more of the
vision for the brand's culture, and may give inspiration for social media posts or design for the
website. Here, Calla & Ivy is fond of summer, open fields, and urban biking. So you could envision
an Instagram post of a bike ride around the city with a Calla & Ivy bouquet featured prominently in
the bicycle's basket. Finally, we asked Imra what Calla & Ivy cares about. Beauty, sustainability,
friendliness, approachability, and creativity. We can now make branding decisions about Calla & Ivy
through this lens. Images chosen for the brand will focus on beauty and aesthetics. Flowers and
packaging will be chosen based on sustainability options. The voice of the business will be friendly
and approachable, and there will be an underlying sense of creativity and design innovation in both
the products offered and in their online presence. Customers who are drawn to creative design, who
may enjoy bike rides around the city, or who only shop at sustainable businesses will be drawn to
Calla & Ivy. Now that you know how brands state their purpose and can use that purpose to connect
with their customers, you'll see it everywhere, a Values or Beliefs section on a website, an email
newsletter that links to an article on social issue, or a higher purpose field to advertising.

Play video starting at :5:13 and follow transcript

5:13

Purpose is the second building block of our EPIC framework and its core to building a strong brand.
In our next video, we'll turn our attention to the visual look and feel of brands, or their identity.
 A strong brand gives you a real advantage when you're building a social media presence.
Facebooks EPIC brand framework can help you build or strengthen your brand. Remember that it
consists of four building blocks, existence, purpose, identity, and connection. By the end of this
video, you'll have a better understanding of what we mean by a brand's identity. And you'll know
what to focus on as you build your brand. Identity refers to the visual look and feel of the brand. This
includes the logo, the color palettes the business chooses. The aesthetic of the images to business
uses, and even the typography they choose.

Play video starting at ::48 and follow transcript

0:48

When we discussed in the previous lesson about a brand being an experience or an intangible
feeling, it's usually the visual identity someone is picking up on. Let's start with logos because they
tend to be the most recognizable and powerful aspect of a brand. For example, how many of these
logos do you recognize? If you recognize the number of them, You'll know how logos play a big part
of brand recognition. How many other logos do you wear on a T-shirt or a hat? Or maybe have
displayed on a bumper sticker that shows the power of brands to become an identity and a culture
for the consumers.

Play video starting at :1:28 and follow transcript

1:28

A logo captures the sense of the brands in one image. We won't go over every step of how a logo
was created, but logo creation combines all the things we've looked at. Origin story, problem solving,
purpose, values, and keywords associated with the brand. And uses those deeper elements to
inform the design. A logo must also communicate other aspects of the brands like innovation,
tradition or whimsy. Finally, what will a logo or a brand be without its signature color. You could
probably readily recognize Starbucks signature green color palette. You'd probably readily recognize
Facebook's blue as well, and Coke has its signature red label. But what if Coke had a yellow label? It
wouldn't be Coke then, would it? Or you wouldn't associate Coca Cola with yellow packaging? What
if Coke had blue label? Then, you'd confuse it for Pepsi. Curating a color palette for your brand isn't
only about having it be readily recognisable to your customer and differentiating from other products.
There's a lot of psychology behind color and color choices, and a color palette can set the tone for
your brand as well. Red is excitement, blue is trust, orange is fun, brown is natural, and black is
prestige. There doesn't necessarily need to be deep signs behind the color choices for your brand.
Pick a palette that feels right for your business. And use it to influence site design, advertising,
packaging and more. Imagery is another aspect of creating a brands visual identity. And this can
include the types of photos, visuals or illustrations a brand users on its website or in social media
feeds. This will not only evoke a feeling, but create a kind of ecosystem for that brand. For example,
Airbnb, the business that connects renters with guests, showcases beautiful photography of
locations on its social media feed. Instead of advertising cheap rental rates there featuring the
beauty and uniqueness of locations around the world, which will then inspire you to book a trip
through them. Finally, typography or the selection of typefaces and fonts that are business chooses
helps communicate its visual brand. Like a logo typeface is trying to capture the feeling and
association of the brand in lettering. And while business can certainly just pick a phone from the drop
down, a business wanting to be deliberate about its brand will be its story, values and purpose while
choosing their typeface. In many ways, a brands typeface will be as recognizable as it's logo. Look
at the New York Times and The New Yorker. Both are long, running, well respected New York based
publications. The New York Times uses classic straightforward type facing in its text. And its logo
 still features it's or original blackletter typeface which fits the New York Times as brand as a solid,
trusted purveyor of objective news. To New Yorkers typeface, however is curved. Each letter taking
up a different size, and is individual artistic and whimsical, much like the content of The New Yorker.
Let's get back to Calla and Ivy and help Emma create a visual identity for her business. The good
news is that we've already done a lot of work to help us establish a visual identity. In that we wrote
her origin story and we articulated to values of her business. First, let's make a logo which captures
the bouquets that Imra makes. The lettering in her business name is curved and creative,
communicating a kind of friendliness and approachability. Some of the key words that were
mentioned under the brand's purpose. Since this is a flower shop, it would make sense to choose a
color palette related to flowers or nature. We've chosen soft greens and teals which communicate
calm, serenity, and trustworthiness, but also suggests the brands value of sustainability. Finally, we
put together some images that will use as guidance for our social media feeds and website design.
Some of the images are of Imra's flower creations, highlighting her products and design. One is Imra
herself creating a bouquet showing the artisanal nature of the brand. And the final image is a
bouquet being given which communicates the inherent connection created by giving a gift of flowers.
Now we can use this visual identity to influence our design, branding, marketing and even everyday
business choices going forward. As we went through this lesson brands we didn't mention probably
came to mind as you thought about the logos, color palettes, imagery. And maybe even typography
of businesses you interact with our daily basis. Continue to take note of visual branding to inform
your future branding choices.

Play video starting at :6:42 and follow transcript

6:42

A brand's identity matters, it's how people recognize and remember brands. So, make sure to give it
some thought. Document your brands identity and then be consistent and stick with your choices.
We've now explored three components of our epic framework, existence, purpose and identity. In the
next video will turn our attention to the final component, Connection.

So we've come to our final video on the EPIC framework. Remember that this framework by
Facebook consists of four building blocks to help you develop a strong brand, existence, purpose,
identity and connection. This video focuses on the last portion of the EPIC framework, connection.
Connection refers to the voice and style your brand adopts in written and verbal communication. Like
the visual design choices we looked at earlier, your brand voice is built from understanding your
brand story, purpose and values. Also, like the visual design choices earlier, choosing your brands
voice will help create unique brand identity and literally and figuratively speak to your audience. First,
let's define what a brand voice is. Actually, the way I've been speaking to you this whole time is
through a deliberately chosen voice. But what if I used a different voice for this course? I could have
said, "Hello and welcome to our session on framework overview. Our previous lesson deconstructed
and distilled the elements traditionally attributed to brand creation. Yet, as technology continues to
evolve, both the form and function required to market in a capitalist economy will alter." Or I could
have said, "Hey folks, are you excited to learn about branding? This is going to be awesome, so let's
go!" Very different, right, aren't they? You probably figured out from that example the voice of your
brand is the way in which your brand speaks the words it uses, and feel it communicates. Should
your brand voice be authoritative and confident, friendly and personal, fun and quirky? Would your
brand suggest you peruse its website or check it out? Would your brand use short, pithy sentences
or long, more stylistic sentences? It comes down to what will resonate with your audience, but how
do you know what's going to resonate with your audience? This is where creating a persona for your
business comes in handy. Instead of thinking about their audience as a demographic, many
businesses create a persona or an example customer. So they can think about one person when
they're creating content. Let's create a persona for Calla & Ivy. We know who the target
 audience is, and we could think of the audience as being someone with money to spend on a
subscription, who appreciates flowers, who may be interested in sustainability, who probably lives in
the city. But see how hard it would be to narrow down a voice. Instead, let's think about Holly, a mid-
thirties professional with disposable income who works in the city, bikes to work to save the
environment. And loves having fresh flowers in her apartment. So she bought a subscription, she
also has a subscription for her office. Because she loves adding some organic aesthetic to her stuffy
workplace. Now we have a clear idea of who we're creating content for and which voice we'd use to
talk to Holly directly. Marketers create personas to help them imagine what their target audience is
really like. To personify the audience, helps to have everyone in the company imagine the same
person when they're working on marketing. And it helps to give you a persona a name, and a face.
You can add a picture of what your persona might look like. Once we have a persona, it's easier to
define our tone of voice. We can use this template to help identify the kind of voice we want to use in
our branding and that would resonate with Holly. Calla & Ivy would be a bit more on the serious
side, but not so serious as to turn away customers who want to connect with a real person. We've
already determined that we want to be friendly and approachable. So the brand voice would be on
the casual site. With a creative influence and inspiration in this business, we would certainly choose
our brand voice to be slightly irreverant, but not so irreverent as to offend. Finally, in a business that
thrives on connection, you would expect Calla & Ivy to have an enthusiastic voice as well.
Above all, always make sure your brand voice is authentic. As you can see from this example, if you
keep the persona in mind, it's easier to determine what tone of voice will help to make a real
connection. Let's look at two real life examples. First, here's Mailchimp, a brand that provides
software to help businesses send emails to customers. Here are two snapshots of their website, and
here is one of my favorite images from the site, the sweaty monkey finger. This is the image you get
right before you send out your email. This is the type of software that you can use to send out mass
emails. So I'm sure you can imagine how at times pushing the Send button gets a bit stressful. I
think they captured that feeling really well here. The way Mailchimp communicates in their text and
images is all part of their brand tone of voice. If I were to characterize them in our framework, I would
say the brand is funny but not so much that it is comical. They're a software brand after all. A bit
more casual than formal with some irreverence and they're enthusiastic but not extremely so. Now
let's look at Skittles, the candy. Here's their website and here's a screenshot of their Instagram
account. Skittles brand tone of voice is kind of out there. They are funny and quirky in an almost
absurd way. Here is how I would describe their tone of voice in our brand spectrum. I'd say they're
funny, very casual, definitely irreverent and very enthusiastic. So you can see how brands can really
differ in how they communicate and connect. Now that you have a sense of what voice is and how it
can be used, start looking for distinct brand voices in the businesses you interact with. You'll start
reading emails from businesses and social media posts differently and you may even start to wonder
if you're the persona that brand has in mind.

Play video starting at :6:32 and follow transcript

6:32

This may finish our look at the EPIC framework. And while the four aspects we looked at here,
existence, purpose, identity and connection will get your brand well established, there are many
other ways to create your branding. And many more strategies to sustain that branding once you
have it. Still, now you have a useful framework to carry with you, and I can assure you that this will
come in handy when you start creating content for your social media marketing. Whether it's organic
or free content, or advertising.

Congratulations, you've finished the first module in social media management. You now know how to
establish a business presence on social media and how to create a business account on Facebook,
Instagram, as well as many other platforms. You can also establish the foundation for an EPIC
 brand, by articulating a brand's Existence, Purpose, Identity, and Connection. Now, it's time to start
posting and connecting. Let's see how you can best manage all that in our next module. I'll see you
there.

Content is core to everything we do as individuals on social media, and that's no different for
businesses and their marketing. In this module, we're going to focus on the core building blocks of
great social media posts, the combination of text and images or video. By the end of this module,
you'll know how to create effective posts, how to optimize your texts, and how to add eye-catching
images and videos. We'll look at all this in the context of free or organic social media posts, but you'll
see later that the same building blocks apply when you create social media ads. So let's get started.

Why should a business create content for social media? Well, let's start with a story, Inu and Neko is
a dog and cat grooming business in New York City, run by lifelong pet lover Carlos. After settling in
the city with his wife and dog, he quickly grew frustrated with the lack of specialized pet grooming
services. So, Carlos started Inu and Neko, to provide personalized services to dog and cat owners
who value giving their pets a healthy lifestyle. Carlos opened a location, built a website, told his
friends about his new business, hang some flyers and waited. He figured his business would grow
by word of mouth. Pet owners especially dog owners, are always out chatting at the park, but New
Yorkers are busy, and many had their own grooming place already. So, Carlos started paying for
advertising which brought in some customers but wasn't cheap for a new business. If he couldn't
figure out how to bring in more clients soon, the dream might end before it truly began. One day one
of his customers asked him if he had seen the thread about organic pet food in the Greenwich
Village pet owners group on Facebook. They were wondering where to buy a certain kind of organic
food that you sell, she told him. You should jump on that and let him know. Carlos hadn't yet planned
out a social media strategy, but couldn't hurt to offer some advice. So he created an account for Inu
and Neko and started answering questions in the Facebook group. Someone asked him if he was on
Instagram, so he created an account and started posting photos, finding that ones he posted of the
client's dogs and cats, paired with a little story about them got the most likes. Carlos joined Twitter
and shared resources and blog posts about pet grooming and healthy lifestyles, and soon gained
hundreds of followers who are pet owners with the same interests and values as him and his
business. Carlos started making tutorial videos for YouTube and TikTok and began selling grooming
supplies on Pinterest. Soon, pet owners in Greenwich Village began booking appointments, not
because they saw an ad, but because they knew the story behind Inu and Neko. They knew the
values it stood for, saw Carlos as a knowledgeable expert in his field and wanted to partake in the
experience. So why should a business create content for social media? Because social media is
where the people are and where the conversations are happening. And as a business you want to
be in the midst of it. Gone are the days of a business gaining customers with the use of a TV spot
and a good Jingle, or making endless cold calls or sending mailers hoping the right person will see
your ad and take action. Carlos at Inu and Neko did these things, but it wasn't until he started
engaging with people on social media that he saw return. Because, once he started providing
content of value, answering pet owners questions, providing resources to his followers, sharing cute
pet pictures, his audience found him.

Play video starting at :3:11 and follow transcript

3:11

Like Carlos, we always want our business to focus on customer engagement, and social media can
help us achieve our engagement goals in four ways. First, social media content helps increase our
 brand awareness, recognition, and trust. We want people to know who we are and what we do. By
posting valuable content consistently, we show our customers that we're present and responsive,
which also builds trust as well. Social media is like an active, ongoing conversation. And if we are in
the conversation, people will notice us, become more familiar with our voice, learn what content we
tend to post and may like, comment or even follow us. Second, social media content provides value
for our customers or followers. This could be by letting them know about the product that will help
them, sharing information that will inform them or telling them a story that will inspire them. By
providing valuable content instead of sales pitches, followers know that the business sees them as
humans to interact with. Valuable content should be shareable as well, so the sharer can provide
their followers something of value too. Social media content allows us to connect with our customers
and help them. Social media is a great tool to use to connect with people on a relatable, authentic
level. By sharing our businesses stories, photos of our employees or behind the scenes video,
followers are able to identify with and relate to our business. Because they see the human side of it,
even through posting reactions to pop culture that may not even relate to our industry, businesses
are signaling that there are people behind the accounts. Social media also provides a great
opportunity for real time customer service as well. Fourth, social media content gets people to
become customers, fans and advocates. We want customers to purchase or interact with our
products or services, but we also want them to become our biggest fans. Social media is a great way
to create initial awareness for customers, and once they follow us, we can engage with them, with
valuable, relevant content. They can buy our products and services through social media, and
contact us for help. Once they become loyal fans, they will then share our content with their followers
and become new cheerleaders for our brands. With these benefits in mind, let's take a closer look at
how interactions on social media work.

So how do you create a social media post? Easy, pull out your phone, dash off a few sentences, and
hit send. But as a social media manager, you don't necessarily want easy or quick, you want to
create thoughtful and deliberate content for your audience. We've already talked a bit about why it's
important to engage on social media. Now, let's look at the element that makes up the most
important piece of your social media strategy, a social media post. Before we start creating, there's
some prep work that we need to do. If you completed course one of this specialization, you will have
all the preparation you need. Here's what you need. First, we need to have a solid understanding of
our brand. Knowing your brand's values, identity, and voice, will help you determine what kind of
content you want to create, that will align with your brand. Make sure that your business has done
the work of establishing its brand first, and our previous lesson on branding can help you with that.
Second, we need to establish some goals for our social media posts. Even though it may just be a
one-off post, any piece of content is always part of a greater strategy. Do you want to let people
know about a new product? Do you want to get followers to sign up for a newsletter? Do you want to
educate your followers about something in your industry? Even a simple posts that comments on an
event or something in pop culture, is still working to engage your audience, and raise awareness for
your brand. Ideally, you've written down the SMART goal for your campaign. That means a goal that
is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. If you need a refresher on how you
can formulate your SMART goal, we covered it extensively in our first course. Next, who's your
target audience? You should know your target audience already. So ask yourself, who's the
audience for your post? Finally, which social media platforms do you want to post on, and how will
you approach this? Platforms have different requirements for posts, like character limits or video
only, and generally have different cultures. While it's a great idea to re-purpose content on multiple
platforms, you may need to rewrite or rethink it based on the platform.

Play video starting at :2:37 and follow transcript

 2:37

Now that you've all the prep work done, you can begin to create a post. Let's take a look at the key
elements that make up a great social media post. Even though we just said that no two social media
platforms are alike, social media posts across most platforms generally have the same basic
elements: text, images or video, hashtags or mentions, and a call to action with a link. In later
lessons, we'll go deeper into each of these, but for now, let's look at how they work together to
create a social media post. Regardless of the social media platform, text is probably going to be a
necessary and important piece of your social media post. It'll be how you tell your origin story, how
you talk about your new product, how you state your values, how you respond to a follower, or how
you make a call to action. Remember, don't just list facts, tell a story as your follower is much more
likely to remember it. Even on more image-heavy social media platforms like Instagram, you still
need to use your text as a caption. A social media post with an image or a video is a great way to
catch someone's attention as they're scrolling. In fact, content with a visual image with it, gets more
engagement, more shares, and is remembered longer than content that's text alone. Images or
videos are another way to tell the stories about your business, and are also a great way to create
brand awareness by showing off some of the brands visual identity, like a logo or color palette. A
social media post often contains hashtags, which are words or phrases proceeded by a hashtag that
associate posts to specific subject matter categories, so that the post is easily findable within that
hashtag category. You might also use a mention, which is a user's name proceeded by an at that
tags them in a post, or lets them know you've mentioned them. These simple additions provide a lot
of leverage to your content, getting found, and getting shared. A great use of social media is a call to
action, which usually consist of pointing followers toward content on your website, like a product
page, a blog post or an article. Social media posts should include an obvious link where there needs
to be one, so that customers can follow where you're leading them.

Play video starting at :5:9 and follow transcript

5:09

You now know what the core elements of a social media post are. Now, let's take a look at how this
works in practice on Facebook.

What's on your mind? We've probably all seen the prompt on Facebook and have contributed our
fair share of thoughts, location check-ins, shared articles, event photos, and food pictures over the
years. In our last video, we talked about some of the basic elements of a social media post. Now
we're going to look at how to create a social media post on Facebook, not just as an individual, but
as a thoughtful and deliberate social media manager. Let's log on to Facebook and pull up the home
screen for our business page. I'm logging on to the Facebook page of Calla & Ivy, the flower
business we've talked about before. If you haven't worked with a business page before, you'll see
that there are many more tools for insights, engagement tracking, and resources for your business
on your dashboard. If you're an individual user, you can bounce back and forth between your
personal profile and the business page on the side menu. Scroll down to the box with a button,
Create Post. Before we press that, you'll see that there are some shortcuts beneath. Photo/Video will
prompt you to upload one of those visuals. Check in will let you search for a location. And
Feeling/Activity will bring you to the emoji picker. You can access these options through the Create
Post menus as well. Click on Create Post. Remember in our last lesson, we looked at the four major
components of a social media post. This is where will add all that content which includes text,
images or video, hashtags or mentions, and a call to action and a link. And as you can probably
already see, Facebook gives us a lot more options to play with as well. Let's write something, but
first let's think back to our prep work. What goals are we trying to achieve with our post? What
audience are we trying to engage with? What's our brand voice? And what kind of post do we want
 to create? We'll create a simple post this time, so we can focus on the functionality of posting. Let's
share a new article that was just added to the Calla and Ivy website about how to care for fresh cut
flowers. First, enter some text. A good piece of advice is to keep it short and punchy, but also keep it
consistent with your brand's voice. I'm going to say five tips to keep your fresh flowers blooming. And
why Facebook's character limit is a whopping 63,206 characters, it's best to never go that long.
You'll find though that some posts warrant more words than others and that's fine. If you want to add
an emoji for some fun, you can click on the smiley face to access the collection. Next, we want to
mention the author of the article in our post and we can do so by typing @ and then typing their
handle, in this case Anke Audenaert. A list of handle suggestions will pop up and you can pick the
person you want to tag. By mentioning someone in your post, they'll be notified that you created it
and they can share it to their followers as well.

Play video starting at :3:20 and follow transcript

3:20

What about using a hashtag? Hashtags have traditionally been used much more broadly and widely
on other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. While you are able to add hashtags on
Facebook, hashtags aren't typically a major feature on Facebook. And if they see them, followers
may think you've cross posted something from another platform to Facebook. So I suggest you use
them if you feel they really belong. Because we want our followers to read our new article, we want
to include a URL of our article so followers can easily click through to it. Social media users are
savvy so no need to include the phrase click here. Just paste URL and when you do you'll see
Facebook creates a link preview that pulls metadata from your website. Here we have a big image,
the title of the article, and the website cleanly and prominently displayed. If we want to attach our
own image, we can get rid of the link preview by clicking the x in the upper right corner. Want a tip, if
your URL is long, messy, or you just don't want it on your post, once the link preview appears you
can delete your URL and the link preview will still remain. What else can we add? Right below the
text box, Facebook has a collection of Add to Your Post options. This can include adding a folder or
video, a feeling, a location check in, and other options such as the option to raise money for a
charity. Add videos for a watch party and even add the option for followers to buy gift cards. Ready
to post, before you do, you have the option to boost your post? Boosting a post turns your post into
an ad that will get shown to an audience outside of your followers. When you select Boost Post and
click Post, you'll have a menu of options to specify including who you want your audience to be, your
budget, and a duration of your ad. Don't worry if you don't choose to boost your post now, you can
always go back and boost it later. You learn all about advertising on Facebook in our next courses,
so for now we will keep this as an organic post. Now you're ready to post, click Post or you may
decide to post later. Facebook also allows for scheduling your posts, which is available under your
businesses publishing tools section. This allows you to create content well in advance and schedule
it to target specific dates like holiday or the day of an event. Facebook also gives you the option to
create other kinds of posts, like items for sales listing, or a fundraiser post, or an event. Facebook
also offers you the ability to publish stories to Facebook from your business page. Just know that
you can only do this from the Facebook mobile app. Looking for a more personal way to reach your
audience? Facebook also allows you to go live where you can broadcast video and interact with your
audience in real time.

Play video starting at :6:26 and follow transcript

6:26

Now that you know the basics of a Facebook post, let's jump to Instagram and create a post there.
When Instagram emerged, it was a different kind of social media, one that suddenly allowed
everyone to be a photographer, millions of selfies later, and it still stands as the foremost image-
centric social media platform. Let's learn how to create a post for Instagram. Open up Instagram. If
you're not there already, select your business account. I'm using the business account for Snackwall
here, the snack subscription service from DCB Cleaning. To create a post to appear on the news
feed, we're going to simply tap the Plus in the center. Instagram will default to our camera or photo
library where we can take or choose a photo for our post. Instagram will also let you take a
boomerang video, which takes a video and places it on a back and forth loop. You also have the
option of creating a collage of photos or adding up to 10 photos per post. Now let's create a post. But
first, we'll think back to our prep work. What goals do we want to achieve with our post, and what
kind of posts do we want to create? In this case, I want to create a post that will help James
introduce Snackwall to customers so he can start to generate some awareness. We'll just do one
photo right now, but a multiple photo post might work as well for this. We'll tap the Plus button and
add the photo we want. Let's select a photo that shows the appeal of Snackwall. When you're done
choosing your photo, click Next. Unlike Facebook where you can add what you want all at once,
Instagram will guide you through the posting process. The next screen is where you'll be able to edit
your photos for brightness, contrast or vibrancy. You can let Instagram do the photo editing by
choosing a filter along the bottom, or you can tap the "Lux" wand at the top of the screen for an auto-
tuning of the photo. Or you can edit a photo yourself in the edit screen, where you can alter the
contrast, saturation or color, add a vignette border or a tilt shift to focus on a specific part of the
image. Remember that you want to catch a scrollers eyes with well taken, sharp, uniquely edited
images. When you're done, click Next. Now's the time to create our caption. While Instagram will let
you write a long 2,200 characters, captions are truncated after 125 characters and followers will
need to tap a Read more to get the rest of the caption. As we write, let's think about our brand voice
and the personality of our business. We might write treat your employees to office snacks they can
look forward to. Now's the time to add our hashtags, which will tag our post with a category and
make it more findable. Simply type in hashtag and some words. Instagram has a handy feature that
will auto-suggest hashtags and show you their frequency of use so you can pick one that's more
likely to get to the public eye. Remember that users can not only search hashtags, but can follow
hashtags like they can follow users. While Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post, we don't
advise using that many. Now, include any mentions or tagged user accounts in the caption. For
example, any media that might be covering your event or people or products in your photo, this will
alert them that they've been mentioned in your post. I don't really need to add anyone for this post
but I could add Aptly, our company here for instance. Now would be the time to add a link to the
Snackwall website so people can learn more about it. But Instagram does not allow you to add
hyperlinked URLs in the caption copy. You could certainly add it, but your followers wouldn't be able
to tap it nor could they highlight it to copy it into their browser. They would have to physically type
your URL in. Instagram does however, allow you to have a link in your bio where businesses can link
to their website or to specific URLs. Often people will just add link in bio to their post, and that's what
I'm going to do here. Now that we've created our caption, let's fill out some other information. You
can tag the people in your photo which will let them know you posted about them, same as a
mentioned. Add your location to link your business to a map. Instagram also gives you the ability to
post photos to multiple Instagram accounts, or to post out to linked accounts such as Facebook,
Twitter, or others. Just be aware that photos and captions may be truncated and add mentions may
not be the same on other sites. Click Advanced settings to alter your commenting, let followers know
 that this is sponsored content, set automatic Facebook posting, and write some alt text or text that
describes what can be seen in the images you used. Ready to post, click Share and it'll immediately
go live to the newsfeed. Notice a typo or want to add a hashtag, tap on the ellipsis in the upper right
corner to make alterations. You cannot schedule your posts with the Instagram app. For that, you
would need to create your posts in another tool instead. We will look at how to use those tools later.
Now let's create an Instagram story. From your Instagram homepage, simply swipe right and stories
creation screen appears. This screen allows you to post a photo, take video, add filters, and post
polls and interactive questions, add stickers, hashtags, mentions, and more. Instagram also offers a
live feature which allows you to interact in real time with your audience, answer questions, and
conduct interviews, and even host a fundraiser where viewers can donate right through the app. Our
Facebook and Instagram examples are just two platforms of the many you can use to create unique,
relevant, fun, and engaging content for your audience. Next, let's explore what you can do to make
the components of your post as effective as possible. We'll start with the text.

A picture speaks a thousand words, and there's no doubt that we're living in a visual world. With this
in mind, you think we've left the written word in the past. But words are still crucial for
communication, and play an essential role in many different ways in social media. In this video, I'll go
through tips you can use to make your words effective when you create social media posts. First,
make sure you're writing is in line with your brand's voice. Think back to the epic framework lesson,
and how you can create a brand for your business. We talked about your brand's voice, or the way
your brand's personality talks. You'll remember this framework we used to specify a brand's voice. If
your brand is more professional than serious, then you'll want to choose words and phrases that
present that kind of personality, like using the word discuss, instead of chat. Minimize the use of
exclamation points, or using longer, more well crafted sentences. If your brand is more fun,
personable, maybe addressing a younger crowd, you might use words like chat, instead of discuss,
write shorter phrases, and use more exclamation points, and add more slang. You can see the
difference in these two posts, for example, both from literary organizations, but with very different
social media voices. Make sure your brand voice is consistent across your communication. Next,
consider what story you want to tell with your post. Note that I didn't say what information do you
want to give? Remember that science is on our side when telling a story. Readers or listeners will
remember story better, and respond to it more fully than just data points. So use your words, the text
in your posts to tell your story. How can you do that? Try to use what we call the hero's journey.
You'll recognize the story, a person, or character, or hero of our tale goes on a journey to confront a
problem, and then ultimately solves it. If you're trying to come up with good, engaging, emotional
content, use the hero's journey to tell the story to connect your audience to your brand. You'll see
the structure used often in stories shared on social media. Our business was doing its thing, but one
day, something changed, and we did the following to address the change. You're telling your follower
about a heroic journey your business went on to face and overcome a challenge.

Play video starting at :2:43 and follow transcript

2:43

My next step relates to how you address people. We know that people genuinely like attention
focused on them. Capitalize on that by utilizing the word you, and you'll have a powerful engagement
tool as you write. For example, a coffee shop could write "buy a coffee". Or they could write "you
want a coffee, don't you?" That "you" creates an immediate engagement with the audience.
Similarly, stay away from listing things about your products and services. And list how you're going
to help your customer improve their life, or reach a goal. For example, a health tracking app could
say "our app can do all these things." Or it could say "you want to get healthy, and our app can help
you achieve your goals." Once you start noticing this use of you, you'll start seeing it everywhere,
and you'll notice when brands don't do it. Did you know there's another example of engagement in
the last segment? Not only that we use the word you in the example, you want to coffee, don't you?
We asked a question. Questions are another great tool to catch a readers attention, and get them to
interact with your post. You can ask a rhetorical question, or you might ask followers to write their
answers in the comments, or use a poll on an Instagram story, for instance. It's a way to get
customers thinking about the problem you're going to solve for them. For example, is your current
methods of doing XYZ just not working? It's also a fun way to build engagement, and you'll see
brands simply asking followers questions, or doing trivia. Questions are also great if you're short on
space, like on Twitter, or with images like you see here in Blue Apron's post. What did you cook this
weekend? Always make sure to include a clear Call-to-Action, or CTA in your post. These days,
social media users are accustomed enough to know to click links when given. So you may never
need to right click here. But look for places where you can put an action forward CTA, like start your
free trial today, or join the club. Next, make sure your post utilizes active voice, like we can help you,
instead of you can be helped by us. Also, use strong, confident words like we can help you, instead
of we might be able to help you. Get straight to the point. Users are scrolling fast. Try using a tool
that can help maintain an active voice, as well as checking your spelling, grammar, and punctuation
is free of errors, like Grammarly, for instance. You may not think this is incredibly important,
especially for an informal social media post. But a professional business posting copy with errors will
lose brand credibility incredibly fast. Up to this point, we've talked about techniques related to
crafting the body of your posts and captions. But don't forget the importance of other words as well,
including the use of hashtags, mentions, and URLs. They take much less copywriting finesse to add
to your post, but there's still text. Hashtags can be really helpful to make your post surface in search.
And as we said before, make sure to include relevant hashtags, but don't overdo it. I suggest
keeping the number of hashtags under ten if you can. And if you decide you need to add many
hashtags, separate out the body of the copy from the hashtags, so you don't overwhelm people and
make your posts hard to read. Quick tip, on Instagram, if you want to post a group of hashtags
without detracting from your caption, hide it on the bottom of your caption by adding rows, like you
see here. You have to add rows using periods. You can just hit Return. Sometimes, words may not
easily express what you want to say. Emojis are a great way to add some emotion to your text and
catch attention. And they're definitely part of the social media marketing lingo. You can also try to
emphasize text with special fonts. But again, don't overdo it. Posts full of emojis, exclamation marks
and bold text can actually mask what you really want to say, and they can be difficult to read. I think
that with these steps, you'll create great copy for your posts. And don't forget the old adage goals
that writing is in the revision. So take a look back through your post, and see if you can tweak the
voice. Add a question, or make it engage your followers more. You may even want to draft a few
copies of your post, knowing that subsequent drafts might read better, and resonate stronger than
the first one you crafted. Now let's take a look at how you can accompany your post with great
images.

As we've seen in the previous video, you need to be thoughtful and deliberate about crafting the
writing in your post. Well, the same is true for the images you choose and how you present them. By
the end of this video, you'll know what to keep in mind as you select the images for your posts.
Across social media platforms, users understand that attaching an image to their post will help
capture the attention of users scrolling through their feed. Actually, a tweet with an image gets three
times more engagement than just a text tweet. And a Facebook post with an image gets 2.3 times
the engagement. Additionally, a LinkedIn post with an image is 98% more likely to get a comment.
And the key thing to remember, you want to catch a users attention with your image by making it
unique and standout. Let's go over some tips that can help you with that. First, let your brands visual
identity guide your image choices. Remember how we discussed the visual identity as part of the
epic brand framework? This guide on colors and image types that fit your brand can help you when
it's time to select the image for a post. For example, a fashion company may want to show visuals of
its products. A data company may want to show fun charts and infographics. And a community-
based organization may want to show images of people. As we mentioned in our last video, stories
are a powerful way to get your message across and images are great to support your story. For
instance, if you're posting about summer camp for kids and how great your camps are to help kids
unwind and make new connections. You can support your story with a picture that really captures
the essence of that story. To do that, you want to make sure that your photo is going to
communicate a clear story and is easy to understand. For example, don't choose a sweeping shot of
the campsite with dozens of people in the photo. There would be too much going on, and the viewer
may scroll by, or if they stop, they may not understand the story. Instead, choose a photo of a few
friends roasting marshmallows around the campfire. It simple, individual and it tells the story. Let's
go through some ways to compose your image so it will look professional and eye catching. The first
technique is to use the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is simply the idea that if you break up your
image into thirds, horizontally and vertically, your subject should be placed at the intersection of one
of the grid lines, not directly centered. Similarly, if you're taking a shot of a landscape, you either
want to have 2/3 land in 1/3 sky or 2/3 sky, 1/3 land. Having the subject slightly off from center
actually makes it more noticeable and is more appealing visually for our eyes. There may be times
though when you want to post a perfectly symmetrical photo, which can also be visually pleasing
and starkly unique at the same time. This works especially well with architecture and city scapes.
While Instagram no longer hosts in app grid lines, you can turn grid lines on for your phone's camera
in the settings. Next, we want to make sure that we have good light. If at all possible, use natural
light for your photograph. Photographers call the time around sunrise and sunset, the golden hour
because the light then is softer and more angled, giving you better light and shadow contrast. Also
make sure your exposure is balanced by tapping on your screen as you're lining up your photo.
Tapping on dark areas will cause the photo to lighten and tapping on light areas will cause the photo
to darken. While you can change much of the lighting appearance in the editing tools, it helps to
capture a good image to work with first. If you want to have the viewer focus on a subject, put some
space around it to set it apart and become the focal point. This will help you simplify your post as
well. Experiment with different kinds of angles as well. A shot from below or an aerial view, that
shows us a different viewpoint than what we normally see at eye level. It can capture a user's
attention and make your shot much more appealing. Also include lead lines or lines in the
photograph that draw the eye towards the subject and to tell the viewer what to look at. It can be as
simple as a path leading to a subject, lines on a tablecloth or an inserted arrow. It helps to guide
people to focus on what you want them to see. Finally, don't forget to add some alt-text for your
photos, which is simply a description of what's in the photo for anyone who may be visually impaired.
Once you've captured your image, you'll want to do some further editing to make it really stand out. If
you have and know how to use professional editing tools, then use them. There are also a number of
in-app and third party editing tools that will touch up your photo for you or apply a cool filter. Or you
can do it yourself with your phone's camera tools. Pictures aren't the only images you'll find included
in social media posts. Infographics, charts, graphics, images with text on them, cartoons. They all
serve a purpose in catching someone's eye and function as unique content that represents the
brand. Don't think you're just limited to photos. Adding a visual to your social media post has been
proven to increase engagement. An image can tell a story much faster and much more complete
ways than text alone can. And our visual attachments to the image can help us to remember better.
So it's important to give some thought to the image you post and make sure it's aligned with the
story you want to tell and a brand image you want to convey. In our next video we'll look at videos
and their role in social media posts.

There used to be a time and only those with the right equipment could make a video. Today, anyone
can demonstrate their creativity and tell a story through a video captured by their phone in their
pocket. Video has become one of the key elements of social media content strategies and is a great
tool to use to increase engagement and tell a story. Videos can also be more personalized, which
builds engagement and trust with the viewers. We know that there are whole social media platforms
dedicated to video storytelling. Video may take a little bit more time and thought to create, but the
returns are worth it. Tweets with videos received 10 times more engagement. Instagram videos get
twice as much engagement and follows. Video is the best-performing posts on Facebook and in
2018, 81 percent of the 500 best-performing Facebook posts were video. Let's go over a few tips
that can help you create effective videos for social media. Before creating your video, you want to be
particularly conscious not only of what goal you're attempting to meet with it, but also what platform
you're creating it for. Most social media platforms have the ability to post video. Some like TikTok
and YouTube are exclusively made for video, but it's a video the right choice for what you're trying to
say. Also, before you begin, you need to know the platform well enough to make sure that your video
will fit in. Even though you might be creating a video for the same business to one for Instagram and
one for TikTok will likely be very different. Be sure to know the video limits as well and what the ideal
length for each platform. While Facebook and YouTube have high caps for the length of videos, the
idea length is much lowered, just two minutes for YouTube and one minute for Facebook. Twitter
caps video at one minute, but a bit shorter is ideal. Instagram caps at 30 seconds with longer videos
reserved for IGTV and TikTok videos are between 15 to 60 seconds. As you know, storytelling is
key, and that's especially true for video. You're able to easily tell a story, but words, but you miss out
on any visuals while images provide visual context and a lot more information in one photo they're
static. With video, you not only have dialogue, but the movement and actions to go with it. Video can
be used for all different storytelling on social media. Make a tutorial video showing viewers how to
use a product or how to make something. You can use video to make a quick explainer video or
share some fun facts. Use video as a behind the scenes look or for a virtual tour, for instance, post a
video of an interview. You can even post a video simply for entertainment. To create and optimize
your video content, the same principles we talked about with creating a photo apply. Make sure your
subject matter is clear and easily understood and make you subject the focus of your video. Make
sure you have good lighting, natural light works best. If it's not possible, see whether you can add
some extra lights to brighten the scene. Sound is important too, try to get highest quality sound
possible and you might even consider using an extra microphone. Don't forget to stabilize your
camera as well and if necessary, use a tripod. Most people are going to be viewing your video on
their phones, so while you might be tempted to shoot in cinematic landscape, you should be
shooting in portrait or vertical. Make sure to optimize your content for mobile. In fact, TikTok won't
reorient from portrait. Familiarize yourself with platform specs to make sure you're uploading the
right dimensions and file size. Front load your video and try to catch attention in the first five
seconds. This holds true for any storytelling, but the goal is to catch viewers attention and make
them stop scrolling and since most videos on social media platforms autoplay, you want to catch
their attention quickly, add some movement and jump right into the story. Depending on the
platforms, video length limits, you may not have time to spare, 65 percent of viewers who have their
attention captures in the first three seconds will continue watching. While autoplay can be a great
thing to catch an audience's attention, as there is no added step to pick a video and press play.
Autoplayed videos are often played with the sound off. This means that it's even more important to
rely on the strength of your visual storytelling. As you're creating a video, consider shooting it so that
it's understandable without sound. One way to think of this is to plan for sound off and delight with
sound on. Work around no sounds by adding text or subtitles, viewers can still read the dialogue or
voice over if the video is on mute. Texts can also give an added emphasis along with voice over or
dialogue. Like adding alt text for images, it's good to add dialogue for anyone who might be hearing
impaired, make sure your video is closed captioned as well for accessibility. When you keep these
steps in mind, you'll be able to create videos that grab attention and work on social media and if
you're looking to create some unique, exclusive content for your followers, consider going live. Most
social media platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, have the ability to go live with streaming
video. You can conduct interviews, chat with your audience, answer questions from the comments,
and even post the call to action like a fundraiser while you livestream. Finally, remember to have fun
while posting video may seem like a formal structured endeavor with scripts and studios, social
media is full of everyday people comfortable with posting videos whenever and wherever about all
content and businesses are partaking in more informal and personal content as well, to connect with
their followers. Start experimenting with video in your social media strategy and see how it can make
your engagement stronger. You now have a good grasp on the core elements that go into posting on
social media. So it's time to put some of it into action. In the project that follows, you'll be creating
your own posts. Have fun.

Let's put everything together now and let's revisit Carlos at Inu and Neko. We're going to help him
put together some social media posts. We're also going to revisit Imra at Calla and Ivy and help her
put together some social media posts as well. Let's get started. What goals is Carlos working on for
Inu and Neko? He spent some time posting fun videos and tutorials in order to increase engagement
amongst his followers. Carlos just rolled out a new mobile app, which includes a scheduling tool, tips
on grooming, and pet health and more. He would love his followers to download the app and wants
to create some social media posts to get to word out. Carlos is going to post to his audience on
Facebook first. What kind of post should we create? How do we want to engage our audience? We
definitely want the outcome to be a call to action, to download the app. So we'll certainly include a
link. But is that it? From what we've learned, we know we should add an image or a video to catch
people's attention and we should tell a story if we're providing value and usefulness through the app,
not only helpful information, but an easier way to book an appointment, we might want to include
something addressing that in our post copy. Finally, what kind of content would fit with our brand
name? A few months ago, Carlos's niece began taking some pictures for her photography class of
Carlos and his dog Buster. Carlos posted them on social media platforms. They got a lot of likes
more so than some of his other posts. So Carlos called on his niece again to create more pictures.
Here are four photos his niece created for Carlos, all featuring Buster. That's going to be our
Facebook post. Carlos's niece created one image with four panels so that followers can see it as a
whole as they scroll through. The images together tell a story and the post is eye-catching. But let's
add more to it. For our text, let's think about how to be short and engaging. Thinking back to what we
learned about creating post copy, this is a perfect opportunity to present the problem and offer a
solution. But we don't want to get too salesy by listing all the features of the app. We certainly could,
but we want to connect on a personal basis and offer a solution to a problem like one handed
appointment booking. Let's write this to go along with the pictures. Us pet owners know, book your
next grooming appointment with one hand, download our new mobile app today. This simple post,
plays of the images relates to the followers experience, uses the word "you" to connect with them,
and has a clear call to action. Then we'll add a link to the website where we have more information
about the app and links to all the mobile app store where we'll host it. Once they're on our site, they
may look around. Let's add some other information. Let's include an ad mentioned to the owner of
the Facebook group where we first started posting, because we know they will then share it with the
group. Let's add our location so that followers can see our business name again. Finally, we want to
post it when most followers are on Facebook and are going to see it, possibly in the early evening
right after followers get back from walking their dogs. The content is fun and eye-catching. It's
relatable and shareable. Dog owners are going to want to share this with other dog owners. Let's
create a Facebook post for Calla and Ivy, our flower subscription business from our previous
lessons. Imra has started a blog in order to share her experience, expertise, and creative insights
with the world, and wants to promote her news post, a guide to giving flowers at the holidays. Imra's
goal is readership, but of course, she has links to holiday bundles she sells in the article. So
readership could convert to sales as well. Already we know we want to include a link to the article
and position it as being a solution for clueless gift givers. Let's create our post. We'll be telling our
story in writing this time and we want to start with an eye-catching headline. Looking for the perfect
gift, might be a good first draft, but it's been said before and probably won't catch anyone's attention.
What about, "Give them a gift no one else will think of." Its straightforward, confident has an implied
"you" to speak to the audience and suggests a solution to a problem the follower may have. I've run
out of unique gift options before. Then, something like our guides to holiday flower giving will make
sure that this year your gift is the favorite. Everyone wants their gift to be the favorite at the holidays.
So we've played on a bit of emotion there. Now we want to add our link to the post and since we
have a beautiful image into blog post, we don't have to worry about adding another image, it will
automatically come up. Note that the image has a clear subject, is valid, is colorful, and eye-
catching. Let's add some hashtags. Since we know they've worked for us in the past. Holiday gift
guide, holiday flowers, unique gifts. Let's add our location as well so people can see the business
name again. This post, does the greatest thing you can do to engage with your customers. It
provides them value by giving them advice on how to purchase flowers and give them as gifts. Imra
will be able to track who clicks through the blog post and who then buys holiday packages from that
post. But even if someone doesn't buy this time, they may remember the blog post at the next
holiday. Because her content is valuable, it increases brand trust, awareness and loyalty. The
content is definitely sharable as well. These are just a few of the many, many approaches we could
take to creating content for these two businesses for Facebook. Will they work? Carlos and Imra will
have to utilize their tracking and analytics to see. But what we've done is create thoughtful posts that
align with the brand, work to achieve goals, are eye-catching and unique, and will help further each
brand. Let's create a post for them on Instagram next.

Now, let's help Carlos and Imra create posts for their businesses' Instagram accounts. Carlos is
always working to increase engagement with his followers and raise his brand's awareness. Carlos
also knows that his audience is different on Instagram. It's a mix of people from the neighborhood.
But unlike Facebook, which tends to be a more local audience for him, Instagram has people from
across the globe. They tend to follow him for fun pet pictures and short tutorial videos on grooming,
and while they may not be in-person clients, he knows he gets e-commerce traffic from Instagram. A
local animal rescue shelter was in danger of closing, so Carlos and few others pet grooming
businesses decided to host a fundraiser, $10 dog washes in a local park. Carlos knew it would be a
fun, well-attended day and a great opportunity to showcase Inu and Neko in the local community as
well. He hired the photographer to take photos to use for social media. Let's create Inu and Neko's
fundraiser post. We're going to use Instagram's option to let us post several photos at a time in a
carousel, so that we can really showcase the event. The photographer grabbed some great shots of
the crowds, and of dogs having fun in the suds. Since our first photo is going to be the cover or the
photo people scrolling through their feed will see, we want it to be fun and action filled. So let's add
in our photos. The photographer did a great job of capturing our subjects and editing the photos but
we'll do a little adjustment and touch-up in the editing settings on the next screen. Actually, let's put
them all through the same filters like this. Next, we're going to use our caption to tell the story of the
day in the form of a hero's journey. The animal shelter was in danger of closing, but Inu and Neko
knew they could help, they got together with other businesses, to host the fundraiser and raised
$10,000. We could start it off with an attention getting first line like, "Dog groomers to the rescue!"
Don't be afraid to use a higher word count on a post like this since we want our audience to know the
story and know our involvement as well. Since hashtags are part of Instagram's culture, let's add
hashtags so our post can be found by other users. Let's add the animal shelter as I mentioned, as
well as the other pet grooming businesses so they can see that we feature them in a post. Let's add
the location of the park too, so anyone who may look up recent posts at a park will see our event.
Finally, we could also add a call to action like, "There's still time to donate! Go to the link in our bio!"
Who knows? We may collect further funds for the shelter from followers who may not be local, but
who may connect with our mission and purpose to help. Not every post needs a hard sell, or a call to
download, or buy something, what Carlos is doing through this post is not only creating more
awareness around his brand, but he's continuing a conversation with his followers and letting them
get to know the business of Inu and Neko. He didn't just post a bunch of fun pictures of soapy dogs,
but shows that his business takes care of the community it's in. By helping out the animal shelter, he
also communicated his brand's value of helping pets get rescued. He's building connection and trust
so that someone with a future pet grooming need will remember his brand and choose him over his
competitors. Lets now shift to help Imra, with an Instagram post for Calla & Ivy. As a flower business,
she's always offered customers the ability to customize a message of a note card in the bouquets
they send. Recently, Imra contracted with a local paper artisan to sell her small handmade cards.
Imra's goal here is easy. Let her followers know about her new line of cards that they can pair with
their flower orders. Imra takes a photo of few of the cards to show their handmade designs and fun
sayings. Let's create this post. We're again, going to take advantage of Instagram's multiple photo
option so followers can swipe through the collection. Another option would be to post one card each
day for a greater quantity of posts, and greater reach, and saturation in the newsfeed. It's something
Imra could also do, but we'll do the full collection today. Let's add in our photos and make any
brightness, contrast, or coloring tweaks we want in our editing tool. Next, let's use the caption to
announce the new stock of cards and call attention to it using something like, "Send the perfect note
with the perfect gift." Let's also add a little more about the local artisan who makes the cards. They're
not just cards Imra got from a wholesaler, but there are one of a kind gift. Let's add hashtags so that
this post can be found by other users. Let's add the card's creator as a mention, so that she can
know we tagged her in this post, and so that our followers can start following her business. Finally,
let's add our location so our followers can be reminded of our business. Even though this post may
seem to just showcase stock, it's doing a bit more here. This post shows that Calla & Ivy is making
business decisions that align with their values. Imra's an artisan making handcrafted bouquets, so it
would make sense to partner with another local artisan. This post also shows that Calla & Ivy values
and supports its local community which is a value that will resonate with its followers. It also
demonstrates that Imra wants to provide value for her customers by offering unique gifts. Again,
these are just two of the many types and flavors of posts we could create for these two businesses.
As you followed along, I'm sure you are thinking of different ways you could create them too. Take
what you've learned and start applying it to your social media posts today.

Congratulations, you've finished the social media content module in our social media management
course. You can now identify the core components in social media posts across platforms and you
know how to create effective posts. You know how to create posts for a business on Facebook and
on Instagram. You also know what to keep in mind as you create copy for your posts and you can
create images and videos for your posts like a pro. Next, we're going to look at how to best manage
all the great content you create.

As a social media marketer, you're going to post and manage a lot of content. So you'll need to
come up with ideas and find ways to produce effective posts and manage them. In this module, we'll
help you with that. We're going to look at different categories of content you'll typically encounter in
social media, we'll discuss ideas for things you can post about, and ways to create your posts. At the
end of this module, you'll also know how to create and manage a content calendar, and you'll learn
how to build a following and keep the conversation going on your social media platforms. Many
exciting things to cover. Let's get started.

There's nothing scarier than a blank screen when you sit down to write or create. Where am I going
to get the next idea for a post, will I run out of ideas, will they work, how do I tell a story in just a few
sentences, and how will I know it'll be interesting? There are big questions that can be daunting to
even the most seasoned social media managers. In this video, we'll give you an approach that can
help you decide what kinds of posts to create, how to create content that works with each platform,
and how to take the strain off of constantly creating new content by curating. We want to create
value for our audience on social media and create posts that will keep them engaged. So, What kind
of posts would be valuable to them? Engaging social media content typically falls into either one of
three categories. First, posts that are educational, that teach, update or inform. Second, posts that
are inspirational and feel good, or that move people to act. Third, posts that are fun and entertaining
and that present a brand in human and spirited way. Think about the posts you've liked or shared
recently, they probably fell into one of these three categories. As a first step in thinking about your
social media content, think about these categories and whether you can create content that falls into
either one of them. Before you start creating content, it's good to reflect on the format of your posts.
First, remember that there are two types of content that you can create for social media. You can
create organic content, which is content created for posts and tweets and where you interact with
your audience like a fellow user. You can build engagement and conversation through organic
content, it's also free. The other kind of content is paid content, like an ad or a paid sponsorship.
This type of content can specifically target certain demographics and will appear in users feeds who
meet your criteria. Page posts can help leverage the work you've done through organic interactions,
but for social media, which is based on social interactions, having only paid content might not be the
right approach. Knowing your platforms before you post is also key, as you want to make sure your
content looks native or that it fits in seamlessly into the culture. For example, a hotel posting a photo
of the beautiful view from a balcony would be seen as content native to Instagram, the hotel posting
an ad like you'd see in a Sunday flyer would not be. It's important to reflect on the platform where
you plan to post your content. You want to make sure that your posts fit in. What's considered native
content for each platform? In the first course in this program, we discussed the main social media
platforms in more detail and that probably gave you a good idea of what typical posts look like in
each of them. But let's look at a few more examples. Consider Facebook, your classic or baseline
 social media site where you can post different topics, like a community story, a business update, or
sharing an article with different formats like images or videos. Because Instagram is image forward,
your posts should be image forward as well. The same can be said for Pinterest. With Twitter,
images and videos are great to have, but the platform has always been text-based. LinkedIn is
focused on professional networking and industry news. TikTok is the fun video only site. Finally,
knowing your platform is especially important if you want to venture into niche social media spaces
like Twitch, DeviantArt, or Nextdoor.

Play video starting at :4:2 and follow transcript

4:02

We now know the three categories of content most engaging posts fall under and we know we have
to adapt our posts to the platform we plan to post in. But what should you post about? The challenge
is to come up with unique content for your audience, different ways of telling stories, and in different
formats. There are many different approaches you can take to your posts and we'll go through more
of those in our next lesson, but think about doing some of the following; share content from your
website, create a behind the scene video, showcase employees or members of your audience,
promote upcoming events, create content around holidays or events, make a tutorial video, engage
your audience with a question, have a giveaway or a contest, contribute to a hashtag challenge, post
inspirational quotes, go live, showcase a new product. As you can see, there are a lot of different
kinds of creative pieces of content you can post, and there's much more that your business could
come up with as well. The important thing is to remember to try different topics as sticking to one
type of post will get old quickly. In our next video, we'll go deeper into the different content
approaches.

Play video starting at :5:21 and follow transcript

5:21

If we're suppose to post at least once a day or more, depending on the platform, where are we
supposed to come up with all that content? Well, the good news is that you don't have to create new
unique content for each one of your posts. Much of your content can and should be curated from
other people. Curating content created by other people that you can share with your audience is an
important part of your content strategy. This can be articles, news updates, stories, videos,
infographics, really anything, and it can come from websites, other social media accounts, or users.
There are a few reasons why you should share curated content. It shows that you're in the
conversation on social media. And sharing and commenting creates the interlocking nature of social
media. It also shows you know what's going on in your industry and positions you as an authority if
you share valuable content about the industry to your users. It's also a way to show other
businesses or organizations in your industry that you are there and they may share your content in
return, which is a way to grow your audience. Finally, it takes the pressure off you having to create
more content, but curating content to share takes some effort as you do need to keep on top of
who's posting what in your industry. As you grow your presence in your space, you'll find other
trusted businesses like you, whose content you keep going back to, so share that content with your
audience. For example, a bookstore may share other bookstore's recommendations or a publishing
house may share content from the New York Review of Books, for instance, or other literary
websites and organizations. Additionally, keep an eye on news, magazines, and newsletters. Set
Google Alerts to flag you for content, or use a curation app like Feedly or Pocket to gather different
articles and posts you want to share. When you do share a piece of content, don't just put it out there
without context, write why you like it, quote it or ask a question about it, and don't forget to tag the
content creators. This shows you know how social media works and that you want to start a
conversation. Part of your curated content should also be sharing what your audience is doing or
sharing customer generated content. By sharing their content, you show that you're paying attention
to your followers and add a little humanity to your brand by showing your brand's greater culture.
Don't forget that if you're stuck for ideas, you can always repurpose content as well. Go back to
some old blog posts or articles and repromote them. Have a report that your business generated last
year, pull out some nuggets and create content around them. You can even share content across
other channels you didn't share to in the first place. We'll take a closer look at different topics of
social media posts in our next lesson, but hopefully you're already thinking about different
approaches to your social media content, and a blank screen is a little less daunting.

It can be daunting to try to come up with new content that's engaging, informative or fun on a daily
basis, but there are many different topics you can post about, and we're going to take a look at a
number of examples to give you some inspiration for your future posts. Share content from your
website, like a blog post, an article, or a podcast. It's useful information your audience would be
interested in. So share it, write a summary and include the link or instead of a summary, take a
quote from the post you're linking to. Here's an example from the Harvard Business Review. They
published an article focused on applying for jobs in which they highlight that you don't need to meet
all the qualifications asked for, before you apply for a job. They posted this highlight on LinkedIn.
Great advice by the way. Here's another example from Microsoft Teams. They wrote a blog post on
how you can use background effects in online team meetings, and they tweeted about it in this post.
Create a behind the scenes post of your workplace so your audience can get a peek behind the
curtain, give a tour of your stock room or your kitchen, for instance. Or show behind the scenes of
how you're putting together an upcoming event. Or show a day in a life of an employee, so that your
audience can get a feel for the other side of your business. Feeling adventurous? Do your behind
the scenes video on live. SpaceX, for instance, will often give you a glimpse behind the scenes on
their Instagram account. Here's an example from City Winery Boston on Facebook about what is
going on during harvest time. Speaking of employees, show them in your post at work, have them
showcase a product or service to your audience or have one of them do social media takeover for
the day. Again, it's a way to humanize your business and build trust between your team and your
audience. Here's an Instagram post from Casper, the mattress company in which they feature
Caroline, one of their employees. Or here's another post from Porter Square Books featuring their
employees. Use social media to promote upcoming events you may be hosting. In fact, create your
event on Facebook as many businesses are using Facebook events like an events calendar.
Whether they're very active on Facebook or not, build excitement by dripping out posts about your
event across your social media channels, like interviews with participants, link to articles or
information about participants or a giveaway or promo if there are tickets involved. Here is an
example of an event page on Facebook for a book signing. Here's a post on Instagram announcing a
live ask-me-anything with Brian Armstrong that will take place on YouTube. Create pieces of content
around upcoming holidays or special events like the Super Bowl or Election day. Be sure to keep up
on special days in your industry like National Ice Cream Day or Independent Bookstore Day. Take a
note of these days and add them to your content calendar to make sure you don't miss out. Here are
two examples, an Instagram posts from Target around the winter holidays or Sesame Street's tweet
for Bert's birthday. If you have a product or service you offer, make a tutorial video showing how it's
used or how it works. Like using an app to order a rideshare, making a food box recipe or showing
what workouts are like at the new gym. You never know who's been reluctant to use your product
because they just didn't know how it worked. Let's look at these examples. Uber posted this tutorial
on Facebook on how you can request a ride for a guest, and here's a post from HelloFresh, where
they explain how you can prepare one of the recipes in their mealbox. Here's a tutorial on TikTok
showing how to use TikTok. Ask your audience a question to get them engaged, prompt them to
reply in the comments, take a poll or do some trivia. This builds audience interaction and can start
some fun conversation, but make sure that you're around to respond to the comments. You can also
go live and do an AMA or ask-me-anything and your audience can post their thoughts in real-time.
Here's a tweet from the NHL in which they asked users to put in their guesses for an upcoming
game. Or, this Instagram example from In-N-Out, the fast food burger restaurant in which they ask
users to find menu items, or this question from Runner's World Magazine asking people simply why
they run. Hold a giveaway or contest through your social media channels. Encourage your audience
not just to submit their entry, but to submit some original content, like a photo with your product that
you might be able to use for future promotions. Create a hashtag around to contest, or create a
promo code just for a specific channels audience. Here's an example from JetBlue on Instagram
where you could win unlimited flights. Or this example on YouTube from GoPro, who gives away
cash prizes for the best raw GoPro shot. Create content around a popular hashtag like Throwback
Thursday or Motivational Monday, which are hashtags and content people look for and expect.
Having a Throwback Thursday post can also provide your audience a fun look into the past of your
business or your organization. Want to really show some personality behind your brand and have
some fun? Participate in a hashtag challenge on TikTok, for example, or create your own. Here's an
example of Lush, the soap company participating in the hashtag challenge, Don't be suspicious on
TikTok, and this is a post from the MBTA the public transportation in Massachusetts. They posted an
old photograph of the Boston station on their Instagram account for Throwback Thursday or #TBT.
Does your business have a report or whitepaper with industry information that maybe interesting to
your audience? Share it. Post some charts or infographics to catch their attention. Share quotes
from the report or encourage people to check it out with a, "did you know?" question. Here's an
example from Consumer Reports. They tweeted about a coffee maker study they did. This is an
example on Instagram from Column Five, a creative agency about an employer branding study they
conducted. Keeping up on social media is just as important as posting to social media. Be aware of
any trends in the social media space, which could be as small as a popular hashtag or as big as
responding to a major societal event. Join the conversation with questions, educational materials, or
affirmations. Providing resources and comments on industry can also position you as a leader in the
space. As we are recording this video, elections are coming up in the US. Here's an Instagram post
from Ben & Jerry's encouraging people to vote. This is a Starbucks post related to the Black Lives
Matter movement and protests. One way to catch your audience's eye as you're scrolling, is to pose
some inspirational quotes for your audience. You can do it simply through text or use an app like
Canva, for instance, to create a text image which will stand out even more on image-heavy
platforms. Here's an example from Grubwriters and one from SoulCycle. Note that both of these
posts are from Instagram, typically an image rich platform, but by creating a text-based image, you
can stand out. Showcase your customers, feature a customer of the week or month and share their
story with your audience. Or have a customer give a testimonial about your product or service that
you can share as well. Here's an example from Southwest Airlines, a post featuring two of their
younger customers. Here's an example from the Gap, an Instagram post featuring a picture of a
customer in one of their dresses. Because of the organic nature of social media, businesses are
finding success in promoting their products or services by partnering with an influencer, create some
sponsored content with them or have them do a social media takeover of your accounts for the day
so their audience can get exposed to your business. Here's an example from Instagram where a
food influencer, Chicago Food Authority, plugs a sandwich from Butterfly Kitchen. Note, the hashtag
"sponsored" at the bottom of the post indicating that Butterfly Kitchen paid the influencer for this
post. Here's an example of a takeover by influencer Hannah Bronfman of the Sephora Snapchat
account, in which Hannah is marketing clinic make-up products. If you're releasing a new product,
tell the world through your social media channels. Be sure to showcase it with storytelling. Tell your
audience about the problem you were looking to solve and how this new product solved that
problem. Here's an example from Skullcandy introducing new wireless headphones, or this example
from Volkswagen, introducing a concept for a new electric car. Use some humor and levity in your
posts to engage your audience and get them smiling. Employ some witty banter with other
businesses as well to show that your brand knows how to have a little fun and take a joke. Here's a
post of Princess Anne showing the Queen of England how to use Zoom shared on Facebook by The
Independent, and here's an example from Dunkin' Donuts, having a little bit of fun with people like
me who stick to their hot coffee, even in hot weather. Throw in some pop culture to your social
media posts. It may seem odd to post about the new album, TV show, or video game when your
business doesn't relate to any of those. But it shows that you as a brand are up-to-date on the things
that your audience is interested in. Plus, it gives you some human credibility. Here's an example of a
Facebook post from GrubHub with reference to a popular Netflix show, Orange Is the New Black,
and here's a Facebook post from Purple, the mattress company, referencing the popular TV show,
The Office. Share curated content like articles, blog posts, and other valuable content that other
businesses, organizations, and thought leaders in your industry have shared. This not only shows
you're paying attention to your industry, but by being a source of information, it positions you as an
authority, can also expand your audience and you can build relationships with the businesses whose
content you shared. Here's an example, a tweet from Raven Book Store referencing an article from
audio books company, libro.fm, about Audible from Amazon. Another example on LinkedIn a post
from OpenX, an advertising technology company referencing research from the IAB. Similarly, be
sure to share customer generated content as well. It not only shows that you're paying attention to
your audience, but resharing can show everyday use of your product or service. It also tells the story
of your brand through your customers or users, not just from you alone. Hamilton, the musical,
shared this tweet from a fan or this post from Tasty Burger, where they reposted a picture taken by a
customer. Who's to say that you can't share older content you may have on your site. Point people
back to still relevant content to repurpose it, or take older content and chunk it up into new Top 10
list posts or other tips, tricks, and tidbits that you can use. Have an archive, dig some interesting
content out for your audience. Like in this example from WGBH, point your audience to a favorite
cause or charity your business cares about. Post their story or partner with them to create some
original content. It not only shows that your business likes to give back, but it also creates a new
audience for the cause or charity. In this example, Wendy's tweeted about their initiative to support
the black college community. Thank your audience when you hit a followers milestone or after a
campaign. A little gratitude goes along, especially in showing your audience that your brand is made
up of people who are grateful for the audience. Throw in an impromptu promo code as a thank you
gift. Here's an example from Zinneken's Waffles, thanking the colleges that hosted their food truck.
Finally, just sell something. Post a product or service you offer with a link to purchase it. Social
media platforms are beginning to add purchase buttons to their posts so that followers can be taken
directly to a purchase page to buy. Of course, you shouldn't sell in every post, but it's perfectly fine to
do so on a regular basis in combination with other posts that are more focused on engaging your
audience. Here's an example from Lovepop showing some of their popup cards, and another
example from Boston General Story showcasing their Mother's Day bookcase. As you can see, there
are a lot of different kinds of creative pieces of content you can post, and there's much more that
your business could come up with as well. The important thing is to remember to try different topics,
and sticking to one type of post will get old quickly.

Creating social media content is all about storytelling. In this video, I'll walk you through a technique
that makes story creation easier, storyboarding. It's no surprise that the idea of storyboarding started
with Disney. Animator Webb Smith is credited with creating the first storyboard, which were simple
sketches, laying out the scenes of a cartoon pinned to a board on the wall, a technique of planning
out content that Disney would embrace. The first fully storyboarded cartoon was The Three Little
Pigs in 1933. Because of the value storyboarding provided to their productions, Disney hired
dedicated storyboard artists, and created a department dedicated to story development. Filmmakers
knew storyboarding could be beneficial for planning out the scenes, and shots of live film as well, not
just cartoons. The first fully storyboarded live action movie was Gone with the Wind in 1939.
Storyboarding was also critical to Alfred Hitchcock's film making too, as he storyboarded many of his
classic movies including, The Lifeboat and The Birds. Is storyboarding then just for film or TV? Well,
it has a place in social media marketing as well. In this lesson, we'll show you how storyboarding can
help you create better social media content. A storyboard is simply a visual outline of your story,
sketched across a series of blocks or boxes arranged in order of the story you want to tell. Consider
it like a comic strip for your content or a blueprint for what you're going to create. A storyboard is also
a great way to see if your story or concepts will work before you commit time, money, and energy to
make it. If it does work, you now have a detailed visual outline you can use to create your content. If
it doesn't work in your storyboard, you can literally go back to the drawing board and reorganize,
rewrite, or recreate. For what kind of content would you use a storyboard? Storyboarding is going to
be a great tool as you plan out your video content. So you can see which shots to set-up, which
camera angles to use, and how to create your story arc. Storyboards are also useful for something
like Instagram or Facebook stories, where you can string multiple videos or images together into a
narrative arc. Similarly, if you have multiple single image posts as part of a campaign, you can
storyboard those as well to make sure your content makes sense and aligns, even if they're being
posted at different times across different platforms. Finally, you may not necessarily use a whole
storyboard to plot out a single post, but you can still use the things you learn about storyboarding to
help you sketch out and vision, and create one of content. In our next lesson, we'll walk you through
a sample storyboard for one of our businesses, Calla & Ivy.

Let's create a sample storyboard with Imra at Calla and Ivy to help her plan out a new Instagram
story. The first thing to determine when starting to storyboard is our engagement goal for our social
media post. Do we want to educate our audience? Do we want to increase traffic to our website, or
do we want to make a sale? Also, what story are we going to tell? So for this storyboard, we're going
to have education, inspiration, and purchase in mind. For our story, we're going to show how Imra
creates a flower bouquet. There are tools and apps out there, but for our storyboard, we're going to
use a plain sheet of paper. Let's make our boxes or panels. Since we're designing for Instagram
stories, we'll make our panels rectangular to mimic the phone screen. Since we want to tell a story
here, let's title our boxes with steps we want to include from choosing a flower color scheme to
arranging and wrapping up the stems. Imra typically starts her process by deciding on a color
scheme for her bouquet. Then she reflects on what's in season. Then she goes to the flower
markets, and examines the selection, and chooses the flowers that will work for her bouquet. She
then cuts the stems just right, arranges them in a bouquet, adds a few more stems for effect, and
then she wraps up the stems. We have a great story arc here, but we want to make sure we include
 an opening block with a title and setup to let our audience know what they're about to see. Let's add
that panel at the beginning. We also want to have a call to action after the bouquet has been
created, which will be something like buy this bouquet today, or discover more bouquets. Let's add
another panel onto the end that will be our call to action, and which will contain a link to our website.
Let's start sketching out the panels for our storyboard, so we can see visually what our Instagram
story is going to look like. Already, we can see that some of the panels looks similar to others. Since
our Instagram story already feels long, having nine boxes means our followers have to watch nine
different segments. Let's cut a few. Originally, we were thinking of just having static images, but now
that we're laying out our storyboard, it may be more engaging to have them be short videos.
Because we know what we want in each video, it will be much easier to film once we start. Maybe
you want to include some voice-over to the videos. We can start drafting the script in our storyboard
as well. Actually in remembering that most videos are playing without sound, not having a voice-over
is probably good idea. Let's make text to go in the video instead. In addition to the text, we want to
add some stickers on those videos. So let's include that in our storyboard as well, so we don't forget.
Let's add our logo in the bottom right corner of each video too. Let's make sure that we're not going
to miss anything in our closing panel. So let's include any hashtags we want to include, draft our call
to action language, and make sure we have the right link. Our storyboard is complete, meaning we
not only have a detailed outline now for our Instagram story, we've been thoughtful in our approach
to creating this content. It's going to be unique, educational, and eye-catching. We'll hopefully get
our audience to click through to check out more of Calla and Ivy.

Play video starting at :3:33 and follow transcript

3:33

As you can see from the exercise, there are great benefits to storyboarding your content before you
post it. First, it allows you to brainstorm and think of good ideas before you commit them to video. If
something's not working, or if you need to rearrange sections, you can do so easily. Also,
storyboarding helps you flesh out new ideas that haven't fully formed yet. Because social media is so
visual, storyboarding allows you to picture what your content will look like, and how it will present
before you start creating it. By planning out your content with the storyboard, you're committing to
creating deliberate, thoughtful, well-put-together work that your audience will notice. If you begin to
be recognized for your excellent content, you'll build trust and gain followers. Storyboarding is also a
way to capture tiny elements you may forget when posting on the fly, like stickers you want to add
hashtags, location tags, mentions, and others. If you have multiple people working on your
business's social media, storyboarding is a way to make sure everyone is on the same page. If you
need to pitch social media stories to a marketing director or editor, it's also a great way to show them
visually what you're thinking about. Finally you can turn storyboards into templates for future content.
So you're not starting from the ground up each time. As a social media manager, knowing different
ways to create fresh professional content is key, and storyboarding is sure to be one of the most
helpful tools in your toolbox.

Before social media, any company that wanted to become a brand name had to flood the airways
and that costs money. The world-famous, "I'd like to buy the world a Coke ad from 1971, cost
$250,000 to make and far more than that to broadcast on every major television network, which was
a staggering amount even at the time. But now, any person with a cell phone camera, and a social
media account can reach the same number of people if their content goes viral. We couldn't teach
you all about social media marketing without touching on viral content. We all know examples of
posts that went viral, good and bad ones. But how does content become viral? What makes people
share content? Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast recipe for going viral, but Jonah Berger, a
professor at University of Pennsylvania, analyzed thousands of pieces of viral content to figure out
common themes between them. Doing so, he found six ideas you should follow to maximize
engagement. He wrote about it at his book Contagious. Let's go through them. Berger identified six
common themes between posts that go viral. Posts should increase social currency, have a sensory
trigger that makes people think of your brand, evoke emotion, represent a public brand identity, be
practical, and tell a good story about your product. We'll briefly go over each with examples. First,
you should create posts or ads that will increase people's social currency when they share them.
Most people on social media want to seem smart, cultured and ethical. You should give them
content that helps them do that. They may be more inclined to share that content because it makes
them look good. Take Toms shoes as an example. In 2014, Toms launched a successful advertising
campaign in which they promised to donate one pair of shoes for every pair a customer bought.
Because of that, being seen wearing Tom's signaled to people that you were an ethical and
conscious consumer. Wearing them increased the buyers social currency and people flooded
Facebook and Instagram with pictures of themselves wearing Toms as the company achieved the
marketer's dream, having other people advertise your product for free. Second, you should try to
create a trigger for your product. This is something that makes people immediately think of your
product when they see, hear, smell, or touch it. One of the most successful examples of a trigger in
advertising history is Nike's slogan, Just Do it. When most people across the planet here Just do it,
they think of Nike. Other famous triggers includes a line, Do You Know Where Your Children Are?
from New York City Public Safety Campaign. Budweiser's Whassup? line, which signaled that
drinking Bud meant it was time to relax. Evoking strong emotion is also an excellent way to go viral.
The emotion could be happiness, sadness, or even anger. A good example of this is Johnnie
Walker's 2015 Dear Brother ad. In the ad to two 20 something brothers walked through
breathtakingly gorgeous Scottish highlands. They tracked through rolling hills and stop at ruined
stone cabins, sharing Johnnie Walker all the way until they reach cliff overlooking the ocean. Then
the ad reveals that one of the brothers was dead and the other went to the cliff to spread his ashes.
People immediately posted reaction videos of how the ad made them weep after it aired. It's since
been viewed over tens of millions of times. Johnnie Walker successfully evoked strong emotion to
create the most successful whiskey commercial in history. Another good way to go viral is to create
a brand that maximizes its publicity. Adidas is an excellent example of that. Its three stripe logo is so
ubiquitous that most people immediately recognize it and associated with the brand. It's also easily
reproducible from a screen to a shoe to sticker. Try to find a uniquely distinct brand logo and
coloration that maximizes your publicity. That way, people will know your product is yours whenever
they use or talk about it. People like to share content that's practical or immediately useful. Valentina
Lord created this video with a hack for peeling garlic and posted it on Twitter. The video went viral
and received over 24 million views. The plain practical nature of this and the fact that this peeling
garlic trick is universally useful, made it something people wanted to share. Finally, as we discussed
before, people like stories. Ads and content that tell a story are more likely to be shared and they
can be even more powerful if they invite people to share their own story. We touched on the
legendary Dove campaign in our previous course. In the early 2010s, Dove discovered that only four
percent of women worldwide consider themselves beautiful, largely because of unrealistic standards
created by airbrushed advertisements. So they launched the viral Real Beauty campaign with a
collection of stories about women discovering that they were and felt beautiful. Social media allows
customers to communicate back to you. By turning the process of discovering one's beauty into a
story, Dove both created popular ad and used social media to invite people to tell their own. This
created one of the most successful ad campaigns of the last decade. Creating viral content isn't
easy, and you shouldn't think that all your content on social media should go viral. I suggest that you
keep these six themes that Jonah Berger described in mind as you develop your content. They may
give you ideas for content creation and they may make your content more engaging overall.

Imagine you're taking a trip to the big city. You've always wanted to go and there are a number of
places you want to see and things you want to get done. You've read up on all the cultural spots,
restaurants, and historic sites, and you head in with the mindset that you'll go with the flow and see
where the day takes you. But at the end of your trip, you realize you spent too much time at one
museum and never got to that other museum you wanted to see, didn't realize that historic site was
all the way across town, and couldn't get into the restaurant because you needed reservations
weeks in advance. It was a trip, but not the one you hoped for. If you could rewind, you would have
made a schedule for each day telling you where to go and when, factored in travel time, and made
reservations in preparation. Might've taken more effort and planning, but your trip would have been
the dream trip you had hoped for. When it comes to your social media strategy, you could certainly
wing it and figure out posting content as you go, but it may not be the content you or your audience
wants, and it probably won't achieve any goals. If you want to have a plan of execution, use a
content calendar, which is simply a calendar where you fill in upcoming events for your social media
platforms, when they're going to be posted, and where. Without a calendar, you'll be scrambling to
post content in real-time, racking your brain for something relevant, and unaware that it may need to
tie into previous posts or created campaigns. Is it really that important to think carefully about what
social media content to post when it may just be sharing a link or uploading a photo? Posting on
social media isn't independent from your overall marketing strategy. As we mentioned in previous
lessons, one of the primary reasons to post on social media is for customer engagement, which
furthers your brand, increases trust, provides something of value for your followers, and turns them
into fans. If every post works together to build your customer engagement strategy, you won't want
to leave it up to chance. Just like how your planned trip allowed us to go more places and do more
things with less worry about how we were going to do it. There are many benefits to having a content
calendar for your social media posts. The first is organization. By planning ahead on what content
you're going to post, when, and to what platform, you keep your upcoming posts organized. It allows
you to time to be more thoughtful about your posts, and to map them as greater content strategy as
well since you can see a few weeks or months in advance. Having a content calendar will help you
keep consistency in your brand voice. Not only does it allow you to see multiple posts and how they
fit together to further your brand, you'll probably be writing multiple posts at once or batching, which
will guarantee they'll be written in the same voice. You will also have the ability to review upcoming
posts. If one doesn't align with your brand voice, you can pull it, or revise it. Having a content
calendar can also help you plan for upcoming events, holidays, and special occasions. Mark major
holidays, or holidays that might be important to your industry, like National Ice Cream Day if you're
an ice cream shop, so that you can plan content around that day, and have the time to create it well
before it needs to go live. If something pops up that you want to post about you know which posts
you can be scheduled for another time, and which need to stay to correspond with a specific date.
Having a content calendar allows you to fill in the gaps as well. Social media requires constant
posting to keep followers engaged. So, having a content calendar that shows what's being posted
when, will help you see any gaps you may have in scheduled posts, or if there are too many posts in
one time for instance. Finally, a content calendar allows for greater collaboration across your team.
Team members will be able to see what social media posts are coming up and could make
suggestions for posts of their own, or add two posts already created. The team can staff social
media channels for replies and monitor call to action responses generated by the post. Additionally,
having a content calendar allows for easier vetting of posts if your team requires a second set of
eyes for approval.
Play video starting at :4:53 and follow transcript

4:53

Ready to start filling in your content calendar? Before you do, take another look at the prep work you
did before. Remember how you specified your smart goals, your target audience, and their customer
journey? This information will come in really handy as you start populating your posts. If you need a
refresher, we went through this information in course 1 of this program. Looking back at your goals
will help you decide what content you need to create when. For example, you may have a new app
you want followers to downloads, or a new product you want to share. Knowing what goals you need
to hit, like knowing which sites you wanted to see on your trip to the city, allows you to create content
that will get you there. Who is my target audience? What does a typical customer journey look like
for my audience? Knowing your audience is key for many reasons. It will help you decide, which
platforms to use, and what posts to create for those platforms. What should you include in your
content calendar? You should include anything that's going live to your followers. Like the posts
contents, any images or videos that go with it, any links you may include, and any hashtags you're
using. You also want to include any information you want to track, such as which platform it's on,
whether it's an ad, or original content, or a reshare, or curated content, and so on. And of course,
you want to include a specific date and time the content goes live. In our next video we'll walk you
through a template you can use to create your very own content calendar. Of course, you can use
any templates that you think will work best for you, or you can rely on content calendar tools from
companies like HotSpot or Hootsuite for instance. The most important thing to remember is that the
best content calendar is the one you'll actually use.

The only way to truly understand how a content calendar gets created is by creating one ourselves.
Let's rejoin Carlos at Inu and Neko to help him create a content calendar for his social media
engagement. First, we want to think about the goals we have for our social media content. As we
articulated in the past lessons, our content provides value for our audience. And in connecting and
helping them, we increase our brand awareness and trust. As we begin to brainstorm, we want to
make sure that the content as well as the voice of our posts speaks directly to our audience. We can
also get a sense of what content our audience likes by looking at what they've engaged with most in
the past. For example, they like informational articles on pet grooming, have responded well to our
stories from our community, and reshare our fun pet videos a lot. Let's start brainstorming some Inu
and Neko content. It's a great idea to note ideas in your calendar somewhere, so that you keep
everything in one place and anyone in your team that has access to your calendar can add to it as
well. While there are many content calendar creation and management websites and apps out there,
the simplest way to create a content calendar is in a simple spreadsheet like Google Sheets or
Excel, for instance. Open up a new spreadsheet, before we start laying out a calendar, lets
designate one of the sheets as content ideas. We know right from the start that we want
informational content, inspirational content, and fun/entertaining content. But you also want to
remember to include content that tells our audience about our services and any events we may have
coming up. Content related directly to our business that we want our audience to know about. For
informational, let's be sure to share some of our recent blog posts on pet care and grooming. We
can and should also share content created by others that we find useful. Carlos bookmarked a few
articles on how grooming is directly related to pet health and can share those with his audience. Our
content calendar is going to go into the summer. So we want to be sure to share an article or two on
how pet grooming changes in warmer weather. For inspirational content, we can tell stories from our
community, how one of our clients rescued a cat, or share photos or videos from community
members bringing their pets to visit a nursing home. Fun, entertaining videos are easy as Carlos'
clients' pets are always showboating for the camera. As for content centering around our business,
we can post about our services, any discounts or new offerings we have, promotions or updates to
our mobile app. Are there any campaigns, series, or hashtags we can use? One of Carlos'
customers suggested he do a Throwback Thursday series of members from the Inu and Neko
community as kids with their first pets. Another hashtag is Motivational Monday, which could be easy
to put together. Maybe we want to ask a nightly question to get our followers to respond and engage
as well. While this brainstorming isn't our content calendar, you can start to see what kinds of ideas
you have to use and what platforms might be best suited for them. And this is a good place for other
members in the team to park their ideas as well. Let's open another sheet and map out our calendar.
I like to structure my calendar a little, so I can easily enter the following information. First, the date
and any special holiday or event I need to keep in mind. Second, the content ideas. I like to split
them in ideas that relate to a certain day or time of year and evergreen content. That way, if I need
to cut anything or shift anything around, I know which content is easier to reschedule, and I like to
keep a row per platform where I'm active. Once I have the content ready, I can add a link to the
posts here for each of my platforms. That way, I can always go back and check what I posted. In Inu
and Neko's case, Carlos posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. So that's what we would fill out
here. After we map out the dates of our calendar, let's go through and add national Holidays, so we
can create content around them. Already, we have Mother's Day, Father's Day, Memorial Day, and
the 4th of July. Carlos knows some other pet related special days like National Pet Awareness
Month and Bring Your Cat to Work Day. So let's fill those in, too. Let's also plug in some internal
business milestones, like when app updates will go live or when our e-commerce summer sale
begins. Before we start filling in the other content we brainstormed, let's plan our content around
these special days. We will fill in the content topics here and then we will also add the formats we
plan for each platform. Since national pet month is sponsored by the American Veterinary Medical
Association, lets pair up with a local veterinary office to create a month's worth of content. We'll
feature healthy tips and advice, which may be text based and good for Twitter or Facebook. We'll
also feature interviews and videos from the vets, which would be good for Instagram, Twitter, or
Facebook. Inspirational stories will be good for Instagram and Facebook. Next, Inu and Neko has a
great relationship with the veterans in their neighborhoods and their service dogs. So let's tell their
story for Memorial Day. Inu and Neko hosts a daily pet meet up or summer camp for local pet
owners, which includes free grooming and registration ends on May 31st. We want to count down a
reminder for her followers, but we don't want to do it just the day before. So let's include a few
reminders in the weeks previous to the deadline. Speaking of summer camp, let's schedule in a
summer camp Sunday series of photos or videos to show the fun our community pets had at the
camp the week before. For the 4th of July, let's plan to have a post with some of our client's pets in
patriotic costumes. But we also know that fireworks can be a source of stress and anxiety for pets.
Let's create some posts leading up to the 4th of July about noise and ways pet owners can manage
pet stress. Finally, let's fill in content for the rest of the holidays and special events. Now, let's fill in
some of the content we brainstormed already, like promoting our blog posts, sharing about our
services, adding our throwback Thursday, and Motivational Monday series, and adding our nightly
question. You can already see how our content is coming together in an easily manageable way and
how, at a glance, we can see what's coming up and where we need to create more content. We can
fill in as much content as we want, but we need to be sure that we'll be able to create and post all of
that content. We also need to make sure that we are posting frequently and consistently to each
social media platform. So that our audience continues to see our presence and can anticipate new
 content from us on a regular basis. Studies show that a business should post once a day on
Facebook, 15 times per day on Twitter, 11 times per day on Pinterest, and once or twice per day on
Instagram. That sounds like a lot of posts for small business owner Carlos, but there are three things
to remember. The first is he doesn't have to post that much. Just make sure his social media posts
are consistent and frequent enough for steady engagement. The second thing to remember is that
many of those posts will be curated content shared from other sites, other industry leaders, and from
individual followers themselves. While we still need to write why we're sharing the content, it's
content that's already been created, and it saves us a step. The third thing to remember is that posts
don't have to be individual, independent posts. You can repurpose content on different platforms.
Carlos could create a post for Facebook that's a summary of his blog post. He could take the video
from his blog post and use it for an Instagram post with a caption, a quote from the post instead of a
summary. And he could break the post down into 10 tips or 10 quotes to post throughout the day on
Twitter. Now, we know exactly what we're posting, what format it's going to be in, what platform it's
going to be posted to. And if it's part of a bigger series, we can simply fill in the copied images or
video, any hashtags we're going to use, any links and tracking we want to use with them, and
pinpoint what time of day we'll post. Continue adding ideas until the calendar is filled.
Congratulations, you've created a three month social media content plan for Inu and Neko in only a
matter of minutes. By planning out our content, we've saved time and stress because we won't be
scrambling to create posts, we don't have to worry about missing milestones or holidays. And now
that we have a plan in place, we can always tweak it as we go. We also have an easy way to track
content and see what kind of content works with our audience.

Any business with a strong social media strategy knows that keeping the pipeline full of content is
key, but that doesn't mean every piece of content needs to be created from scratch. There's no need
to reinvent the wheel every time because there's a lot of new content that you can repurpose from
work you've already done. We'll show you how. Repurposing content is simply the idea that no piece
of content is ever, "One and done." Your content is full of ideas, stories, stats, and information that
can be presented again in different formats, which can appeal to new audiences and expand your
reach. Repurposing content is not only a way to stretch out the value of your content, but it's an easy
way to fill in your social media content calendar as well. How does it work? Let's say you've written a
blog post about the state of social media engagement today in your industry and you share that with
your audience. Is that it, move on to the next blog post? That's what you might think, but there's still
a lot more mileage you can get out of that post. For instance, take some of the stats you found and
create an infographic, or a series of tweets, or pull a quote and make an image, turn the contents
into a presentation or an informative video. If your post has great insights, update the data in the
future, and share it all over again. Notice that repurposing content is not just taking past content and
republishing it, or promoting it again, in the same way you would repurpose a tin can as a flower pot
or a t-shirt as a pillowcase. You want to actively think about how to use your content and its ideas in
new creative ways.

Play video starting at :1:55 and follow transcript

1:55

Can you just repurpose every piece of content? Not quite. There are a few types of content that you
should look to first, as you begin to repurpose. The first type of content that you should target when
repurposing, is evergreen content or content that is useful, interesting, and impactful year after year.
It could be; a how to guide, a report, or an overview of a certain topic or industry. This kind of content
 is always relevant to your audience, so it's a great place to mine ideas for repurposing. Opposite of
evergreen, is timely or time stamped content, or content that responded to a trend or a news cycle,
like a guide to new tech in 2015, or new movies in 2018, which would now be outdated, of course.
Because the content is no longer relevant, you would stay away from these pieces and look to your
more relevant content for sources. But you can always use these kinds of posts to inspire new posts
like, new tech for next year, for instance. Second, seek out your most popular content by taking a
look at your engagement analytics. Because an audience interacted with it before, is a good
indicator they would interact with that content again or that they are at least interested in the topic.
Find your social media posts that did well, the ones that got lots of likes and comments, for instance
and think about how you can repurpose them.

Play video starting at :3:31 and follow transcript

3:31

Let's look at a few ways to repurpose content for different audiences and platforms. You created a
step-by-step tutorial for your blog on how to set up a simple website and you share that link with your
audience. What else can you do? That tutorial could easily turn into slide deck, which you could post
on LinkedIn. Take the slide deck and add a voice over or use the texts from your blog posts to
narrate a screen cap and share that to YouTube. Take clips of the YouTube video and share them
as a teaser or lead generator on Instagram. Take the steps in your tutorial and create a tweets
thread with those steps on Twitter. Finally, make an infographic to post on Pinterest. In each of these
situations, you can also tweak your caption for each platform to appeal to that platform's audience.
For LinkedIn, it could be how to create a website for your business. For Instagram, it could be how to
create a website for your creative portfolio. Repurposing content requires a bit of a shift of thinking,
doesn't it? Once you start seeing all the options for repurposing content, you'll start to use this tactic
more and you'll keep repurposing in mind when you create new content as well.

Play video starting at :4:51 and follow transcript

4:51

It may seem like just a shortcut, but there are a number of benefits to re-purposing your content. As
we've already seen, it stretches the value of your content. You spend too much time researching and
writing a blog post, article or white paper only to share it a few times and move on. What you're
trying to share isn't a package of your article or paper, but the ideas inside. Start viewing content in
terms of ideas that can be communicated in many different formats. We've already seen that
different social media platforms highlight different formats. Play to that platform's strength by re-
purposing your content into different formats. Like creating a presentation for LinkedIn, an
instructional video for YouTube, or an infographic for Pinterest. Repurposing content into different
formats also exposes your ideas and findings to an expanded audience who may not consume
content in one format, but may devour it in another. By spreading your ideas through repurposed
content, you're repeating and reinforcing the message you're trying to communicate with your
audience. Seeing your message in one place may not make an impact, but repeatedly, seeing it in
various formats will. Repurposed content acts as an amplifier for your brand. Repurposed content
gives you more social media posts. More content means more frequent posting about it, which can
round out your content calendar. If your audience sees you posting pieces of quality content
consistently and frequently, it keeps you present in their feed and top of mind. By re-purposing your
content and sharing your message in many different ways, you also position yourself as an authority
in the space. By having more content out to your audience, you can find out what format resonates
with them. Have you been writing blog posts, but find that your audience is paying far more attention
to a podcast created from that blog post, now you know where to focus your future content creation
efforts. Repurposing content also gives you Search Engine Optimization advantages. Since
repurposed content contains the same keywords, you'll increase your brand's association with those
keywords in search, increasing the probability that your content will come up in search results for
those keywords. Additionally, if your content references other websites or studies, repurposed
content will increase your opportunity to link, which is another way to improve your search rankings.
Finally, yes, repurposing content does save you time, in that you don't have to start from scratch
every time you want to create a piece of content. So don't reinvent the wheel. While there are times
you still need to create new pieces of content from scratch, know that there are many different ways
to repurpose existing content, so you can build your audience and your authority.

There's an old saying, "Nothing succeeds like success" from TV shows to cars to coffee. If a product
is a hit with your audience, you'll want to try to replicate what you did to capture that success again.
The same goes for your content. If a particular topic or format resonates with your audience, you
want to create more content along the same line. If your audience doesn't like a particular topic or
format, you want to redirect your effort. But how do you know what's doing well and what isn't?
That's where a content audit can help you discover where your successes are. An audit is simply a
detailed list of what content you have and the engagement metrics associated with each piece of
content. Like how many likes, shares and comments each piece received. Then you can analyze
your numbers, pick out patterns, rate your content and make data-driven plans for your content
going forward. Content audits cover all of your content. So that is content on your website your blog
and your social media accounts. Getting into the practice of conducting regular audits for your
content is going to be one of the most valuable tasks you can do for your business. It not only allows
you to have much better oversight of your content, but allows you to see what content is valuable
and engaging, find any trends in content engagement, see where you can make improvements and
if the audience engaging in your content is aligned with your target audience. Some businesses will
conduct a full audit once a year, when they go to update static pages. Others will do a monthly or
even weekly audit to keep a closer hand on their content engagement. It's going to be up to your
business cycles, what you want to track and how often but I suggest you evaluate your social media
content at least monthly. Let's get started by setting up a spreadsheet to track the content on our
website first. The audit of our social media content will be a bit different and we'll go over that next
but you may want to track all of your audits on different sheets in one spreadsheet. Like in Google
Sheets for example. First, populate your content into one list. This is going to include static pages,
blog posts, videos, digital downloads, any asset on your sites that your audience engages with.
You'll want to record the title and URL at the very least and date of creation, author, last update,
topic or theme, whether there are images or videos on the page and any other notes that will be
helpful to you. Doing this manually may be a challenge, but there are resources that can help you. If
your website has a content management system or CMS on the backend, use that to get a list of
your content. Additionally, there are third party websites that can crawl your site and set you up with
a list. Screaming Frog is such a crawler. Next, collect your metrics. Your business may have internal
analytics set up on your website, or you can get these through Google Analytics. Google Analytics
will track and report all the user interactions with your website. Remember that while Analytics can
track all metrics, not all metrics are going to be useful to you. So you'll want to decide which metrics
are going to help you determine what content is successful according to your marketing goals.
Typically, the most helpful metrics for content are the number of visits and the number of visitors, as
well as the time spent on a page. As you're adding these metrics, you may want to organize them by
months, so you can keep track of how your content is performing from month to month. Now, you
can just compile this massive resource of data and just let it sit there. Don't worry if you don't have a
background in business analytics or statistics, simply start looking for patterns. For example, do you
see that visitors stay on certain blog posts longer? Look into what topics those blog posts cover and
focus more on those topics in the future. Do visitors stay on pages longer that contain images? Use
more images. Once you've looked through your data and uncovered patterns, you can take action.
You can even go through and rate each piece of content on a scale, so you can keep the top rated
 content, update mediocre contents and get rid of the lowest rated content. Now that you have
identified your top rated content, check whether you should share some of it again on social media.
Finally, remember to use this data to inform your future content strategy.

Play video starting at :4:52 and follow transcript

4:52

Now, let's go over auditing your social media posts. Start with the channel specific audits before you
get into specific posts. List your social media platforms, the URL of your profile and how many
followers you have. If you do this every month, you will get a good idea of how your audience is
growing. Then, like you did for your website content audits, you'll want to go platform by platform and
do an audit of your individual posts. You can use the social media platforms dashboard to make a
list of your social media posts. Including important information like URL, date and time and if each
post had a link or an image or video. You can get more detailed by adding what the call to action
was, the post's topic or if it was part of a campaign. Next, add the metrics you want to measure, like
click-throughs, likes, shares, number of comments and so on. Remember that you want to track the
metrics that are going to be most important to help you measure your goals. In a later video, we'll
show you what these dashboards look like on Facebook and we'll talk more about where to find
these metrics and what they mean. Now, just as we did for the website audits, go through and do
your analysis of the data to surface any patterns you see, so you can make a plan for your content.
Typically, you look for the content that was most engaging. That means the content that generated
most interactions like, likes or other reactions, shares and comments. After all, that's what social
media is all about. You want to engage your audience and you want to identify the content that does
well. Maybe you're seeing that posts with images on Twitter are getting more likes than simple text
posts. Make a plan to include images with your tweets going forward. Are you finding that Facebook
posts that gets the most engagement are more on the educational or the informative side? Since
that's what your audience responds to, continue posting educational posts on Facebook. Are the
same post getting little traction on Twitter? Pull back on those kinds of posts. Again, now that you've
completed your social media audit, make a plan to do another one in a month, so you can continue
to monitor your engagement and now benchmark your changes moving forward. In our next lessons,
we'll give you more information on how to navigate your social media dashboards and the metrics
that matter to you. But for now, use the system to get you started on finding your successes and
where you can create more of that valuable and engaging content.

Building a following is the most essential part of establishing a business's social media presence. Of
course, in order to get people to follow you, you need to post interesting and engaging content. It
may take you a while to get an audience, but there are few things you can do to help build up that
following. We'll walk you through a set of tips using one of our example businesses, Calla & Ivy.
Calla & Ivy is a flower shop based out of Amsterdam, it's predominantly web-based, and it uses its
physical store front as a showroom. Imra, the owner of Calla & Ivy, wants to use social media to
grow her business. Here's five steps she can take to establish her following: The first thing Imra
should do is turn her personal social media following into a professional one. When you start your
business presence, you need to let people know about it. Starting with your friends will help you to
get the initial word out. Facebook gives you the option to invite your friends and family to follow when
you start a business page. Imra should do this and ask for close friends to advertise for Calla & Ivy
too. Once your friends and family follow, the next step is to start posting valuable content. Posting
valuable content is a great way to grow your following from friends to strangers. If you post useful
videos and articles, your followers may be more likely to share them. That way, you get more
exposure and there's a chance people who see your posts start following you too. For Calla & Ivy
that could be a video that teaches people how to take flowers and press them into bookmarks, for
instance. Imra could also teach people seven easy steps to keep your plants alive, among other
flower relevant content. Hashtags are a great way to connect with potential customers. They connect
social media posts by topic and aggregate them under a single word. Calla & Ivy should use
hashtag, flower, flowerstagram, flower photography, and other popular hashtags like that with
millions of posts underneath them to expose their business to a wider audience. Then when people
search for these topics, Calla & Ivy's, posts may come up and people who see them may decide to
follow. Using @mentions allows you to tag other users. When you tag another user, they will be
notified and they will see your post. That may prompt them to share your post and it does expose
your post to the audience of the person or business you tagged. Calla & Ivy should @mention
anyone who buys or posts about their flowers, so those people can share Calla & Ivy to their friends
list too. You can get creative with @mentions. For instance, Calla & Ivy could post a small table
arrangement with a coffee and a croissant and mention a bakery where they bought the croissants.
Something like enjoying some coffee and croissants time with @Molenbakker deliciousness. With a
bit of luck the bakery, Molenbakker, will share the posts with its audience. Social media influencers
are people who have large followings and will advertise your business for you. They start at
minimum 2,000 followers and usually charge for their services. You can find the right influencers for
you using software like Social Beaker or Tagger, for instance, Influencer Kiera Madison advertised
Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm to an audience of over 10,000 viewers. Calla & Ivy could find someone
like this to talk about their flowers, which would give them a lot of exposure. Sometimes smaller
influencers will plug products they receive for free. It may be worth it to send some free flowers to a
few socialites in the hopes that they will post the bouquets on Instagram and mention Calla & Ivy. Or
they could send free or reduced rate flowers to heavily photographed events like weddings in
exchange for @mentions on wedding social media posts. Finally, you can use advertising to
increase your following. All good ads start with a good story. For Calla & Ivy, that means telling their
founder, Imra's story with an introductory video and Instagram post. Imra loved to pick flowers during
long hikes as a child. She'd braid them into crowns using Callas, her favorite flower and Ivy. She
later went to art school and decided she wanted to arrange flowers professionally, thus Calla & Ivy
was born. Imra's passion is authentic and makes for a great first advertising campaign. It's a great
way to introduce Calla & Ivy to social media. It also grows your audience by getting people
emotionally invested in your brand's story. Building a following isn't always fast, but if you follow
these steps and use tools like friend invitations, hashtags, mentions, influencers, and advertising
campaigns, you'll be off to a great start.

Social media is all about interaction. Brands and businesses are invited to be part of the
conversation. But a conversation means that people can react to what you share, and they will.
People will comment and reply to your posts, and once you have a social media presence, people
may reach out to you with questions or concerns. You want to make sure that people have positive
associations with your brand, and the way you carry on a conversation in social media has an
impact. The best way to create a positive brand impression is by responding to customers' social
media comments in a timely and polite manner. We're going to walk you through a four-step process
on the best way to do that. More than a billion people follow their preferred brands on social media,
per 2020 data from Sprout Social. This means that good social media branding can make a
company and bad branding can break one. In this lesson, we'll focus on four engagement strategies
to maximize good branding. These include, always responding to customers within 24 hours,
engaging positively with brand supporters, engaging diplomatically with brand critics, and moving
brand criticism from the public to the private sphere. According to a 2018 survey, 83 percent of
social media users expect brands to respond within one day or less. That mirrors the speed at which
most regular users respond to social media comments. To a customer, social media portrays your
brand's post the same way it does your friend's ones. This gives you the opportunity to effectively
portray your brand as a friend, you should capitalize on this by responding to their comments,
mentions, and tags at the same speed their friends would. Be sure to monitor your social media
pages for brands, tags, and mentions to best do this. Another good way to establish a relationship
with your customers is to always engage with their positive feedback. Always like or favorite any of
their positive brand mentions, to let them know you see them and appreciate them. If someone posts
something complementing your brand, always respond with a comment. The more personalized the
better. In this example, a young bride named Claire thanked Calla and Ivy on Instagram for doing
her wedding's flowers. Calla and Ivy demonstrated good social-media interaction by addressing
Claire by name, specifying the work they did for her, so Claire's Instagram followers can see it and
thanking her for her business. It's no secret that people on the Internet can be difficult. They can be
angry, rude, pointed, and critical. But that's why it's important to distinguish between legitimate brand
criticism and abuse. Abuse or inappropriate comments are just not right, and you should hide or
remove them. No need to react. Criticism involves a legitimate grievance with your brand. In this
example post, DCB Cleaning installed a snack wall which led to rats. The DCB Cleaning
representative dealt with it the right way by apologizing, promising to compensate, and then most
importantly, moving the discussion to a private chat by direct messaging the person. Never ever
argue with the customer or be anything other than professional on a brand account. It never looks
good for you or your company. Negative comments happen and they can be stressful. It helps to
follow this pattern when answering them. First, acknowledge the comment to let the customer know
they've been heard. Examples of this include, "Hey Bob, we hear you." Second, apologize if it's
appropriate. Remember, apologies are easy and free, and they often make your brand look
considerate and sympathetic. Third, solve the problem in a private conversation. This is important if
you're going to negotiate refunds or complimentary services, you don't necessarily want those done
in public. Following these three steps should make responding to negative comments simple and
easy. Also, remember that nothing on the Internet is truly private. Any private message can be
screenshotted and reposted. So it's important to be as courteous in direct messages as you would
be in public comments. Some commenters, however, can't be reasoned with. That's why Facebook,
Instagram and Twitter offer hide reply or hide comment features for their users. This moves these
comments to a separate section that other users have to click a button to see and most users won't.
This feature is useful for comments like the one Calla and Ivy's post got in this post or for bots
posting spam. It's important not to use this feature to hide legitimate criticism of your brand though,
as that will only upset customers. People understand brands are run by humans. Admitting your
mistakes and apologizing for them in a professional manner is the next best alternative to not
making them at all.

We have covered a lot of ground so far on how to create content for social media, the types of posts
you can create, how to build a following, and how to communicate in social media. By now, you may
start to wonder how you should keep track of all these tasks and how should you go about posting,
monitoring comments and so on. The major social platforms have excellent tools built in to help you
stay on top of everything and there are tools you can use to help you manage across different
platforms as well. By the end of this video, you will know how you can keep up with your social
media. There are three topics I want to cover that can help you when you think of managing your
social media. First, you don't have to do this all alone. Social platforms let different people post so
you can work with a team. Second, you can make responding to messages easier by using some
automation. Most platforms let you program automatic responses. Three, you can use tools to help
you manage the publication of your posts. If you have your content calendar and your content in
audit place, you're off to a great start already. Taking that extra planning step really helps. Not only
will it help you to know what to post, but it can also help if you are working with a team as it gives
everyone one common plan. This brings me to our first point, if you have other people in your
company that can help you work as a team to publish your posts. The main social media platforms
let you give other people permission to help manage your page and you can give people different
roles and levels of responsibility. Facebook, for instance, has six roles available for page
moderation. These roles loosely correspond to other social platform's, roles types too. They are, in
descending order, admin, editors, moderator, jobs manager, advertiser, and analyst. Facebook page
admins have total control over the page. Admins can create ads, view audience data, send and
receive messages from the company page and post and delete from it. They're also the only people
who can assign roles to others. Your social media manager and top company executives should
always have admin status. Every social media platform's business page has an admin level tier.
Next, are Facebook page editors. Editors can do everything admins can do except assign roles on
the page. Anyone whose job it is to post to the page and respond to messages from the company
should have editor status. Below that are moderators. Moderators can respond to page comments
and send messages from the page. Moderators can't, however, post directly to the page. This is a
good designation for customer service representatives working under a manager who has editor
status. Advertisers and jobs managers are next to bottom tier. Advertisers and jobs managers can
post advertisements to the page and view audience data. This is a good level of access to give to
people your company partners with. It'll let you coordinate ads with them without giving them
permission to post from your page. Finally, Facebook page analysts can only see your customer
trends and user data. Most people in your company should have analyst access so they can stay up
to date on customer interests and demographics. This chart can come in handy when you want to
assign roles so you'll find it as a reading resource in this lesson. A second tactic you can use to help
you manage your social media messages from your audience, is using automated messaging. The
Internet never turns off, which means online businesses can't either. According to Sprout Social
Data, people interact with brands on social media more than any other medium. Up to 56 percent of
people will unfollow a brand if they feel they've received poor customer service. As we saw earlier,
people expect fast responses. Brand pages have to be on 24/7 even when employees aren't and
that's where setting up automatically responding chatbots can help. Many social media platforms
have this functionality built in. It's easy to pre-program your automated replies to messages you may
receive, while no one in your team can immediately respond. Automated response bots aren't
people, but they can take over four specific functions which companies used to assign to
receptionists and switchboard operators. Bots can schedule person to person interactions, triage
customer queries and direct them towards the right people, answer commonly asked questions and
respond to customers when your business is closed. Later in this lesson, you'll learn more about how
you can set up these automated response bots yourself, either in your social media platform like
Facebook for instance, or by using a specialized tool like Sprout Social. Finally, a third way to make
your life as a social media marketer all lot easier is by using the publishing tools that are available in
the social media platforms where your active, or using a publishing tool that lets you publish across
several tools all at once. Some of the large social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have
some sort of publishing tool embedded in them. It's where you can draft your post, schedule and
publish them. It's also where you keep a library of all your posts over time. Often you'll also find
some data there on how your posts performed. Here is what the publisher tools look like for
Facebook. When you log on to your page, you can click on the publisher tools button. Then you land
in this Overview. As you can see, you get a neat list here of all your posts. From here, you can
create a post, save drafts of a post, and schedule them to publish them later. If you allow other team
members to help you, then you will see their posts here as well. This way you can keep a good
overview of everything that's going on, on your Facebook page. Note that you can also link your
Instagram account to this platform and then you can manage your Instagram posts from here too. Of
course, you can also use third party software to help you manage all of your social media efforts.
Using a third party has the advantage that a software lets you manage across platforms. Commonly
used tools are Hootsuite, Sprout, Social and Buffer, for instance. These tools let you connect your
social media accounts and then you can create, schedule and manage your posts all from their tool.
You can create a post and publish it on all your platforms at once. You can also create and manage
your content calendar from these tools and keep a nice overview of all your content and activity.
They also make it possible to keep track of all the ongoing conversations and messages you are
receiving and you can respond straight from the tool. These tools typically come at an extra cost, but
it may be well worth it if you manage more than one social media platform. Later in this lesson, we'll
provide you with more detail on how these platforms work and how you can use them. As you can
see, there are a few tools and processes you can use to help you manage your social media activity.
Enlist your team to help, if you can, use automated messages so your brand remains responsive
and rely on publisher tools, either within the social media platform you use or rely on a third party
tool if you manage more than one platform.

Facebook Page Roles and Permissions

How do I assign roles to people moderating my Facebook
page?
There are six roles you can use to moderate your Facebook pages. They are:

Admin
Admins have total control of the page. They’re the only class that can assign and change others’
roles and they can post, edit, message, and view all audience data. Your social media manager and
CEO should always have “admin” status.

Editor
Editors can do everything admins can except assign and change others’ roles. People who you’d
trust to manage your full page should have “editor” status. “

Moderator
Moderators can create ads, access audience data, and—most importantly—remove comments and
ban people from the page. Anyone who has to moderate discussions on a large company page
should have “moderator” status.

Advertiser
Advertisers can create ads and access audience data. It’s a good designation for company partners.

Analyst
Analyst is the lowest class of Facebook role permissioning. It gives you access to audience data and
tells you how customers are interacting with your posts. Everyone at your company should have
“analyst” access, so as to have access to the latest customer interaction data.

Jobs Manager
Jobs Managers are people who have the same permissions as Advertisers, but who can also post
jobs.

Facebook Roles Table

Congratulations, you've completed yet another module and you're well on your way to becoming a
social media marketer. In fact, you now know how to create and manage content on social media,
which is really the most core part of a social media marketers role. Everything on social media starts
with content and knowing how to come up with topics to post about, creating those posts, and then
managing the conversation that follows is key. You're well prepared to do all that. So now let's move
on to evaluating the results of our content efforts. That's what's next and I am looking forward to
seeing you there.
 A lot is involved in creating and managing your content. So, after you've been doing all that work,
you feel you want to know whether your posts were a success. That's what we'll look at in this
module. At the end of this module, you'll know how to evaluate your efforts and which metrics you
should focus on to determine whether you're reaching your goals. You will also learn how social
media platforms help you with ad evaluation by providing you with insights dashboards. By the end
of this module, you'll know how to navigate these dashboards for both Facebook and Instagram.
You'll know how to find the information in those dashboards that matters to you and your marketing
goals. Finally, you'll also know how to use the insights to adapt and optimize your social media
content calendar. Let's get started.

When you started your social media efforts, you had a goal in mind, so it's important to check to
make sure that your efforts are actually getting you closer to your goal. That's where insights and
metrics come in. They can help you evaluate whether you're on track to reach your goal, and they
can also point you to things you can do, to improve your efforts. By the end of this video, you'll know
what you should look for when evaluating the results of your posts, and you'll know which metrics to
pay particular attention to.

Play video starting at ::36 and follow transcript

0:36

In order to measure how effective your social media efforts are, you're going to track what are called
key performance indicators. Or KPI's, tracking a KPI simply means, that you're looking at a metric or
set of metrics that will show you how you're progressing towards your goal. Basically, you're looking
for indicators that really reflect whether you are successful. Depending on your goal, different
indicators are going to matter more to you. For instance, if you're working on building awareness,
you will want to know whether your follower base is growing. If you're working on engagement, you'll
want to learn how many people are interacting with your posts. And if it is your goal to sell products,
you look at a number of people that clicked on your post, and bought something. The large social
media platforms all come with their own metrics dashboard, that gives you insights into how your
follower base is growing, and how your individual posts are performing. You'll find that when you go
into these dashboards there are a lot of metrics. Some will be immediately meaningful, and some not
so much. And to be honest some of them really matter, and some are more of a nice to have. Let me
give you an approach you can use to structure your thinking. Around all things metrics and find the
most important ones. Our marketing goals typically fall into three categories, generating awareness
for your company or your product, engagement, or the number or type of interactions you have with
your followers. Conversion, or making people take the action you intended, like buying something for
instance. Depending on which category your goal falls into, your KPI's will differ. We can think of the
metrics, that we should evaluate as falling into this same categorization. The first category is
awareness. In order to generate awareness for your brand, you want to get your message to reach
as many people as possible. So the metrics to look for here are metrics, that tell you something
about how many people see your messages. The first metric you will want to check is, the number of
followers you have, or how many accounts clicked a like or follow button to directly receive your
content in their social media feed. This gives you a good idea of the size of your audience. The more
followers you have the more people will get to see what you post. And of course people who follow
you are aware of you.

Play video starting at :3:22 and follow transcript

3:22
 Tracking the changes in your followers can give you insight into what strategies are gaining you new
followers, or losing them. Another important awareness metric is total reach. Or how many people
are viewing your content. This can include someone viewing your post on their feed, but it can also
include friends of that follower viewing the post on their feed. If the first follower liked, or shared the
post, this metric is related to individual posts which gives you a good idea of how many people are
getting eyes on your content, and it's a great way to evaluate which posts work well for your
audience.

Play video starting at :4:6 and follow transcript

4:06

Larger reach for a post typically means that more people have shared it or interacted with it. So you
may want to create more posts of the same kind.

Play video starting at :4:16 and follow transcript

4:16

On some platforms you may find a slightly different awareness metric, impressions, which is similar
to total reach, but instead measures the number of times your post was shown. Keep in mind that
this metric doesn't count individual accounts just times seen, so if one person saw your post twice,
that would count as two impressions. Both reach and impressions are going to help you understand
the exposure. Or lack thereof of your content. Ultimately, the metrics around your awareness are
going to give you insights into the extent to which your content is getting out into the world. Having
higher Total reach numbers may mean that your content is valuable and helpful enough that it's
being shared, for instance. And if you see the number of followers spike just after you posted a
particular piece of content or maybe even launched an advertising campaign, it shows you that that
post or that campaign worked. Tracking reach metrics can present you with these kinds of insights
into how amplified your content is getting and how broad your audience is. If you're not seeing the
reach you desire, you now have the data to back new strategies for growth.

Play video starting at :5:40 and follow transcript

5:40

The next category of metrics we're going to look at focuses on audience engagement or actions the
audience takes to interact with your content. Yes, this is where likes come in as they do tell us
something about audience engagement.

Play video starting at :5:55 and follow transcript

5:55

They're probably one of the simplest metrics to track, a like is tapping a button to show you read or
appreciated a post. This simple action shows that your audience is doing something to respond to
your content, so it's worth paying attention to. Of course, I'm talking about likes here, but on most
platforms likes have some nuances. You can love something, show surprise, sadness and so on.
Another important sign of engagement is sharing content, so that's our next metric. Number of
shares, a share means tapping a button to share a piece of content with your own audience. Along
with likes and shares, tracking the number of comments is going to be helpful as well. It not only
shows that a follower took time and effort to compose the comments, but can also give you some
 good insights into how your audience thinks about your brand. Posts with more comments means
that your audience wanted to take the time to engage with you. Another signal of engagement is
clicks. This means that a follower took the time to click on a link you provided in your post. whether
to read an article you shared, to go to your website, to read a blog post, or to find out more about
one of your products. This tracks who's showing increased interest in learning more about your
business or products. Ultimately, the metrics around engagement are going to give you insights into
how actively interested your followers are in what you have to say. Here are some of the insights you
could get from studying these engagement metrics. If you find that you're getting a lot of likes and
shares but very few comments then ask a few questions that get your audience engaged. If you find
that you have high engagement but haven't been actively posting calls to action, go ahead. Your
audience will probably want to find out more about you and your products. Do you have a large
reach but low engagement? You probably aren't providing content that's resonating with your
audience.

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8:02

High engagement but low reach, maybe you're a niche brand, with a dedicated but small audience.
Or it may be time to focus on building your following a bit more. Tracking engagement metrics can
give you new insights into how interested your audience is in what you're doing and the content
you're posting. If you're not seeing the engagement you want, you can now make a plan for
improving the quality of your content. Make sure to use these metrics to decide on what kind of
content you should create. If you see posts that have high engagement, create more along those
lines.

Play video starting at :8:42 and follow transcript

8:42

You may have noticed that we've been looking at metrics that move along the marketing funnel. We
started looking at awareness which measures brand exposure. Getting your message out and
getting the right audience to follow you. That would be at the top of the funnel. Then we looked at
engagement, which is when your audience begins to respond to your content. Finds it valuable, and
takes action, whether it be liking a post talking about you or clicking through to your website to find
out more. That would be the middle of the funnel. Now let's look at metrics that center around
conversions. Conversions happen when people take the action that you want them to take after
seeing your post, or a series of posts. Often conversions are sales. You want people to buy your
product. Sometimes you just want people to come to your website or download your app. Those are
conversions too, because it refers to an action you want people to take after seeing your content.
Conversions could also be generating leads. A lead could be an email address, for instance of a
person that seems to have an interest in what you have to offer. Remember DCB Cleaning? They
provide cleaning services for offices. In their case a sale or subscribing someone to Their service
mostly happens over the phone, but they use social media to encourage people to contact them so
they can get an initial conversation started. Once that initial contact is made, DCB has a lead that
can lead to an actual sale. One thing that's a bit different with conversion metrics than with
awareness and engagement metrics is that most of these conversions won't actually take place
within the social media platform. Often the action you want people to take will actually mean people
leave the social platform. You want them to visit your website, download your app, buy your product,
etc. This means that when you're looking at metrics related to conversions, you often have to go to
other dashboards and analytics tools that are related to your website or app. So what are the metrics
that would matter here? Generating traffic to your website from social media is often an important
 goal and thus tracking website visits from social media can be a good place to start. Are you seeing
a large percentage of traffic coming from social media after you posted something new? Then you
know that you're doing something right. Or do you have posts that have gotten a ton of likes and
shares but you didn't get the traffic you expected? Maybe you have to formulate a better call to
action or think about different things you can post to get people interested to check out your site.

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11:31

Another important metric to track is sales and more specifically sales that were related to your social
media posts. That can be a little trickier though, it can be hard to prove the connection between your
post and a sale. After all, people may not buy immediately after they saw your post, they may buy
later, and sometimes they buy in the store and not on your website. We'll talk about tracking sales
more when we talk about advertising. But for now, I suggest you track the trend in sales and try to
understand whether you're increased social media activity seems to lead to an upwards trend in
sales. Tracking the number of leads like capturing an email address resulting from your social media
account activity can be another form of tracking conversions. Conversions capture the actions you
would like to see people take as a result of your marketing. Those actions could be different things,
so different metrics can correspond to conversions and they may be a bit harder to track within the
social media platform itself. While they are of course very important, I suggest that you evaluate your
organic or free social media efforts primarily by assessing how you are increasing awareness and
engagement. Conversions typically follow later and increasing awareness and engagement will
ultimately help you drive conversions as well. Finally, it's important to track these metrics to see how
they change overtime in response to your efforts so that you can benchmark what's working and
what isn't in your strategy. The goal is to have data based information to work with in order to
continuously improve your social media reach, engagement and conversions.

You can't know how successful you've been with your social media efforts, until you start measuring
it. Facebook has a robust insights dashboard, to help you track your KPIs, so you can benchmark
your social media strategy. See where you stand on meeting your goals and create strategies for the
future. In this video, I'm going to walk you through Facebook Page Insights. For this walkthrough, I'm
going to use this speech from Paco Chierici, he's an author. He wrote "Lyons of the Sky," and action
packed novel about fighter pilots. Having been a navy pilot himself, he has many interesting stories
to tell and footage to share on his Facebook page. That's how he attracts readers to buy his book.
Well Facebook provides many different resources and tools to help you manage your page, we'll
take a tour of insights, which is Facebook's native analytics tool, and demystify it for you. After you
click "Insights," you land on this page. You'll see a long menu of items to explore on the left. We'll
start with the overview page, which is the default home page of this dashboard. The Overview starts
with a one-stop shop summary of your business page, which is your businesses homepage page on
Facebook, as opposed to individual posts, within user's feed. It starts with actions on page, which
counts any clicks within your page. Page views is anytime anyone went to your page to take a look
around. Page preview, comes when users have hovered over your page name to see a pop-up
preview. Page likes are how many people have liked your page, which Facebook breaks into organic
and paid. These are the stats that can help you understand, who's going to and engaging with your
business page. We'll look at these expanded metrics in a bit. Next, this overview gives data on your
content, including post and story reach. Post engagement, which is anytime someone likes or
comments on your posts and videos, which includes any place that last longer than three seconds.
This overview also shows you how many times followers recommended your page, how many
followers you have, and the number of orders you've received, if your page is set up to sell. You can
change the range of this data from the past week to the past four weeks. You can also export your
data into a report. Scroll down and you'll find your most recent posts, that shows you useful data like
 when they were posted, post type, your target audience, each posts reach, and total engagement.
Facebook also lets you add other pages that are similar to yours. You can see how your
performance stacks up, to comparable business pages.

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3:11

Your overview will tell you a lot already and give you a bit snapshot, as to how your Facebook page
is doing. But let's go deeper into what we can learn from the dashboard on the left navigation. Ads is
going to bring you to your ad center, where you'll manage all of your page posts. Here you can
create ads and track the engagement on your ads. We will focus on ads in our next two courses.
Your followers section is going to provide you an overview of the number of your followers, the
changes in your followers, and where they're coming from. Drag the slider in the first chart, to adjust
the date range for your data. Total page followers will show you your total audience. Click on a date
to learn more about where those follower came from. Click on total page followers on the right below
benchmark, to see your average growth. Page followers, allows you to view your audience by
organic and paid followers. Finally, this dashboard shows you where users were in Facebook, when
they followed you. The likes section of the dashboard is going to show you similar data. Your total
page likes with benchmarking, the number of page likes with whether they were organic or paid, and
where your likes happened. Remember that this is engagement for your business page and not yet
for your individual posts. Reach is going to dig into how many different Facebook users saw your
posts, broken down into organic and paid. Scroll down to the bottom, to find total reach, which is
account of any user who saw anything from your business page. Here you'll also find anytime
someone recommended your page in a post or comment, and your audience frequency of liking,
commenting on or sharing your content. Page views, is just going to be an overview of how many
times your business page, is being viewed. Here though, you can view analytics broken down into
what sections of your page people are viewing most, and also who's viewing according to age,
gender, location, and which device they're using. Finally, you can see the top sources of where your
views are coming from. Page previews, shows you how many people have hovered over your name
to view a preview of your page. Again, it shows the total views and also breaks it down by age and
gender. Actions on page, is going to tell you who clicked a link and what link it was. The link to your
website or your businesses phone number or another action button you created. This information is
broken down into who clicked, what by age, gender, location and device, so you can see who in your
audience is seeking out more information?

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6:19

The post section is going to be incredibly helpful as Facebook's done most of the work for you, in
auditing your content. Here you'll find a list of all your posts, when they were posted and how your
audience engaged with that post. You'll discover your reach as well, and Facebook even adds a
handy guide to what type of post you have and whether it contains a link, a photo or a video. You
can also change your reach filter and your engagement filters, to discover more about your posts.
Use this section, to help you see which posts are resonating the most, with your Facebook audience,
so you can keep creating great content for them. You can find out when your followers are on
Facebook, on this dashboard, too, which will help you plan which days and times to post in order to
maximize your reach. You can also track the success of different post types and how other
comparable page's posts are doing as well? Events will take you to your events dashboard, where
you can create events, track engagement, and anticipate your audience. Videos will show you your
top videos and how long they were viewed for? Stories will give you insights into your Facebook
 stories. The people dashboard, lets you discover more about your audience, broken down by fans
and followers. Here you'll find their ages, gender, where they're from, and what language they
speak. This data can let you know whether you are indeed engaging with your target audience or if
there are different segments following you, that you didn't expect. The messages dashboard, will
give you information on who's contacting you through Facebook Messenger. Finally, the orders
dashboard will track any sales, if your setup for e-commerce. Facebook also allows you to check
insights individually for each post, simply click on "People reached, or engagements," in the status
bar beneath your posts. A window with at-a-glance stats will pop up. You'll find reach, how many
likes, comments, and shares and any click-throughs. It'll also tell you any negative feedback your
post received. Like if someone reported it as spam for instance. You'll also find your reach and
impressions broken down by organic and paid, so you can track any promoted or paid posts. As you
start to interact with the analytics for your business page, you'll become more comfortable with these
dashboards and you'll discover the best way you can use the data. Remember that analytics are a
great resource to surface, what's going well with your content, what to improve, and new strategies
to implement going forward.

Now, let's take a tour through insights on Instagram; their native analytics tool that will help you
discover who's seeing what posts and when, who's interacting with your posts, who your audience
is, and more. Open up your Instagram app and navigate to your business profile Home. You'll find an
Insights button here on the page, or you can navigate to Insights by tapping the "Menu" icon here.
While not as robust as Facebook's Insights, there's still a lot to discover that will be helpful to your
marketing strategy. Insights breaks metrics down into three areas: content, activity, and audience.
Each section is broken down into further metrics. Let's start with content, which is going to focus
around what you've posted. First, it gives you an overview of how much content you posted in the
past week and what a Delta is from the week prior. Note that these insights only cover the past
week. While they do show the change from the week before, there's not a way to pull up customized
dates. If you do want to track your metrics over time, you may want to revisit Insights weekly to
record the data you need. Next, the post section shows what you posted this past week, along with
its reach, which is the number shown next to the eyeball icon, which is the number of times a post
was seen by an individual account. Instagram is going to order these by largest reach first, not
chronologically. Tap "See All" to see all of your posts, which is the only place in Insights where you
can go back further than a week. This screen is going to be incredibly helpful to you as it's going to
give you the ability to filter on post format, dates, and your metric of choice. It defaults to ranking
your posts by reach for the past year. Change the filters at the top to look at only photo or video
posts. Change your dates from the past week to two years ago and change what metrics you want to
look at. Maybe you want to see how many likes or comments your posts got, or which posts
prompted people to follow you, or click the link in your profile. This section is going to be your most
helpful to surface what content your audience engages with the most, and how. The next section is
Stories, which we'll show you the same data for the Instagram stories that you post. Tap on "See All"
to view all of your stories in the past 14 days, and filter by whatever metric you'd like; Reach, Link
Clicks or anyone who exited in the middle of viewing a story. The final section of content is
Promotions, where you'll find data on the posts that you've turned into ads to target specific users.
You can also tap "See All" to view different metrics for each of your promotions as well. How can this
data help you? By knowing the stats on your individual posts, you can see what posts your audience
engaged with most, track your KPIs, and make a plan for future content. Which posts had the most
profile clicks? Did those posts contain a call to action? Maybe the posts with the highest reach were
posted at a certain time of day when more of your followers were on the app. The goal is to uncover
insights into your content performance and make adjustments to better serve your audience.

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 3:40

The next section of our Insights dashboard is Activity, which uncovers how people are finding your
content and interacting with it. The first section is Discovery, which starts with Reach or the number
of unique users who have viewed any of your posts. This is like unique visitors in our web metrics.
Even though a user may have looked at your post multiple times, they're counted as one user. You
can see the change in your reach over last week as well. This dashboard also shows you
impressions, which is the number of times your posts have been seen. Since impressions focuses
on the number of times seen, you may have single users being double or triple counted in this
number as they may have scrolled by your post a few times. You'll also see your impressions' week
over week changes. These numbers are going to show you how far and wide your posts are going,
which can help you track awareness and impact of your brand. The next section on the Activity is
Interactions, which is simply a measure of an action taken by a follower. Here, Instagram measures
profile visits, which is times a follower visited your profile to look at your older posts or to find out
more information about you. It also measures website clicks or the times a follower clicked the link in
your bio. If these numbers are below what you want them to be, especially your website clicks, take
a look into how you're phrasing your call to action.

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5:20

The third section on Insights is going to tell you all about your audience. You can see who's following
you. Most importantly, you can see whether they align with your target audience or whether they're
entirely new segments. It's going to tell you how many followers you have right at the top of the
dashboard and the change from the previous week so you can see how many followers you gained.
Next is Top Locations, which simply shows where your followers live, defaulting to city first. You can
toggle to countries as well for a global perspective. Again, you'll probably see what you expect to see
here in regards to your target audience, but this section may uncover a regional or global audience
you didn't know you had. Next is Age Range, which shows the age of your followers segmented into
demographics. It defaults to all but toggle back and forth between men and women to see if there
are any differences to uncover in age ranges by gender. The next portion is Gender, which shows
you the breakdown of your followers. Again, use this data to see if you are engaging with your target
audience or if you have new audiences that you need to be aware of. Finally, Instagram shows an
incredibly helpful chart when your followers are on the app by day of the week and by time broken
into three hour segments. This takes the guesswork out of when to post. Simply post when you
followers are there. While gives you a bit of data on individual posts in that first content section, there
are times when you may want to drill down further into specific post. Go back to your Profile and
click on a post. Once there, click "View Insights". What first pops up is an at-a-glance look at the
insights for your post. The heart is how many likes it got, the speech bubble is the number of
comments, the paper airplane is how many times it was shared to a story or shared with another
user, and the bookmark is who favored it. Beneath the at-a-glance header, you'll find a bunch of
helpful information, the number of profile visits it encouraged, which is restated in the Interactions
section right below it. It also shows your posts reach. In the Discovery section, it will also tell you
how many accounts it reached who don't follow you. That could be someone finding it shared on a
story or through a hashtag. The discover section will tell you if someone found your post through a
hashtag. If you promoted your post, it will also give you details on your posts impact there as well.
As you can see, Insights is going to give you a lot to work with. But if you want more expansive
analytics, like having the ability to view customized timeframes, track audience changes over time,
and run reports, you might want to look into using a third party app. Third-party apps can also fold in
creation and scheduling tools as well. As you look to engage more with your audience, drive traffic to
your site, track your KPIs, and grow your brand awareness, make sure to use all the tools you have
at your disposal, including Instagram Insights.
We've covered a lot of ground already on how to create great content. How to create a content
calendar, so that you can anticipate where and when your content will post. How to track your
metrics, and what analyzing your key performance indicators can do to help you plan content for the
future. Now, let's put it all together as we help our friends at Inu and Neko iterate on their content
calendar. In a previous lesson, we created a content calendar for Inu and Neko. Where we planned
out posts to create based around holidays and events, which internal initiatives we wanted to
highlight to our audience, video and stories we could create and content we wanted to share. We
made a plan of what to post on which platform and when. Then, we created our content using a mix
of texts, images and video, good storytelling, shared links, and calls to action, as well as curated
content from around the web, and from our customers. Then, we posted that content to our social
media platforms on the dates and times we planned out in our calendar. Remember, we also kept
track of all our content on different social media platforms in our content audit. Fantastic job so far,
but now we need to see how we're doing with that content, and if our strategies being off. We've
gone through our metrics dashboards and analyzed our data, and across our platforms, our reach
and engagement has gone up overall. Our efforts are working, but we need to know more about how
our individual posts are performing, in order to make adjustments and plans for new content. We can
learn a lot by just tracking engagement, and total reach for each one of our posts. Here's what we
found for Inu and Neko. When we looked at our Instagram insights, we found that our new weekly
Throwback Thursday posts, where we showcase photos of the Inu and Neko staff and community
escapes with their first pets, got a lot of engagement, especially in the comments section, where our
audience shared memories of their first pets. Because of the high engagement and the field
goodness about these posts, we'll continue. We scheduled out a series of reminders for our services
on Facebook, which were posts designed to get our audience to click through the link, to learn more
about our grooming services at our website and hopefully book an appointment. But, in looking at
our metrics, we found that those posts didn't do really well on engagement or conversions. Maybe
we should think about bundling this call to action with a story. I think the audience reacts better to
that. We can see that the end of summer sale promotions we posted, received various engagement.
When we look further, we can see that a general post, got a lot of click-throughs, than the posts
about specific products. Going forward, we'll know to post about specific products. Additionally, our
summer sale product post got most clicks on Pinterest, possibly because due to Pinterest's shopping
options, our audience there is much warmer and looking to make a purchase. We discovered that
the tweets with the highest total reach, were tweets that contained tips and advice on pet grooming
and health. They achieved that level of reach because they were re-tweeted more than any other
kind of tweet. If they're being shared by our audience, It means that they are valuable to them, and
they're seeing us as an authority in our industry so let's keep sharing advice and tips. And let's make
a note to start including a link to our services with those tweets. If our audience likes our advice, they
may want to purchase our services. We can also check to see how our advice and tips themed posts
are doing on other platforms. We decided to post some tips and advice geared towards specific dog
breeds and looking at those posts, we discovered a lot of comments and some good conversation
going. But in looking closer at our metrics for those posts, our reach was really low. That actually
tells us a lot that our niche posts targeted a niche audience and got them talking. We could say, "oh,
we didn't get much reach, so we won't post those kinds of posts again". But, that's probably the
wrong viewpoint. We should schedule these kinds of posts into our calendar again, because even
though we only heard from small audience, they were highly engaged and know we care about their
interests. These are just a few ways in which you can use data to understand the effectiveness of
your social media efforts. Hopefully, you now have a better sense of how much of an iterative
process managing your social media content really is. Creating content and posting it, is really only
one part of it. Running Social Media, involves using and understanding your metrics, and constantly
tweaking your content and format to continually discover what resonates best with your audience
and the discoveries we made this video don't mean that we figured everything out in terms of our
strategy, we'll make the adjustments we discussed, and then we'll revisit them to see if we got better
returns. If not, we'll make another plan and try something new.

Congratulations. You're getting very close to the end of this course. I love how digital media and
social media provides us with data on how people interact with our content. It's actually one of the
parts I love the most about social media and digital marketing. I hope that you love that as much as I
do. You now know how to evaluate the success of your social media activity, and that is a big deal.
Congratulations.

How to Uncover Job Opportunities

This resource covers ways to connect to job opportunities beyond traditional job boards. It will teach
you to create a target company list so you don’t have to rely on what happens to appear up on job
boards. By following these strategies, you will be able to develop your professional network and gain
access to job openings that might not be posted publicly. In addition, you will understand how to
connect with hiring teams to get their attention in the crowded market, where hundreds of people
might be applying for the same role.

Limitations of Job Boards

Monitoring job boards is an important part of any job search as it can surface opportunities that you
would never come across otherwise. Aggregators, such as Indeed and Google for Jobs, make
discovering jobs easier by consolidating postings from various job boards and other relevant internet
sites. Before going into strategies for uncovering opportunities beyond job boards, let’s discuss why
it is not sufficient to limit your job search to what’s discoverable through job boards.

Competition

Job boards’ convenience is also one of their challenges. Once the job is posted to an online job
board, it is easily discoverable by any job seeker, which results in a high volume of applications and
competition. Even with a well-written resume is can be challenging to stand out among tens, and
often hundreds, of others.

Lack of visibility into the job status

Another challenge of job boards is that you don’t know whether the hiring team is what stage the
hiring for the role is in. Even if the role had just popped up on a job board, it might have been open
for a while and new applications are no longer being reviewed.

Tip: When you find an opening through a job board, use LinkedIn to find someone on the recruiting
team and inquire whether they are still sourcing applications. If they confirm, ask to send your
resume directly to them rather than submitting it through the automated system.

Limited information about the role

When applying to a role based on a job board posting, your knowledge about the requirements and
the role is limited to what’s in the job description, which can be imprecise. That means that
something that looks like a perfect fit for you “on paper” might not be one in reality. Relying solely on
job descriptions can also cause you to miss openings that are actually a great fit.

Not everything is posted

There are often openings that are not captured by job boards. This can happen for multiple reasons,
for example, if the role is still in the process of being approved and published. Unpublished
opportunities often provide the best chances of having your application turn into an interview
because you are not competing against a large number of other candidates.

Networking Is the Solution to Job Board Limitations

The challenges with job boards outlined above can be addressed with networking. Direct connecting
within hiring companies can help you find out what roles are open or might be opening up soon and
what exact qualifications those roles require. Referrals resulting from networking will also help you
stand out from the competition.

Create a target company list

To identify people you should be adding to your network, begin with developing a list of target
companies that you would like to work for. These won’t be the only companies you are open to
working for, but they’ll be the ones you actively pursue, outside of job boards. It is important to have
a significant list of 30 to 50 companies because not all of them will have jobs open at the right time.
Remember, companies do not have to have relevant jobs posted immediately to be on your list.
To develop your list, identify which parameters that are important to you, such as location, industry,
size corporate culture, etc. Then research companies that meet your criteria. There are many online
resources ranking companies on everything from being great places to work for parents to their
commitment to social responsibility. If you are interested in a specific industry, you can begin with
one company and research it’s competitors. If location is of utmost importance to you, check what
companies post jobs - any jobs - in your target area and research them to see if they might hire for
your target role. Be creative in finding companies for your list, the more you start with the better.

Speak with people within your target companies

Once you have a list of potential companies, begin developing connections there. Your ultimate goal
is to speak with someone in your target group within the company - someone who could be your
teammate or a hiring manager in the future. Through a simple 15-minute informational conversation
with them, you will be able to:

● Confirm whether this company is indeed a good fit for you and you should monitor it for
opportunities
● Understand the requirements for your target role at this company. It will enable you to
tailor your resume and prepare for interviews if/when the opportunity comes up
● Learn about ways to monitor and apply for opportunities there
● Develop an important professional relationship that one day might turn into a referral

Tip: If it seems daunting to reach out to strangers, remember that all you are asking for is advice, not
a job. You want to understand whatever this company and type of role are a good fit for you. Many
people enjoy being helpful and happy to share their expertise with a stranger who asks nicely!

Finding and reaching out to people. LinkedIn is a great tool for establishing new connections.
LinkedIn People Search function will help you locate people on a specific team at a specific
company. Use your target job function as the search string and add a filter for “current employer.”
Voila! Now you can review the results and send a connection request to people who you are
interested in connecting with Always include a note to explain why you are reaching out to them.

Sample LinkedIn outreach message:

Hi <name>, I discovered your profile because of the interesting work you do as a <role> at
<company>. I’d appreciate an opportunity to ask you a few questions to learn more about what you
do, and what it is like to work at <company>. Thank you in advance for connecting with me!
If they accept your connection, follow up with a message thanking them and asking to schedule a
15-minute phone/video call to learn about their role. Make scheduling easy by suggesting a specific
time to speak, offer to work around their calendar, and send out a calendar invitation with information
on how you will connect (phone, video conferencing, etc).

Do not take it personally if your connection request goes unanswered. Some people don’t monitor
their LinkedIn messages or are simply too busy. Try reaching out to other people at the company.
Focus on those you have something in common with: maybe you want to the same school, have the
same hobby, there is just something about their profile that speaks to you. Reach out to them with
the same goal of having a 15-minute conversation, but focus on the company rather than the role. If
it feels appropriate at the end of that conversation, ask them whether they’d be open to facilitate an
introduction for you with someone on your target team.

Tip: On LinkedIn, you can only access profiles of people who are in your network (i.e., your 1st-
degree, 2nd-degree, and 3rd-degree connections), as well as fellow members of your LinkedIn
groups. You can expand your network by adding more 1st-degree connections and joining groups.

Best practices for a networking conversation

On the day of your informational conversation, it will be your responsibility to set the tone and
agenda for it. Your goal is to make the other person feel comfortable, valuable, and appreciated.
Always begin with a short overview of why you reached out and what you are hoping to learn from
the conversation. Remember to speak to your relevant skills, accomplishments, and personal
qualities so that the person can be compelled to refer you to a role on their, team if and when the
opportunity comes up.

Since you are there to learn about their experience and company, the primary focus of the
conversation should be on the other person. Some people might be more talkative, while others may
need more input from you in order to engage. Ideally, they should be speaking for 50% to 80% of the
conversation. Don’t be afraid of short pauses, and be respectful and patient if they need time to
gather their thoughts.

Always send a thank-you email within 48 hours. Express your gratitude for their time, address any
action items that came up during your conversation, and offer to return the favor in the future.

Follow up and monitor opportunities

After every conversation, evaluate whether the organization you just discussed should stay on your
list of target companies. Does it sound like a good fit for you, and can you expect openings to come
up in your target time frame? If so, make sure to check the company’s careers page for opportunities
regularly, and take any other steps recommended by your new contact. If not, remove the company
from your list and move onto the next one.

If you think there is a good synergy between you and the company, it will be important to keep the
connection with the person you just spoke with active over time. You can do that by sending
occasional updates on your job search or sharing articles and other resources that you think they
might find useful. Doing so will strengthen the connection you had established, and keep you top of
mind for the person in case a relevant opportunity comes up.

Continue Growing Your Network and Target Company List

In this article, we discussed how to identify target companies for your job search and to speak with
people who work there in order to uncover and connect to opportunities. Remember that your goal is
to speak with someone on the team you want to join at each of 30 to 50 companies on your target
list. It might take you a few weeks to do so, and these networking activities should consume the bulk
of the time you spend on your job search.

In addition, remember to continue monitoring job boards and attend networking events to discover
opportunities at companies you would not have thought about otherwise. Whenever you come
across a company that is interesting to you, add it to your target company lists and begin to build out
your network there. The longer your list is, the more opportunities you will have access to.