How to use social media to market your course, even if you don’t have a big audience

By Claire Chen

Instructor Partnerships

Summary

Learn how to post on social media to promote your course including what type of content to post and how to add value while selling. Read on to see examples of our current instructors leveraging their social media and grab templates for posting on social media.

A common misconception is that you should post every day on every social channel to be effective. However, posting twice a week on two channels can be more effective than posting every day on four channels. Instead of trying to maximize the volume of content you're producing, increase your marketing effectiveness while avoiding marketing burnout.

A framework that we use to evaluate marketing effectiveness is: content x distribution = marketing success.

To optimize your impact on social media, your content should resonate with your target student and your distribution channel should be where that student demographic spends the most time.

Here's some practical advice on using social media to drive interest in your course.

1. Which platform should I use?

Most Maven instructors use Twitter and LinkedIn as marketing channels because these platforms are gathering places where business-minded audiences already hang out. You should post on both platforms–and the best part is you can often reuse content. Just make some edits so the post feels native to the platform.

2. What kind of content should I post?

Actively promote your cohort, but not every post should jump straight to asking people to enroll:

60% Add value to your audience. Share frameworks and key ideas related to your course. Establish yourself as an authority on the topic. Get people excited about your knowledge.
30% Course preview and success stories. Share what happens in your course. Give specifics on the material, guests, and student success stories. Help potential students visualize the experience of being in your course.
10% Call to action. Only ~10% of your content should get quickly into “join now” or “closing soon” messaging. If you do too much of this type of messaging, you’ll come across as a bit spammy–and you risk people muting or unfollowing you. I like to use these sales-driven CTAs piggybacked on more value-added content above. For example, you can mention your application deadline as the last tweet in a thread.

Here are some of the best examples of ways to leverage social media:

Value-add content

Wes Kao is the master of value-add content that also plugs a course. Check out her LinkedIn posts here, here, here, and here
Pete Hancock's LinkedIn post lists five skills all Sales Managers should learn in their first year and links to his course to learn more.
Christine Carrillo's tweet thread breaks down how she delegates her inbox and then links to her 20 Hour CEO course in the final thread.
Shaan Puri’s tweet thread shares several of his most valuable writing tips and then offers the reader a chance to learn more through his course.
Noam Segal’s post shares one of his frameworks and then points to his Maven course.
Emily Kramer’s course announcement thread shares common mistakes and solutions for B2B marketing

Testimonials & alumni stories

Brandon Zhang’s tweet highlights alumni outcomes to market his course.
Brandon Zhang / Aadit Sheth highlight alumni success stories to market their course. This strategy helped them acquire 200 new emails from just a single tweet
Here’s an example of using a testimonial screenshot. Testimonials are an effective way of showing social proof in other people’s words.

✍️ Template: Social Media Post

Theme: Top questions I get asked all the time about {topic}

{Course topic} is hard. {What makes it hard? What is the impact if they don’t learn X?}.

{Introduce your main idea and briefly explain the benefits if the readers can achieve X result or prevent making X situation}.

- Question #1
- Question #2
- Question #3

Template/Examples: {Insert template}

{Provide examples}

P.S. If you want more content like this, here’s a {link to workshop/blog posts/articles/case studies/videos/tools/swipe files/etc} I think you’ll love.

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