Certificates are one way to prove to employers and clients that you have the skills needed to create and execute successful social media strategies. As recommended by my professor, I embarked on a journey to get inbound certified. I chose to get Social Media Certified. I chose social media out of a number of other valid options because of how prevalent and important it is in all spheres of modern life and businesses. I completed the Social Media Strategy Certification on HubSpot. It took me several weeks to complete it even though the official course time is 8 hours. I liked learning about:
- Social media channels
- Developing a budget and garnering executive buy-in
- Social listening and monitoring
- Building content strategy for social media
- How tone and voice makes all the difference
- Demonstrating industry leadership through content curation
- The importance of tagging, timing, and testing
- The varying shades of influencer marketing
- How to work with influencers
- What UGC is and why it matters
- Why social engagement is the heart of social strategy
- Why digital advertising is important to inbound strategy
- Why measuring social ROI matters
- Social media audit
- How to tie metrics back and transform your business
- Determining your ad spend, and
- How to create remarkable ad content
The part I liked the least was toward the end of the course. Talking about social media governance and risk, crisis management, and employee advocacy programs put me to sleep multiple times. However, I understood the importance of grasping these concepts so I kept going back to rewatch them.
My Key Point to Remember Will Be: Don’t forget to measure social media ROI!
Social media ROI is, by definition, the results you get from everything you do on social media, ranging from building brand awareness and loyalty, retaining and satisfying customers, protecting your reputation and directly earning revenue.
But it’s tough to measure the ROI of social media – because how can you measure goodwill or the impact of word-of-mouth marketing as a result of your social posts? Still, you need to put a system in place to regularly track ROI because it:
- Helps you understand the effectiveness of your posts
- Allows you to adjust what’s not working
- Proves the value of social media within your organization
- Shows executives the value of budgeting for your social media efforts
- Shows how social media impacts all departments beyond just marketing and sales
- Helps you understand how people are talking about your brand so you can gain control over those conversations
Create social media analytics reports at least once a month, but I’ve found it’s also helpful to create weekly analytics reports. This allows me to see our most effective content on a deeper level and really dig into what’s working and where we need to make changes.
For each channel, track metrics like:
- Best and worst performing posts
- Posts with the most engagement (comments, likes, shares)
- Number of posts per week
- Publish times of posts with the best and worst engagement
- Traffic to your website
- Video views
- Post reach and impressions
- Number of Twitter mentions
- Results of paid ad campaigns
Ultimately, I had no disappointments or frustrations. I loved the videos and lectures. I truly believe this certification program is useful for other marketers. On a scale of 1-5, I would recommend this certification program to a friend on a 5. They were extremely professional and it was easy to connect to the instructors. I learned a whole lot I thought I already knew. The HubSpot platform is warm, friendly and welcoming. I would definitely recommend that any/every marketing professional get Inbound Certified at HubSpot.
The icing on the cake? It’s free!
Whether you’re a full-time social media marketer, you work on your company’s social media part-time or you just want to learn more about social media marketing, HubSpot’s social media certification is definitely worth the effort.
