Welcome to the course

Welcome to Understanding Social Media Strategy and the start of your learning journey on the How to Create a Social Media Strategy ExpertTrack, brought to you by the Institute of Data & Marketing.

Over the next 3 courses, you’ll write effective social media platform and campaign strategies, set the direction of social media strategy development, and create a solid social media plan for a business of your choice. You will be taken through the entire lifecycle of developing an overarching social media strategy and a campaign based strategy, using practical activities to deepen your understanding and demonstrate your learning.

Courses are organised in sequence, and for the best learning experience we suggest you follow this order:

• Understanding Social Media Strategy
• How to Develop Your Social Media Content Strategy
• Running a Social Media Campaign: Customers, Influencer Engagement, Analytics

We expect the entire ExpertTrack should take at least 10 weeks to complete, and around 40 hours of work. That said, everyone’s different, and you may find yourself working at a different pace, and that’s fine – one of the benefits of online learning is you can work at a pace that suits you.

There is some assumed knowledge for those taking this ExpertTrack:

• You will have created content for and posted on multiple platforms
• You can gather stats from social platforms
• You have created and posted content on social media platforms as part of a multi-channel campaign

The ExpertTrack is not a ‘how to guide’ for posting to social media, or an introduction to social media.

Assessment in this ExpertTrack

In each course you will see quizzes throughout the weeks. Quizzes are for practice, and do not contribute towards your final score. They’re a fantastic opportunity for you to check your progress and understanding.

Tests are part of your final score. You can retake tests as often as you need, but it is important to complete them as they count towards your overall score. Peer Graded Assignments are part of your final score. These provide you with a chance to develop deeper insight into the quality of your work through the review of your course peers.

You need to mark over 90%+ of steps as complete across the entire ExpertTrack, attempt every test and assessment question, and score an average of at least 70% across all your assessments, to be eligible to gain certificates at both individual course level, and overall ExpertTrack level.

Finally, you do not have to take any Tests or submit any Peer Graded Assignment until you’re ready. To help you prepare, you might wish to spend some time reviewing and revising.

Deepen your learning

But there’s more to engagement than gaining certificates: we are confident that if you engage fully in all parts of this ExpertTrack you’ll likely maximise your learning, encounter other perspectives and ideas, and have a richer learning experience. Full engagement includes:

• Working through the component courses in the suggested order – they’re arranged for a reason, and each course has been designed with a logical sequence. Jumping ahead without completing what came before may give you a disjointed learning experience.
• Reading, watching and listening across a variety of steps – some of which are text based, some with rich media.
• Sharing and discussing your learning with course peers – keep an eye out for the prompts which follow many steps, and get ready to spend a little more time on the Discussion steps.
• Developing your ideas through conversation – Educators will not be able to respond directly to comments in this ExpertTrack. We encourage learners to support one another, share personal experiences, and see new perspectives through the comments.
• Concept-checking and assessing your progress by completing Quiz steps – they’re just for practice, and the marks don’t count towards your certificate of achievement.
• Completing tests in each course.
• Creating, producing and sharing your own work in the Peer Graded Assignments.

Find out more about ExpertTracks on our Community pages here.