Social Media Manager ✹Course Onboarding Guide
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Social Media Manager ✹Course
Section 1: Social Strategy
Social media is all fun & games until you have to sit down and create a social strategy. That’s actually not true - let us show you! A strategy can be daunting, but we’ll do it together. We’ll go over discovering your purpose & setting goals, figure out WTF you’ll post, develop your tone & voice, learn how to do community management right, and execute a social media audit. Yep, that’s just the first section!
Level 1: Goal Setting
The first step is figuring out exactly what you (or your brand) wants to accomplish through their social media accounts. Is it building a community of professionals? Driving as much traffic to a site as possible? Making the dankest of memes? Here, you’ll define your goals and detail how you plan to measure and reach them.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Establish your goals (or advise on what they should be)
Lesson 2: Set KPIs and other commonly-used acronyms you may be pretending to know
Lesson 3: Identify objectives and build the framework for your overall strategy
📮 CTA Time:
Introduce yourself on the course Discord and what your mock (or real) account you’ll be working on is.
Begin building out a social strategy based on your account of choice, starting with social purpose, goal, and KPIs.
Bonus Assignment: Complete your Social Audit and share on Discord for cookies 🍪.
Level 2: Content Buckets and Cadence
Now that you’ve set your goals, the next part of building your social strategy will be determining ~*WTF*~ you’re going to post to get you closer to your goals and how often you’ll do it. These content buckets will be your rubric for all your posts.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Select content buckets that perform and ladder up to your messaging goals & overall goals. Go over the purpose for each of the buckets and the “why”
Lesson 2: Begin concepting ideas tailored to your account that fall under your content buckets
Lesson 3: Establish a competitor set
📮 CTA Time:
Determine your content buckets, and include one concept per bucket, and add to your strategy deck.
Level 3: Voice & Tone
Discovering your tone will be just as important as the content you post–it’ll be what your account is remembered for and how your content will be recognized. Are you #blessed, silly 🤪, impenitently intellectual? We’ll explore your brand voice and how it translates through your social touchpoints.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Explore different examples of voice and tone
Lesson 2: Define your own voice & tone and how to have it shine through your copywriting
Lesson 3: Do’s and Don’ts for captions
📮 CTA Time:
Submit a draft of 3 different captions that reflect 3 different tones for 2 provided posts.
Determine the tone & voice of your account and add as a slide to your strategy deck.
Level 4: Community Management
No, it’s not an NBC mocumentary-style sitcom. Foster and cultivate a community by genuinely interacting with commenters, people that tag your brand, and like-minded accounts. Additionally, learn how to crisis manage and be reactive to current events.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Build out a diverse response bank for FAQs questions
Lesson 2: Discover your brand friends (or frenemies) and how you’d like to interact
Lesson 3: Take temperature checks and respond to sensitive scenarios
📮 CTA Time:
Outline your audience demo and personas, as well as your approach to community management, and add it to a slide in your strategy deck.
📦 Submission #1:
Submit your strategy deck on Discord for grading.
Social Media Manager ✹Course
Section 2: Content Production
It’s not just about planning a beautiful, cohesive grid. You’ll blend visual aesthetics with strategy for a marketing programming deck that can do both. We’ll explore types & formats of content, how to generate & source it, and how to organize your work and collaborate with teams. We’ll also get our hands dirty and delve into production & shooting original content.
Level 1: Programming
When laying out your grid, you’ll need to hit messaging points, provide CTAs, and align with key dates for campaigns. We’ll go over the elements you actually need to create social programming that is both effective and on-brand, and we’ll also go over which trends to leave in 2014 (along with your Disco Pants).
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Build a content calendar based on a marketing launch
Lesson 2: Plot out posts and create a cohesive grid
Lesson 3: Scheduling and posting best practices
📮 CTA Time:
Begin building your Social Programming Deck, starting with a mock grid and posts for Instagram and TikTok.
Level 2: Production & Collaborating with Teams
Chances are, your content will be the result of collaborating with a creative team that will look different depending on the company. We’ll determine what resources are required for the type of content you’re producing, then go through project management and team workflow. For outsourced content, you’ll package a pre-production deck for partners to utilize.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Use a project management tool (Notion) to manage workflow for a creative team
Lesson 2: Consider owned vs sourced content
Lesson 3: Explore the production value desired for your original content
Lesson 4: Create a pre-production deck
📮 CTA Time:
Create a pre-production deck for a social shoot based on a launch and add it to your Programming Deck.
Level 3: Content Creation
Content creation can feel like a beast, but we’re here to unpack it together. Using the visual identity of the brand as a guide, we’ll go over shooting styles, post-production, and trends. #FYP
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Based on the desired production value of your content, learn to shoot & edit your own content or book a social shoot
Lesson 2: User generated content — generate earned tags and produce owned content
Lesson 3: Explore and examine the use of trends & current events within your strategy
📮 CTA Time:
Source at least 5 TikTok trends (sounds, copy, capcuts) and send in the Discord group for discussion. Additional memes strongly encouraged.
📦 Submission #2:
Submit your Programming Deck on Discord to be graded.
Social Media Manager ✹Course
Section 3: Reporting
Social is also a numbers thing - Mathematical! Reporting is the cornerstone in evolving your strategy, measuring your KPIs, and determining your progress toward reaching your goals. A digestible report will communicate high-level updates to stakeholders and your manager (read: a promotion - cha ching!) We’ll go over measuring qualitative & quantitative metrics and how to build insight reports.
Level 1: Analytics & Metrics
While everyone’s looking at likes & comments, an effective social media manager knows to go beyond vanity metrics. We’ll explore all the different ways to measure your content, what the metrics mean, which ones to care about, and how to find them.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Understand different metrics and which ones are important for your goals
Lesson 2: Deep dive into your social reporting tool and learn how to access everything you need
📮 CTA Time:
Start thinking about how you could categorize & label your content and share in Discord for discussion.
Level 2: Creating Reports
Reporting will inform your S/S/C (start/stop/continue) and highlight wins and opportunities. A digestible report will also communicate high-level updates to stakeholders and your manager.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Create a monthly, quarterly, and annual social report
Lesson 2: Look at your comments & inbound and analyze sentiment and trends
Lesson 3: Go beyond numbers and look at performance from a messaging and visual POV
Lesson 4: Create a custom report based on what your brand or client is looking for, compare performance based on specific qualifiers
📦 Submission #3:
Submit your visual trend report on Discord to be graded.
Social Media Manager ✹Course
Section 4: Werk, Werk, Werk
(Yes, as in the great words by Queen RiRi). After you’ve mastered all the hard skills, we’re not going to leave you hanging. In this section, we’ll help you get noticed and get your foot in the door so you can land the interview and secure the job! We’ll also deep dive into freelancing and how to charge for your services, win clients, and lock in sweet gigs. Really, it’s all the things you should’ve learned in college but didn’t.
Level 1: SMM Career Fair
It’s Social Media Career Day! Get a peek inside different social media teams, what it takes to move up in the game, and how to determine & seek out your ideal jobs.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: You’ll hear more about Joellen’s journey and how she went from self-taught entrepreneur to social media director at a global fashion brand
Lesson 2: Get a peek inside social media teams and structures, including titles & their functions
We’ll also go over how to find the job and get a job that aligns with your values
📮 CTA Time:
Start the job hunt! Find job listings that peak your interest and share them in the Discord.
Level 2: Get a Job and Keep It
You’ve learned the hard skills needed for social media management–now let’s put those skills to work and get noticed, land the interview, and secure the job or freelance gig! Just call me your Social Media Mentor 💫
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: Build a portfolio & resume
Lesson 2: Get social - cold outreaching and applying
Lesson 3: Nail the interview process & candidate project
Lesson 4: Soft Skills like how to sell your ideas and negotiating your rates and packages
📮 CTA Time:
Bonus Assignment: Complete your Social Media Candidate project and submit it on Discord for cookies 🍪.
Level 3: Get Paid
The reason for the season - making money! Wage transparency is so important, so we’ll go over salary expectations for different levels of social media roles and how much to charge as a freelancer.
What you’ll learn:
Lesson 1: No gatekeeping - I go in (and pop off) on my personal money journey
Lesson 2: Determine the salary you should be asking for
Lesson 2: Set your rates and calculate how much to charge for services as a freelancer
📮 CTA Time:
You’ve completed the course!
Stay BFFs with your instructor because she loves friends <3
Course Certificate
To earn your certificate of completion, you must submit the three required projects and fill out the form after the last video in the course.
Filling out the form will give us the information we need to put on your certificate.
Social Media Manager ✹Course
Syllabus
✹ This course is entirely self-paced so it can be flexible with your schedule. This is our recommendation on how to pace the course if you are able to work on it at least 10 hours a week.
Orientation
Get acquainted with the curriculum, do an overview of everything we’ll be learning & working on, and get to know your instructor! Kind of like high school orientation, but you don’t have to do it at 8am and it’s actually fun.
Add all the events to your Google Calendar
Week 1:
Section 1, Levels 1 & 2
First you’ll lay the groundwork for your social audit & strategy - what is your purpose and your goals? How will you measure them? Then, begin creative ideation. No messing around here - we dive right in 🏊♀️
📮 CTA Time:
Select account and determine your KPIs & on what platforms (2 hrs)
Build the framework for your strategy deck (30 min)
3-5 content buckets (1-2 hrs)
Competitor set - start thinking about it (1 hour)
1 concept per bucket (3 hrs)
Week 2:
Section 1, Levels 3 & 4
Mouth off. You’ll explore tone & voice, begin social copywriting, learn how to manage your community, and create a strategy for how you plan to engage with them.
📮 CTA Time:
Establish tone & voice (1-2 hours)
Caption practice! (1 hour)
Create a mini response Q&A (30 min)
📦 Submission
Submit your strategy deck for grading (make it pretty!) (2-3 hours)
Just a heads up! You’ll get your feedback in approximately two weeks.
Share your social audit for cookies (6 hours)
Week 3:
Section 2, Levels 1 & 2
Here you’ll develop a launch calendar around a campaign and discover posting best practices. Evaluate different types of content (format, quality, etc.) and how to produce & source each kind. If it hasn’t yet been clear how many hats social media managers wear, you’ll get the picture here.
📮 CTA Time:
Start building your programming deck: mock grids for Instagram & TikTok (3 hours)
Create a comp set analysis (3 hours)
Set up Notion (1 hour)
Pre-production deck (3 hours)
Create social budget (2 hours)
Week 4:
Section 2 Level 3
You’ve got production and budget set–let’s shift focus from your left brain to your right brain and get shooting/sourcing/creating. Get your #FYP ready.
📮 CTA Time:
Exploring social trends (2 hour)
Building a creative brief (2 hours)
📦 Submission
Submit your programming deck for grading (2-3 hours)
You’ll get your feedback in approximately two weeks.
Week 5:
Section 3
Receipts 👏 Proof 👏 Timeline 👏 Screenshots 👏! Here’s where you’ll measure performance and show off what’s working and what’s not. We’ll dig deep into analytics, metrics, reporting, and WTF they all mean.
📮 CTA Time:
Begin categorizing your content and creating labels (2 hours)
Build a sentiment report and trend analysis (3 hours)
📦 Submission
Create a quarter or annual Trend Report (3 hours)
You’ll get your feedback in approximately two weeks.
Week 6:
Section 4 Level 1-2
Tbh here’s where you learn how to market yourself - get noticed, get interviewed, get hired!
📦 Submission
Share your resume and portfolio for cookies (4 hours)
Create a social media candidate project and submit for cookies (4 hours)
Week 7:
Section 4 Level 3
You’re at the homestretch! We’ll go over how much compensation you should ask for as an employee and also how to calculate your freelance rates.
📮 CTA Time:
Graduation! AKA head to the Discord and gloat. 🎓
Upcoming & Past
Workshops and Events↘
ℭommunity ℰvents
Community & Course
Events ✦ Calendar↘
Heads up, this is a calendar of ALL events at ilovecreatives, so look for SMM (Social Media Manager✹ Course). If you would like to add this Calendar to yours, click here. You can also RSVP in Discord Events.
✦ Digital Office Hours with Joellen
(Every Friday afternoon on Discord)
If you have questions about the curriculum, Joellen will be online to answer at this time.
✦ Super Productive Time
A digital co-working session with awesome creatives!
✹ To add this calendar to yours, click +Google Calendar ↖