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Welcome to social media marketing!

The purpose of this book is to provide a simple, focused introduction to social media marketing—for employees who may be working at a company or non-profit organization, for students at a university, or for self-paced learners. The approach is the same that I’ve taken in most of the books I’ve written, which is conversational, friendly, with an attempt to make things fun.

The experiment is to find a way to help people get started with social media marketing in a way that is fun and helps build skills—maybe through an internship, paid work, volunteer work, freelance work, or any other type of work. So the focus is on skills and approaches that can be immediately useful to a business or non-profit organization. I’m not going to try to cover everything, but just on the things that I think are the most helpful.

The other goal is to help you leave any intimidation you have in the dust. I used to be intimidated by marketing, and now look at me. I’m a marketing strategist and an assistant professor of marketing! But I remember the intimidation, so part of my approach is to try to encourage any reader who may feel uncertain about the field.

The fact is, social media marketing has a lot of options, especially in the “tools” area, and it has grown rapidly. That means there’s a lot of material out there. It can be overwhelming! But it can also be very doable if you leave intimidation in the dust, take incremental steps, try things out, and build your confidence.

For example, I had a friend who used to be a journalist. He was looking for new career opportunities, so I helped get him started in social media. One of the first things he ran into was feeling overwhelmed by all the options, including all the articles about all the options. “There are so many tools out there,” he used to say, “How am I ever going to learn all of them?!?”

The answer is that you don’t need to learn all of them. No one can. The thing to do is to focus on some of the tools and skills and then build from there.

I encouraged my friend not to worry about trying to learn everything, but instead to just learn the basics.

My friend worked in Facebook advertising, learned a bit about Twitter, and was able to find a local agency that gave him a shot at doing some freelance social media work. The career didn’t just develop for him—he had to put effort into it. But a few years later, he’s doing full-time freelance work in social media ­marketing and making Google ads. He was able to leave intimidation in the dust and I believe he’s had some fun with it too.

This book mentions what I call the core areas of digital marketing: Content, AdWords, Social, and Analytics (CASA for short). My goal is to reinforce how all these areas are connected. AdWords is Google’s tool for creating ads for search engine marketing. The inspiration came from my professional ­background, as well as looking at trends in the marketplace.

Best wishes in learning social media marketing!