How LinkedIn Learning Helped Me Understand Social Media

This Marketing Monday blog post was written by Communications Specialist Siddhi Nair.

When I started this job, I had limited experience handling a social media channel. I knew how to create posts and come up with captions, but I had a limited knowledge of how to maintain continuity and create a pattern that helps build a brand.  

One of the first things Alexandra asked me to do was go through some LinkedIn Learning videos to understand how social media works:

1. Marketing on Twitter
2. Marketing Tools: Social Media

The way LinkedIn Learning courses are structured goes like: Introduction, Example, and Outcomes. 

For example, in the course "Marketing Tools: Social Media," the instructor starts by talking about the various social networking platforms, then how to plan for the content that goes on these channels based on the kind of audience they have. This is followed by an example of how these channels can be used to take feedback or review from the users. The final part is about how to get the analytics report and interpret it. The key part is to see how the numbers have changed since the strategies were implemented.

Based on what I learned from these tutorials, I targeted three things to incorporate:

1. Using new tools
2. Building a strategy
3. Setting goals: Long term & Short term

The first thing I did was explore Adobe Spark & Canva, which you are free to access with your UTA ID. Using some of the templates, I created few graphics.  

Next thing I did was come up with monthly social calendars based on different days that are celebrated across the country and world, such as National Video Games Day & World Humanitarian Day. These helped us in putting out more content out on our social channels that increased our reach—meaning more people are seeing our content.  

Finally, I set the goal to design a basic skeleton for my calendar. I designed Tuesday Trivia with different theme for every month and Flashback Friday to showcase our vast Digital Gallery. After doing some research, I began using relevant hashtags to promote our events, services, and resources. #MondayMood, #ThrowbackThursday and #WooffullWednesday are three that consistently worked for us. 

Here are a few examples of posts that were well received by our audience:

What LinkedIn Learning allows you to do is not just improve the skills that you already have, but also learn new ones and master them. All the topics are taught by professionals who have a certain level of expertise.  

One of the features that is particularly interesting is that you can save any course of your liking and complete it in your free time. Additionally, if you want to go over just one of the chapters in a course you can do that as well.  

The best thing about courses on LinkedIn is that the skills associated with each course you take gets added automatically to your LinkedIn profile no matter the length of the course. These days it is necessary for everyone to have a good LinkedIn profile. These skills boost your profile and make it visible to recruiters.

Learning is always fun with LinkedIn Learning; you will never run out of new ways to learn.