The Best Online Social Media Marketing Classes for Freelancers in 2024

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Are you looking for the best online social media marketing courses? Do you want to learn the art of social media to become a skilled social media specialist? We have your back: we’ve selected some of the best online courses for freelance social media managers, plus a few resources that will allow you to become a social media manager, find a job, and get rewarded.

Becoming a social media manager is not easy, and the task itself is not easy as well: an excellent social media manager knows marketing, writing, sales techniques, and graphics as well. A social media manager is skilled because this professional doesn’t just select cute pictures and quotes for social networks. They have to define a strategy, execute it, report on successes and failures, engage.

How do you pick the best online social media marketing course?

To find the best online social media marketing courses for freelancers, you need to evaluate a few things:

• Who are the teachers?
• How many people have already enrolled?
• What are the reviews?
• How long is the course?
• How much does the course cost?

These are the main things you need to check when looking for a social media course online. Another thing you may want to check is if the school is accredited and if you will receive a certificate after the completion of the course.

Side note: a course doesn’t have to be accredited as a conditio sine qua non, and it doesn’t necessarily give you a certificate. It has to be good, teach you something, and be helpful. So you should not look after classes for a document, but according to how useful and functional they are.

How hard is to find good courses online?

We don’t want to sugarcoat this: finding excellent and reliable social media classes online can be hard. The facility of access to the platform to create courses have created a long list of so-called experts that are everything but experts. A lot of online courses in social media marketing are just so thin that it’s not worth investing in them, not even if they’re cheap.

We recommend you check on the reviews because they can give you a significant indication of whether the course is right or not: usually, on the leading platforms, when a class has a good rating, it means that’s is a good one.

Just to give you an example, on Udemy, you should never choose an online course that has less than four as a rating and has had a lot of attendants. Putting a number on these things can be hard, but it’s useful to clean and polish your list and to avoid spending money (even little) for something completely useless.

The best online social media marketing courses

Based on the above, we’ve selected the best online social media marketing and management courses you can enroll directly from your home. Make sure you check the syllabus of each session and check what are, if there are, skills that you’ve to have to attend one (or more) of these.

We’ve selected both generic courses and most specific classes: we recommend you start from the basics if you don’t have experience and move towards the ladder to improve your skills. If you already know the basics, you can jump directly to the advanced courses to master one social network better than others and get specialized in a particular aspect of social media management.

The following list will give you a good understanding and knowledge of the social media landscape, allowing you to work for several social networks to create strategies, execute them, and create reports as well.

1. Facebook Ads & Facebook Marketing Mastery

Join 100,000+ students who mastered Facebook and are now Facebook Ads experts. Connect with new audiences and lower your ad costs via Facebook Ads! Mass post quickly to various social media networks. Use the advanced features available in Facebook Business Manager.

2. Social Media Marketing: Complete Certificate Course

Understand social media foundations. Understand the basics of Youtube, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, and blogging. Build a social media strategy, understand the risks of social media, and use them not just for marketing but for customer services & PR.

3. Instagram Marketing: Complete Guide To Instagram Growth

Join 100,000+ students and learn Instagram marketing. Have a powerful Instagram account setup for your Business or personal that you can build your brand and convert your followers into paying customers.

4. Social Media Management – The Complete Bootcamp

Gain in-depth knowledge of business social media, marketing tactics, how to set social media goals, and, most importantly, how to achieve them. Recognize which social media platforms are best for each client and their social media goals. Create monthly reports showing clients in detail how you are meeting their social media goals.

5. The Complete Facebook Ads Course: Beginner to Advanced

Avoid Common Mistakes That Cost Beginners a Fortune. Reduce Ad Cost with Advanced Targeting Features. Generate Your Leads to Increase in Monthly Sales.

6. Instagram Marketing

Learn how to create a successful themed, business, or personal account on Instagram. Understand the platform-specific and growth marketing jargon associated with Instagram. Design a cost & time effective content strategy that works for long term growth.

7. Pinterest Marketing: Using Pinterest for Business Growth

Optimize your Pinterest account to help your business get found in the big search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Incorporate the top “Absolute Must-Have” boards that EVERY business owner needs. Use Pinterest to figure out precisely what your customers want.

8. LinkedIn Marketing, Lead Generation & Sales

Learn how to generate a massive amount of leads using cutting edge sales & marketing LinkedIn lead generation strategies. Learn how to convert LinkedIn leads and conversations into real meetings. The most effective LinkedIn Marketing strategies to capture your audience’s attention and turn them into warm leads.

9. Social Media Marketing Specialization

This Social Media Marketing Specialization is perfect for people interested in knowing a lot about social media and in learning everything about it. You’ll learn how to use social analytics tools, how to build a complete social media marketing strategy, and how you deliver results to meet your goals. This specialization is constructed as a series of 5 courses (+ 1 recap) that help you master this skill. You can enroll in the specialization directly, or just choose the one you’d like to start with.

10. Social Media Advertising

This course teaches you Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter advertising. From essential campaigns to advanced techniques, including lookalike modeling and audience retargeting, this course shows how to advertise on three major social media platforms effectively.

Can social media marketing being taught?

Yes, social media marketing can be taught and learned, but, most of all, the learning process has to be followed by proper experience. Social marketing is a lot of work, and it takes time to listen and to respond. It also takes time to create a strategy and making it work. The only way to put the theory in good use is by practicing.

Aside from following online courses, we also recommend you read a few books that may help you: we know that books can be seen as obsolete. Some are, but if you choose evergreen titles, you’ll be rewarded by a pleasant reading and something that goes beyond the simple “social media management” aspect of digital marketing.

One of the books we recommend you read to improve your skills in social media marketing and digital marketing is Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins. In this book, Mark Schaefer will tell you why businesses must be built on human impressions instead of advertising impressions. This principle should also be the foundation of every social media interaction.

On the same note, the evergreen This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See by Seth Godin. In this book, Godin will explain to you why companies should use their use of marketing to solve other people’s problems. And also why their tactics have relied on empathy, connection, and emotional labor instead of attention-stealing ads and spammy email funnels. Once again, this should be what social media are based on.

How to find a job as a freelance social media manager

Once you’ve gained the necessary skills, or even while you’re learning, you need to get out and find a job to start your career as a social media manager. Let us get this straight for you: finding a job as a social media manager is not easy. But if you keep learning and you can show how skilled you are, how much experience you have, and why you are the perfect person for that position as a freelancer, you will surely nail it. Aside from doing that, facilitate companies when it comes to hiring you.

• Create a profile on one (or more) of the many freelancing websites: do not feel the pressure to lower your rates, and ask the price you think it is reasonable to you. You may end up competing with people asking for a few quids. Do not worry: keep learning, keep applying to jobs, keep getting rejected but at the same time keep asking for the money you think you deserve. And remember: your fee depends on your experience and your skills, so if you don’t have much experience, you cannot charge like somebody with years of experience!. You want to have the right clients and decent pay, not bad clients, and lousy pay.
• Optimize your Linkedin profile and gain useful contacts and insights.
• Pitch, pitch, pitch: the more your name is seen, the easiest it is to get assigned to projects as a freelance social media manager!
• Start your project: make sure you practice on your skin to show potential clients what you can do. Start from your passions, put in place everything you know about social media management, experiment, and make sure you create a strategy as well. In this way, you will be able to showcase your expertise in a given subject to gain authority.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means that we may receive a small commission, at no cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link.