Hi and welcome to this program. My name is Anke and I will be your guide and one of your teachers through this exciting journey. Since you're here, I probably don't have to convince you that social media is shaping how we live and do business today. Social media has the power to change lives and businesses beyond recognition. It can launch products into stratospheric success in brand-new ways, and give immediate access to millions of customers, literally delivering messages into their pockets. We learn of good news, sports results, births and birthdays, our friends trips, weddings, first school days, latest dance moves and cookouts, all in the blink of an eye or a scroll of our thumb, and social media is what frames our reactions. It's the construct we use to connect to others and to tell our stories. Social media is a perfect medium for getting your story out there and for connecting with people. That's true for your personal story, but social media also offers a platform for businesses to connect to customers and potential customers, which has opened a whole new world for marketing. But social media marketers can become part of the conversation. When done well, social media marketing can help businesses launch products, generate sales, and provide excellent customer service. Good social media marketing involves making authentic connections and providing value through content and interaction. It's a bit of a mix between art and science, and this program will provide you with all the skills and tools you need to do it well. Whether you're looking to start a career in social media marketing, whether you work for a Fortune 500 company, a tiny, little mom-and-pop shop, or are simply interested in marketing your own brand and story on social media, then this is the course for you.You don't need any experience to get started. We will start from the very beginning. The only thing you need is an appetite for social media, willingness to put stories out there and a Facebook or Instagram account. This program, we'll look at all aspects of social media marketing. While we'll cover all of the important social media platforms, we will focus quite a bit on Facebook and Instagram. These apps are central to the social media marketing world, and mastering those applications will set you up for future success. More than that, both Facebook and Instagram have partnered with us to create this course, and we're delighted to have them on board. We'll cover the theory behind social media, and throughout this program, you'll also get cutting-edge hands-on experience through working on our carefully curated projects. We've worked closely with the teams at Facebook and Instagram to get a better understanding of the crucial steps that make social media marketers successful and those are exactly the things that you'll get to practice in our projects. These specially curated projects are a golden opportunity to put what you've learned into practice, and after you successfully complete them, you can even use them to create a portfolio to showcase your talents to future employers. Not only is this program wonderful for fun, it will help you own your content creation and social media marketing abilities, and it prepares you for entry level roles as a social media marketer. Upon successful completion of the program, you will earn both the Coursera Certification and the Facebook Digital Marketing Associate Certification. These certifications are valued by hiring managers across industries. It doesn't matter if you want to work for a sports team or for a movie studio, for a massive tech company, or for a local photographer, this certification matter because mastery of social media is essential for every business today and employers love to see documented proof of what employees are capable of before hiring them. In addition to earning the certifications, we'll also support you in the next step, your job search. Once you've completed the program, you can opt in to share your information with top employers in our employer consortium who are hiring for digital marketing jobs. There are six courses in this program. The first course is an introduction to the social media landscape and will prepare you for your marketing journey. The second course is all about content development for social media and how businesses can build their presence and their brand and participate in a rich and meaningful way on social media platforms. The third course looks at the basics of advertising on social media. You learn how advertising on social media works and how you can use it to amplify your message and make it resonate deeply with your audience. In the fourth course, you'll learn how to build campaigns in ads manager, Facebook tool for advertising across Facebook and Instagram. In the fifth course, we look at how to measure the success of campaigns and further optimize them. Finally, in the sixth course, you'll complete a capstone project where you will build your portfolio representing the work that you did throughout this course and telling your unique social media marketing campaigns story. We'll offer the support you need to get you on your way, but your success in the program depends on you. Take your time going through all the videos, to practice quizzes, graded quizzes and projects. Participate in the discussions with your fellow students and keep in touch with us through discussion boards. Now we come to the most exciting part of any journey, the part where the real story begins. Good luck with the course. I'm so excited to see how you'll do with the projects. Let the journey begin.
