Social Media Content Strategy

The goal of this course is to teach the skills, concepts, and theories relevant to planning and executing a social media marketing strategy that helps meet business objectives. Students learn theoretical fundamentals and platform-based skills around social media marketing, content marketing, digital channel strategy and optimization. This course is hands-on, allowing students to build a social media strategy for a brand of their choosing.

While the social media strategy concepts learned in this course apply to all social channels, for simplicity, students will work only on Instagram.

At the completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Craft a social media marketing strategy that meets business objectives for a brand of their choosing

• Explain how social media fits into the broader landscape of marketing channels

• Understand the importance of customer personas and the research methods marketers use to better understand their customers

• Develop content and creative that aligns with marketing objectives and promotes their product in an on-brand way

• Determine which types of posts work best to meet given marketing objectives

• Measure, analyze and optimize posts to increase performance

Students need to attend at least 80% of sessions in order to pass the course.

This course includes a weekly lecture and exercises that students can access and access and complete asynchronously. The class will meet for 1.5-hour weekly workshops structured in the following way: 

• Student show and tell: Students will contribute screenshots showcasing examples of some of the concepts covered in the asynchronous lecture.

• Activity: Instructor prompts students with an in-class activity where they practice the strategies and skills covered in lecture. These labs build up to the final project.

Special Guests: When available, we will host local and global business leaders for a short lecture and Q&A.

• Final Project (40%): Students will build a social media marketing strategy for a brand of their choosing.

• Class Participation (30%): This course is hands-on and collaborative. Students are expected to participate and contribute to class discussions. 

• Weekly assignments (30%) : Students contribute relevant screenshots and answer reading comprehension questions in our learning management system. All assignments are due the sunday before our in-person workshops.

Tools:
In this course, we’ll use a variety of real-world marketing tools, all listed in the chart which specifies the unit details. Access to all these tools is free and required of all students. Most notably, all students enrolled in this course must have access to their own Instagram account.

Literature & Materials:

Articles:

• On Social Media, Sell your Brand, Not your Stuff
• Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media
• ‘Likes’ Lead to Nothing, and other Hard Earned Lessons of Social Media
• Branding in the Age of Social Media
• How to Curate your Digital Persona

Business Cases: 

• Glossier: From Beauty Blog to Billion dollar brand community
• Obama and the Power of Social Media and Technology
• Unilever: Building an Insights Empire

Videos: 

• The Naked Brand (documentary)
• Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened

Books: 

• Building a Story Brand
• The Robert Collier Letter Book
• Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

Session plan