How Much Does It Cost To Learn Social Media Management?
I read about a kid the other day who wanted to get into social media marketing as a business.
He asked the wrong question: “What should I buy to get good at social media marketing and start a business?”
This is a really common question, and if you ever think, “What can I buy to succeed in [X] business?” then you too are asking the wrong question.
With a very few outliers, you can’t buy your way into success. You could maybe buy a website or ongoing business and make back your investment plus a decent return. Or you could buy a blueprint or course that’ll give you information that’ll help you start a business.
But be under no illusion, that $5k investment isn’t going to get you a successful business. Especially if you think it will.
For instance, let’s say you buy a site from a site auction site. It costs you $5000 and it makes say, $200 a month. That’s a two year return on investment if you can keep it earning at the rate it is.
If you can double the income to $400 a month you pay off the cost of acquiring the site within a year.
That’s not bad – but can you do that?
If you can’t, then you’ve spent $5k to learn how to do something. You could have spent less than $50. Your first website probably won’t make any money, because most people’s first website doesn’t. You shouldn’t pay thousands for the experience.
The same is true of courses – why pay $1000 to learn how to write tweets when you can just write some tweets?
Let’s go into that more and get to the kid’s question.
What Do People Who Need Social Media Marketing Pay For?
Let’s assume you’re the guy who asked the question. You don’t want to spend money on college or University because you don’t think it’s valuable. That’s not a bad choice, all things considered. Don’t go to University for the sake of it unless a few conditions are met. (That’s a different topic.)
So instead you want to put down your savings and try to learn how to become a social media marketing guy. This is a good business idea, because social media is a booming industry and with very little investment, you can learn all the skills you need and do some pretty amazing things, as far as expanding people’s reach and business is concerned.
But let’s step back a bit and not spend money we haven’t made yet.
It all comes down to the three basic questions you ask yourself:
- What does the market need?
- What’s the solution to the problem?
- Can I provide that need?
For social media marketing, I just know that people are going to say:
“I’m a social media business, so my job is to improve the reach of businesses.”
This is a problem:
- It’s too vague as far as the need, problem, solution and more go
- Nobody wants extra “reach” so you don’t know what they actually want
- You need to demonstrate you can provide something tangible
In short… this is vague.
When You’re Providing A Service… Make It Specific
Social media is pretty expansive and that’s key. I say this all as a guy who isn’t good at social media, and yet people in the past have hired me to do social media work.
Why?
Because you’re not going to be a superhero at every single platform overnight, and the minute you think, “I’m going to do Facebook Ads, Twitter follower increases and Instagram conversion improvement” you’ve lost the game.
Most people who are successful at social media marketing are excellent at one platform first and foremost. Even when you see people who clearly have the whole thing down – fifty thousand Twitter followers, ten thousands Instagram followers – that’s because they’ve leveraged one platform and put it to work sending people to the next platform.
Concentrate on one platform and at the start, one thing on that platform. Then you have the beginnings of a service.
Would I pay for “social media marketing?”
It’s a hard sell.
If someone said to me, “Hey… I can give you a thousand new customers a month from Twitter!” then that’s a different story.
Create a well-defined strategy that leads to real results. This is better than 90% of social media marketing gurus.
But… How Do I Know I Can Do That?
You can either do it or you can’t.
Luckily, with social media stuff, you can do it. You can get a Twitter account right now. You can make a personal Twitter account or you can do a themed account. There are people who make fake girlfriend Twitter accounts so they can fall in love with themselves in weird psychological things I don’t even remotely understand. Twitter doesn’t care.
The point here is that you can create a social media profile. You can test stuff out for absolutely nothing. You can sell stuff with affiliate links. Nothing costs anything, and you can make as many accounts as you like. (I mean, some platforms don’t let you have multiple accounts but that’s basically an IQ test.)
Most importantly, you get those hopelessly addictive analytics – likes, follows, comments.
You don’t need to buy a course. You just need to sit and experiment to see what works. Then do it over and over again.
Once you have done this, you can prove you can take multiple profiles to a higher level and you can make those followers do what you want.
This is attractive to any client.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need expensive courses and if your first port-of-call is “what can I do with all this money?” then you’re asking the wrong question.
Instead, you should think, “how can I quickly experiment with this new idea without spending any money?” and “How do I generate a baseline of results on which to improve?”
You don’t need investment to become a social media guru. That’s good, because you won’t become good by spending money. I’ve known people and businesses that have wasted thousands of dollars trying to get leverage on various social media platforms, yet I’ve also known people who’ve made thousands without spending a penny.
The first step is never “How can I spend money to make money?” It’s always to do some experiments.
This isn’t really about social media marketing; that just happened to be the triggering example.