How to Promote Online Courses Using Social Media: 8 Actionable Ways to Win the Game

As a course creator, you must have crafted the best online course for your audience, but it requires a promotion strategy to help you create awareness and drive sales.

Promoting an online course is not an easy task. There are thousands of online courses available for students to choose from, so you need a unique selling point.

The competition is brutal; you need a plan to figure out the right strategies to promote online courses on social media.

And to know how to promote online courses using social media, we’ve compiled 8 actionable strategies to promote online courses.

Key Statistics for Social Media Promotion

• Instagram has over 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, making it an ideal platform for reaching a wide audience.
• Facebook is the platform with the largest amount of time spent daily, 33 minutes per day on average, providing ample opportunities for engagement with online course promotions.
• According to stats, 60% of marketers from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States reveal influencer marketing had a better return on investment (ROI) than traditional advertising.

8 Actionable Social Media Marketing Strategy to Promote Online Courses

When it comes to social media promotion for online courses, all you have to do is brainstorm ideas that fit your objective. As an entrepreneur and course creator, you must know how to sell online courses using social media.

You can choose from a combination of tips to promote online courses on social media and craft a compelling strategy. Here are 8 actionable social media marketing strategies you can benefit from.

1. Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms

We’re all social!

Nowadays, people use multiple social media platforms and expect entrepreneurs to be there too. 

Each social media platform has unique characteristics and features suited for certain businesses. So, which social media platform is best for online course promotion? 

Here are some tips for choosing the right social media platform to promote online course:

• Know your audience
• Consider your business
• Research your competitors
• Align strategy with business goals
• Understand different platforms and their uses
• Keep in mind available resources

Remember, if you plan to promote your online course on multiple social media platforms, customize your content according to each channel’s behavior and audience expectations. Don’t publish the same content across all your channels.

2. Incorporating Storytelling Techniques

Do you know how to promote online classes through storytelling? It is an essential part of the content marketing strategy for online courses.

But what is a storytelling technique for digital media? It’s a more interactive way to convey your message narratively on social media platforms. It’s more appealing and interactive and allows you to inspire your audience.

To get you started, we’ve listed tips to create dynamic stories for online course promotion:

• Know who your story is for 
• Include a narrative in your captions 
• Connect with your audience
• Utilise visual storytelling 
• Tell your story

For example, an author, professor, neuroscientist, and empathy warrior, Lisa Genova, conduct online courses. Through storytelling, she promotes her niche topic for online classes through the YouTube TED platform, reaching millions of viewers worldwide.

Source: YouTube

3. Scheduling and Frequency of Posts

Now you must understand how to promote courses on social media with the right frequency to reach the right target audience. Here are some essential guidelines to consider:

Start by understanding your target audience’s behavior and determine when they are most active on social media.

Optimize your post scheduling according to the target audience’s active time.

Always prefer quality over quantity, deliver value and create meaningful interactions.

Consider platform consideration; for example, on Facebook, you can post 1 to 2 times a day; on Twitter, you can post multiple times a day; on LinkedIn, a few times a week and on Instagram, 3 to 5 times a week.

A/B testing is the best practice to see what works best for your audience.

Use scheduling tools easily integrated with social media platforms to queue up content in advance to avoid the last-minute hassle.

4. Leveraging Social Media Features and Tools

If you want your online course to be successful, you must leverage the power of social media features and tools. Social media builds a sales funnel for your online course to convert the target audience into enrolments.

Don’t take social media platforms lightly because it is where your target audience spends the most time, and you won’t want to miss the chance. 

While you know it is the best place to sell online courses, you don’t know how to attract students to online classes using social media. To promote an online course on social media, you must consider the following:

Paid advertising options

Facebook and Instagram are two of the most popular social media platforms that help you reach audiences, boost sales, retarget audiences, and build awareness. Paid ads on Facebook and Instagram can serve as a way to:

• Distribute content and increase its reach
• Build brand awareness
• Increase engagement
• Build your followers
• Get more people to your website
• Leads to sales conversion

For example, Harvard Online promotes FinTech in online business courses through Facebook paid ad promotion.

Source: Facebook

Utilizing hashtags and trends

Hashtags make you more discoverable! 

Mastering the hashtag gives you an engaging way to make your online course more accessible to your target audience and increase your visibility at no cost. Also, pay attention to trends to bring your content into the limelight.

As part of the content marketing strategy for online courses, hashtag creation drives traffic to your content so that you can boost views, likes, comments, and shares.

For example, OPSWAT Academy promotes online course programs in critical infrastructure protection through hashtags relevant to the course and career.

Source: Facebook

Running contests and giveaways

Everyone loves winning! But wondering why a contest or giveaway to promote online courses run? Why not! A contest is a great way to drive engagement and create a lot of buzzes, while giveaways introduce your online course to captivated audience.

Here’s what you can accomplish:

• Boost engagement with the target audience
• Generate social media followers
• Get more traffic to your website
• Grow your email list
• Generate leads for sales

Collaborating with influencers

Do you know influencer marketing is best for smaller budgets, getting positive reviews, and opening the door to long-term relationships? The daily average time spent on social media by users worldwide is 147 minutes.

Collaborating with the right influencer can help you spread your online course awareness and reach a wider audience.

Here are some pro tips for collaborating with influencers:

• Find the right social media influencer who has audiences in your target market
• Communicate with your influencer about your goals
• Make a solid contract and include details about repurposing the influencer content

Analyzing and measuring campaign performance

Now that you have orchestrated an outstanding campaign, it’s time to analyze and measure performance. It is best to be clear about what you expect from the campaign from the start and identify the objectives it sets out to achieve.

Rather than waiting for a big reveal, KPIs indicate whether the campaign successfully met the objectives and delivered satisfactory results or not.

5. Engaging with Your Audience

With a global number of social media users reaching 4.8 billion and social penetration rate of 59.4%, social media promotion can help you achieve the growing digital population worldwide.

Whether you are an experienced professor, expert course creator, or a beginner, you must remember the golden rule: know everything about your audience, what engages them and hooks that can get their attention.

Check out these 5 tips on how to create and engage with your audience:

• Use Storytelling to captivate students
• Make the content relevant to students
• Share reviews and experiences
• Make content visually appealing
• Use gamification for online promotion
• Allow students to collaborate

6. Responding to Comments and Messages

Online course promotion through social media is all about engagement and interacting with your audience. Building and fostering relationships through conversations and timely responses is the best way to nurture an online community.

It can be a little tricky to know the best way to respond to comments and messages of our followers on social media. We’ve compiled the best 5 ways to respond:

• Do not delete negative comments, as they can result in heightened anger
• Redirect the conversation to be held in the message
• Create a personalized message using GIFs, name and use humor when required
• Don’t be defensive in your reply, and don’t take anything personally
• Create an opportunity from neutral comments to engage the commenter

7. Cross-Promotion and Partnerships

Social media cross-promotion and partnership are essential for growing awareness about your online courses. As an online education marketing agency, we understand the importance of leveraging social media platforms to reach your target audience effectively.

Cross-promotion makes content sharing fast and efficient while differentiating the experience through tailored content according to post length, style, and tone.

Here’s how you can effectively cross-promote to engage your target audience:

• Ensure you cater to the follower of each specific platform
• Include links to other social network profiles
• Be mindful that not all image formats are the same
• Create customized tracking URLs
• Repurpose content and share snippets to make them follow

8. Measuring Success and Making Improvements

Measuring success is the cornerstone for improving your online course promotion strategy.  Dependent on the objectives and outcomes, you can compare success by looking at the following:

• Engagement
• Follower growth
• Awareness
• Reach
• Leads
• Conversions
• Website Traffic

Learning from the past while improving future online course promotion tactics and overall social strategy is essential.

It is always easier said than done. It is time-consuming and complex, but we all know that we cannot achieve our results without continuous improvement. 

Final Words

Actionable strategies help create a cohesive social media promotion strategy for your online course.

It would be best if you propelled your online course promotion to achieve devised goals. Keep in mind that there is no one-size fit approach that you can implement. Buckle up and start putting these actionable strategies to work! Now it is your turn to do the work and sell more online courses.

If you’d like to optimize your promotion strategy further, you can contact an expert online course promotion agency.