Using Social Media in Business (Self-Paced Tutorial)

1 Developing a Social Media Foundation

In this lesson, we're going to build the foundation you need to use social media to grow your business. You will discover the definition of social media, learn about its characteristics, and see what it can do for your business. Then you will explore the various types of social media and focus in on the ones that offer the greatest benefits.

2 Creating Your Social Media Strategy

Today, you will see how you can build a strategy for using social media to grow your business. First, you will discover what a strategy is and why it's important to have one for your social media efforts. Then you will gain an understanding of the critical elements of any social media strategy.

3 Building Your Social Media Organization

This lesson demonstrates how to develop a social media organization that will help you be as effective as possible. First, you will see how to choose from among the various platforms to select the ones that will serve your business best. Finally, you will learn how you can transform your simple diagram into a more detailed electronic file and add elements as your business grows.

4 Crafting High-Quality Content

In this lesson, you will learn how to produce social media content that engages your followers and entices them to comment. You will gain an understanding of how to write content that's optimized for distribution on social media platforms and to do so without it becoming a full-time job. Finally, you will learn the various ways that you can store, manage, search, and retrieve the social media content that you produce.

5 Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites. In this lesson, you will learn how you can use Facebook to effectively market and grow your business. First, you will get an overview of how Facebook works, and you will take a tour of a Facebook business page. Next, you learn how to create a Facebook account, set up a page for your business, and use strategies to gain awareness and exposure for your business.

6 Twitter

This lesson focuses on using Twitter to effectively market and grow your business. You will be guided through the steps required to create and brand a Twitter account for your business. Finally, you will learn several advanced strategies that you can use to gain awareness and exposure for your business.

7 LinkedIn

This lesson will teach you how to use LinkedIn to make connections, expand your personal network, and grow your business. You will explore a handful of strategies that you can use to gain awareness and exposure for your business.

8 Pinterest

In this lesson, you will learn how you can use Pinterest to share information and connect with others who are interested in your products and services. You will learn a handful of strategies that can help your business gain additional awareness and exposure.

9 Instagram

In this lesson, you'll learn how you can use Instagram to effectively market and grow your business. First, we'll walk through an overview of the social media platform, highlight how it differs from others we've explored, and take a tour of its features. After that, you'll see how to create a personal account and how to decide whether or not to switch to a business profile. Finally, we'll examine several strategies that you can use to leverage Instagram to engage and interact and grow a base of followers for your business.

10 Social Media Automation

In this lesson, you will learn about social media automation. You will peek at the pros and cons and identify the most common pitfalls of using automation. And finally, this lesson introduces the most popular free and paid automation tools that you can put to immediate use.

11 Social Media and Your Team

In this lesson, you will learn to minimize the time you spend on social media activities through delegation. First, this lesson investigates the types of tasks you can delegate and examine some common pitfalls to avoid. Next, you will explore process for assigning tasks to team members and, if needed, hiring a part-time or full-time social media manager. Finally, you will gain some strategies for centralizing your social media information and get a preview of some software solutions for integrating your social media team's efforts.

12 Measuring Your Social Media Performance

How do you know if what you're doing is working? In this lesson, you will learn about tracking, monitoring, measuring and improving your social media activities. First, we're going to investigate the most com