Course creators, if you haven’t created a Facebook page for your business yet, now is the best time to do so.
According to Statista, in 2025 the number of social media users will increase to 4.41 billion as opposed to 3.6 billion in 2020. This number makes it clear that social media should be part of every online course creator’s marketing plan.
In order to develop a successful social media marketing plan, you need to take the time to look into the social media networks you want to advertise your online course.
In this article, we are exploring some key essential strategies that you can use to promote and ultimately sell your online course through a variety of social channels.
How to Choose Social Networks to Market Your Online Courses
Before you choose which social media platforms to use, you need to consider which of your business end goals you are serving and how you are going to achieve them.
Looking closely into the priorities you have set for your company, you need to first:
- Decide on your target customer
- Determine the personality of your brand
- Check the traffic performance
- Analyze competition activity
Let us analyze these points in more detail.
1. Decide on your target customer
Each social media platform has its own disadvantages and advantages and its own target audience and demographics.
For example, TikTok is used by young people mostly from Generation Z, those born between 1997-2012. If that’s the audience you are targeting, then TikTok is your go-to channel.
Using TikTok will also require that you give your social media content a humorous and creative touch and create short clips that people can relate to.
If you are teaching a course that would benefit well-established individuals more and appeal more to professionals, then LinkedIn or Twitter is the way to go.
With Facebook, you can reach out to a wider range of people, which makes it the safest choice so far.
2. Determine the personality of your brand
How would you describe your brand? Can you think of 5 adjectives that summarize the personality you have created for your company?
Your brand personality could be bold, encouraging, friendly, generous, flexible value-driven, or anything else you want it to be. And, it is important to identify this so that you can bring more of that forward.
Doing so should also help you come up with the best way to communicate with your audience.
For some companies writing how-to blog posts is the number one way to reach out to customers and get the required information across. For others, it could be conducting webinars, creating infographics or videos, sharing quotes or GIFs on social media, organizing contests and giveaways, and so on.
Always choose what feels right for your business.
3. Check the traffic performance
Monitoring your social media traffic should help you make the most of your social media marketing strategy.
If you don’t know who is interacting with your social media content, in what ways they are doing so, and how often, you will never know what to change in order to improve your results.
So regardless of what you have working for your company at the moment, it’s important to look into this before you are ready to make new adjustments or set up a new strategy.
Using Google Analytics or a social media analytics tool will help you make sense of the social media metrics more effectively and improve your performance.
4. Analyze competition activity
Before you decide on a social media strategy, it is important to carry out a competitive analysis.
Checking out the competition will help you find out which are your main competitors, analyze their strategies - which one(s) are working or not, and discover some key resources and tools that you can use to offer additional value to your audience.
It’s also crucial to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses comparing these to your own in order to take advantage of the gaps in the market.
In the eLearning world, competition can be fierce, but there is always a way to create a unique selling proposition using social media.
To rise above the challenge as a small business, spend some time to learn social media marketing and how to use it effectively.
Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies You Can Use
Depending on your business goals, you will need to explore each one and find which are most appropriate and suitable for your industry.
To do this, you need to look into each social media channel individually, see its strengths and come up with some key strategies you can use to promote your online course.
Let’s see some actual examples of how you can do this on different networks.
How to Promote Online Courses on Facebook
Facebook is a tool that needs to be part of your overall promotional strategy.
Since it is at the top of the most popular social network list, you need to tap into its power and build a community of people that is engaged and supportive.
The School of Calisthenics is harnessing the benefits it offers and is creating video content that can boost engagement and interaction with its brand.
For a fitness training organization, videos work well as they are great for demonstrating workouts and exercises that their audience and existing customers can try out easily and on the spot.
The more useful the content for a niche group of audience, the better the engagement you can expect.
How to Promote Online Courses on Instagram
Instagram is the place people go to get some inspiration, learn something new or share meaningful content.
Having this in mind is key to coming up with a strategy that catches the attention of your audience. So, you need to think about what type of content can you create especially for this social network?
Lewis Howes can give you a couple of ideas once you visit his Instagram account.
Sharing inspirational quotes, actionable advice from experts, reposting from other social networks - like Twitter in this case, and showing photos from his everyday life are some ways Lewis connects with his audience.
These, help his audience gain more insights into his personal life, land how he spends time with his family and friends.
Such content allows you to build more rapport and a loyal following, as people are getting to know you better.
How to Promote Online Courses on Twitter
Twitter is another platform that you need to add to your social media marketing toolkit. With it, you can stay up to date with industry trends, use hashtags to create awareness for a specific campaign, and engage people with your brand easily.
As a course creator and educator though, Jenna Kutcher proves that there is more to it.
Using Twitter’s bio can help you position yourself as an industry expert and let your audience know what you can do for them taking from point A to B through your online courses.
According to Hootsuite, Twitter bios give you the opportunity to introduce your brand, offer an elevator pitch, and set the mood. They can also be used as a tool to encourage people to reach out to you.
When it comes to posting content, Jenna is also using Twitter to promote her podcasts.
This is an effective strategy to get people on board her community and share useful content they can relate to. Podcast listeners are a niche audience group but considering that podcasts are gaining popularity fast, it might be worth looking into them as well.
How to Promote Online Courses on TikTok
As explained earlier, TikTok is a channel that can target the younger demographic the most. If that’s what you are going for, you better start creating some unique and authentic video content.
On TikTok, you can share educational advice videos, FAQs, or short videos to answer your audience’s comments, give out quick tips, or provide links to your course content and free resources.
Kirstie Taylor - dating, relationship, and self-love writer, is promoting her own workshop through TikTok, sharing insightful tips and advice to her audience.
For this post, Kirstie is offering a holiday gift guide that comes with a few suggestions on what to get for your partner.
Don’t forget, the secret to acing TikTok’s marketing is being creative and trying out different strategies to see what hooks your audience the most.
How to Promote Online Courses on YouTube
When used effectively, YouTube can offer immense potential and exposure for your brand. With your own YouTube channel, you can easily build a community of subscribers who prefer video over any type of content.
Pat Flynn - the creator of The Smart Passive Income, is using this channel to keep in touch with his audience and is sharing content that answers the pain points of his target audience.
Most of Pat’s customers are aspiring entrepreneurs and people interested in creating multiple streams of passive income so he is talking about business success.
Every other week, Pat creates a video and uploads it to his channel. For most of his videos, he prefers to keep the duration short - up to 20 minutes for easier content consumption.
Just like with every other social media initiative, consistency is key, so make sure you keep the content coming.
How to Promote Online Courses on LinkedIn
If you are targeting people aged between 25 to 34 years old, or you want to expand your brand’s professional network by looking for partners and affiliates, it might be a good idea to use Linkedin.
As your go-to social networking tool, LinkedIn can open up many opportunities and help you promote your courses even further.
LinkedIn trainer - Jo Saunders, is making the best use of LinkedIn to promote her business and social media training course.
Jo keeps her audience up to date with where she appears as a speaker. This way, she is inviting people to book their place at the conference she is organizing or is taking part in.
With LinkedIn posts, she is letting her audience know what she is working on, for example - the new program she is launching.
To boost engagement, test her audience’s needs, and get more people interested, Jo is also creating polls.
Since LinkedIn is at the forefront of what she does as a professional, she posts relevant content to engage her audience at all times.
Ready to Promote Your Course on Social Media?
Through social media, you get not only to promote your course to your target audience but also build more reputation as a business - improving your online brand presence, expanding your customer base, gathering some high-quality leads, and ultimately growing your business.
While it will take some time to create a successful social media strategy that works and brings some actual results, it will all be worth it for the number of courses you are going to be selling!
This article was co-authored with Kyriaki Raouna, a content creator for LearnWorlds, a leading online course creation platform.
