12 Social Media Marketing Courses (for Beginners & Pros)

Have you ever stumbled upon a nice post by a famous brand when scrolling your social media feed and admired the work of that brand’s social media marketing team?

If looking at these brands has inspired you to level up your social media marketing game, then why not take one of the exceptional courses from this list that we have compiled for you?

Course #1: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

Price: Free

Creator: Google

Experience Level: Beginners

We begin our list with Google’s introductory, all-in-one course that covers a little bit of everything in digital marketing.

With this free social media course, students learn :

• How websites work
• How to plan and build a digital marketing strategy
• How to optimize a website for better search engine optimization (a.k.a SEO)
• How to run search ad campaigns
• How to manage social media accounts
• How to run email marketing campaigns
• How to manage the marketing aspects of an online shop.

Google’s course also puts an emphasis on using data in your digital marketing activities and includes a dedicated section for marketing analytics. Unlike traditional marketing, where you  rely on data that is not always precise, digital marketing and SMM have high-quality analytics that you can use extensively to help with your decision-making.

Overall, the course consists of twenty-six modules; Google estimates it will take you around forty hours to complete. These modules consist of a series of video courses and lightweight quizzes you can take at your own pace.

At the end, students take a final exam consisting of forty questions. Those who pass get a certificate of completion accredited by the Open University and IABE (Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe).

This course can be a great introductory point for beginners who want to discover the various digital marketing disciplines, including social media.

However, if you are more interested in focusing your efforts on social media specifically, without touching upon other areas of digital marketing, go for a specialized course like the one we have up next.

Course #2: Get Certified in Social Media Strategy

Price: Free

Creator: HubSpot

Experience Level: Intermediate

Here’s a course available on HubSpot Academy that specializes in Social Media Marketing.

This course covers the main aspects of managing social media channels, including how to:

• Create a social media marketing strategy;
• Learn the needs of your users and the activities of your competitors with social media listening;
• Create content calendars, manage content creation, and understand the publishing process;
• Learn about the main factors affecting your social media reach and engagement;
• Set KPIs and measure your social media metrics.

The course also includes a brief introduction to social media advertising, teaching you how to build and optimize ad campaigns.

The course’s length is approximately five hours and is separated into eight distinct lessons that include both training videos and quizzes.

Lessons are also available for non-English speakers, as HubSpot has translated it into three additional languages—Spanish, Japanese, and French.

HubSpot Academy’s course on Social Media Marketing is a relatively short one, making it very convenient for those who have a tight schedule and cannot commit a dozen hours to learning a new profession.

If you have the extra time, consider longer courses like the next one.

Course #3: Become a Social Media Marketer

Price: One-month Free Trial for the LinkedIn Learning platform.

Creator: Linkedin

Experience Level: Beginners

The course in question belongs to LinkedIn’s proprietary educational platform, LinkedIn Learning.

Its curriculum is a bit different from others. Apart from dedicating a lesson for each skill and area of knowledge in social media (e.g., monitoring, planning, optimizing, etc.), it also includes modules focusing on specific social media platforms.

Here’s what you can expect to learn with this course:

• The fundamentals of social media marketing and the main tips for managing social media channels;
• How to create and run communities for your brand and product;
• The specificities of social media marketing when you are running a small business;
• How to run a Facebook marketing page;
• How to manage a Twitter account;
• Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook advertising.

There is also a dedicated lesson about the financial aspects of running social media channels, including how to calculate your return on investment.

Overall, the course consists of eleven topics that will take you around twelve hours to complete. Each of these topics comes with its own set of instructional videos, quizzes, and downloadable exercises.

When you finish the course, besides providing you with a certificate, LinkedIn Learning also gives you a badge of completion that you can show off on your LinkedIn profile.

In conclusion, LinkedIn provides you with a great course that covers a wide variety of social media platforms. However, if you would like to narrow down your stack and focus only on Meta’s social networks,  consider the next option.

Course #4: Meta Blueprint Courses

Price: Free

Creator: Meta

Experience Level: Beginners

What Meta (a.k.a. Facebook) offers is not a course per se. Instead, it is a learning platform consisting of various bootcamps, lessons, and certification courses. 

Unlike others on this list, it focuses solely on the platforms it owns; Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offer learning materials and classes on them such as:

• Discovering your customers’ needs, documenting them, and building your customer journey map;
• Getting into eCommerce by creating and running an online shop on Instagram;
• Creating a lightweight customer support process and communicating with your users via WhatsApp;
• Engaging your audience in real-time by creating and running an Instagram live stream;
• The best practices for running Facebook ads and Instagram ads;
• How you can make data-informed decisions by taking advantage of Instagram and Facebook Analytics.

Meta also has several courses that focus on the creative side of SMM, including creative writing and visual/banner creation.

The Meta Blueprint academy organizes its educational content into different categories based on its use case (e.g., selling goods, increasing brand awareness, etc.), platform, as well as the target audience who can benefit from the courses (e.g., small businesses, SMM specialists, community leaders, etc.).

So far, we have focused on the courses that tech giants have created for novice social media marketers who want to use their platforms. Now, let’s pivot a bit and show you a social media course by a company that focuses on marketing education specifically.

Course #5: Social Media Marketing by Acadium

Price: Free

Creator: Acadium

Experience Level: Beginners

This course is part of the overarching product Acadium offers to its users.

This platform focuses on building talent by offering lessons on various areas of digital marketing, solidifying the knowledge of its students by organizing apprenticeships and connecting them with businesses that seek marketing talent.

Their course on social media marketing looks similar to what LinkedIn Learning has in terms of structure, as the classes in Acadium’s course are grouped by the social media platform where you run your marketing campaigns.

Here are the social media sites that Acadium covers:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Linkedin
• Google
• Twitter
• Snapchat

This course also offers classes on managing your brand’s page on review sites like Yelp.

Acadium’s course is relatively mid-sized; it consists of thirty-three lessons.

Unlike others, it does not provide you with a certificate. However, you can take advantage of their apprenticeship programs afterward and join their pool of talent that can get you both freelance projects and permanent employment from the businesses that collaborate with Arcadium.

Overall, Arcadium’s courses are the better choice for those who want to stick to their platform and find work opportunities there instead of exploring the open job market.

Their course is also not specialized in any area and tries to cover a bit of everything. Our next one, however, does pay more attention to a particular field of SMM—design.

Course #6: Social Media Mastery

Price: Free

Creator: Canva

Experience Level: Beginners

It’s no surprise that Canva’s course focuses on the design side of social media marketing, considering the fact that Canva is a design tool.

Apart from helping you learn the basics of social media, Canva’s curriculum also covers topics on visual creation, such as:

• The definition of the design language for your brand and the creation of its style guide that you will use consistently in all of your visual deliverables (images, videos, infographics, etc.);
• The visuals-first approach and how to convey the information you want with less text and more images and other graphical elements;
• The theory of colors, palettes, and contrast, as well as the real-world application of these theories in your social media visuals;
• The importance and effectiveness of videos in social media (66% of consumers think that short videos are the most engaging) and the best practices to create them.

Apart from the design lessons, Canva’s course also covers the communication aspects of SMM, such as the best practices for creating and managing a community on your social platforms.

Canva’s course on social media marketing is among the shortest, as you can finish all twelve lessons in under thirty minutes.

Although Canva does have a certification program, it is design-related only. This exclusivity means that the regular courses that Canva offers, including the one here, will not get you a certificate upon completion.

Canva’s course is great for those who are interested in the visual side of social media marketing but have limited time to commit to a full-size course.

We have discussed six courses so far, and all of them were either for beginners or mid-level marketing professionals. Now it is time to introduce one that targets more experienced professionals and covers advanced aspects of social media marketing.

Course #7: Advanced Social Media Strategy Course 

Price: $999

Creator: Hootsuite

Experience Level: Advanced

You can access this in-depth course from the academy of the social media management SaaS tool Hootsuite.

Unlike other courses on this list, this one assumes you already have considerable experience managing social media channels and instead focuses on more complex topics, such as:

• Applying the POEM (Paid, Owned, and Earned Media) model in your social media activities.
• Recruiting and working with social media influencers.
• Calculating a social media campaign budget and measuring its return on investment.
• Protecting your social media channels from PR crises and cyberattacks.

Hootsuite’s course also pays special attention to the advanced aspects of creating compelling social media content and managing content marketing workflows.

Hootsuite created this course in partnership with Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, and, unlike our previous examples, it is a relatively lengthy one with eight extensive chapters.

Although it covers the more complex areas of social media marketing, Hootsuite’s course is still generic, as it focuses on the entire discipline of SMM instead of a single aspect of it.

Our next course, however, is quite specialized—teaching you the ethics involved in your SMM operations.

Course #8: Social Media Ethics

Price: $19.99

Creator: Udemy

Experience Level: Intermediate

The course on being an ethical member of the social media community belongs to the educational platform Udemy.

To help you represent your brand in the best way online, this course covers topics such as:

• The legal side of SMM with the Agency Law and National Labor Relations Act;
• How to avoid discrimination and harassment on social media;
• How to best handle confidential and private information.

Apart from all of these topics, Udemy’s ethics course also covers the general rules of etiquette online (a.k.a netiquette) that you can incorporate in the social media strategy you are creating.

You can complete the course in only thirty minutes at your own pace and get a certificate at the end.

With the ethical side of SMM covered, let’s move on to another course with a specialization. This time, it is about short videos.

Course #9: TikTok Academy

Price: Free

Creator: TikTok

Experience Level: Beginners

When talking about short video content, TikTok is probably one of the first platforms that come to mind.

The SMM course on the TikTok for Business website targets social media marketers and creators, letting them get the most out of their TikTok videos by learning how to:

• Make videos that cater to the interests of your target audience;
• Understand how TikTok’s algorithm prioritizes content and how to get videos recommended to users;
• How to engage social media users.

The academy also covers the analytics and marketing tools of TikTok and explains how to evaluate and improve your performance.

It will take you only a couple of hours to complete this digital marketing course, and there is no certificate of completion at the end.

The courses we have checked out here all belong to private companies and businesses. The creator of the next one, however, is a government educational institution.

Course #10: Creating Engaging Content for Social Media

Price: $15

Creator: New Zealand Institute of Education (NZIE)

Experience Level: Beginners

The organization in question is New Zealand’s Institute of Education, which devised a social media management course and posted it on the learning platform Futurelearn.com.

The course mostly focuses on the content creation part of SMM, including:

• Creating content strategy;
• The art of storytelling;
• Using images and video in social media;
• Copywriting techniques for post descriptions.

If you are a beginner in social media, no worries; this course also covers the basics of social media marketing.

The course is five hours long, and Future Learn expects you to complete it within one week. For those who successfully finish it, NZIE awards a certificate accredited by the CPD professional certificate Service.

We have quite a few specialized courses on our list and have already covered design, content, and ethics in social media. Continuing down the same lane, let’s look at a course that teaches us how to analyze social media data.

Course #11: Social Media Analytics Course

Price: Free

Creator: Quintly

Experience Level: Beginners

This free course is available on the education platform of the social media analytics SaaS service Quintly.

The syllabus includes tutorials on data analytics, such as:

• Measuring social media footprint;
• The structure and specificity of data in each social media platform;
• Definition of monitoring of social media KPIs.

There are also modules that teach you how to communicate your findings with reports and presentations.

According to Quintly, it takes you less than an hour to complete this course and get a certificate you can show off on your CV.

We have almost reached the end. Just like the ones that came before, our last course is also specialized. In this case, it belongs to an SMM SaaS tool and focuses on collaboration with social media influencers.

Course #12: Influencer Marketing Certification

Price: Free

Creator: Meltwater

Experience Level: Beginners

The influencer marketing platform Meltwater offers a course on managing influencer relationships.

In particular, this training course explains:

• How influencer marketing works;
• How to create campaigns in collaboration with social media influencers on various platforms;
• How you can promote your campaign.

You also get instructions on how to reach out to influencers and how to build relationships with them.

To complete this course, you need to pass thirty-six lessons and watch around one hour of educational videos. Unlike most examples mentioned before, Meltwater requires you to take an exam before they can award you a certificate.

Meltwater’s course will come in quite handy if you want to specialize in social media marketing and start working with influencers to promote your brand.

Now Over to You

Social media marketers are highly important and valuable people in the marketing team of any company. With their help, businesses can manage their social media presence, increase brand awareness, and drive sales.

If you have decided to start your career in social media marketing or increase your existing knowledge in it, pick one or several of the courses mentioned here and take your marketing skills to a whole new level.

Social media marketing is one of the favorite topics we cover at Digital Marketers World. To read other guides on this discipline, make sure to check out our blog.