BADM 395: Social Media Marketing

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Winter term: 2020/21

Instructor: Prof. Mark Wolters                 Email: mwolter@illinois.edu

Instructor’s social media pages:

Twitter:  www.twitter.com/woltersworld

Instagram: www.instagram.com/professorwolters

YouTube: www.youtube.com/professorwolters

Overview of the Course:

This course focuses on the ever-growing area of social media marketing. The course is set up in order to prepare students for the rigors of a career in social media marketing. The course will give students the practical and theoretical knowledge to be able to eventually run a social media marketing division of a firm. The course covers a wide variety of topics from social media platforms, to social media analytics, to omnichannel clients, to e-commerce, and many other social media marketing topics.

Objectives of the Course:

The course is set up to train and prepare students for careers in social media marketing and digital marketing which is the future of the marketing industry. The main objectives of the course are:

• Give students a firm grasp of what social media marketing is and how firms can use it to manage their business.
• Give students an insight into their future careers with the ever more importance of social media marketing for business sustainability.
• Give students the ability to handle, work with, and succeed with digital-first consumers,
• Give students the insights on developing social media plans, social media strategies, and social media tactics, including content creation and curation topics,
• Give students the knowledge to develop their own social media portfolio on a variety of platforms, including blogging, microblogging, video marketing, and visual marketing,
• Give students the ability to use the analytics throughout social media marketing to develop better interactive experiences for clients as well as develop new content for platforms,
• Give students a firm grasp of the ethical and legal issues they may face as social media managers.

Methodology:

The course is set up to be a hands-on class for social media marketing managers. Students will be learning key concepts and models for social media marketing during lectures, as well as using those concepts in active online sessions within the class time and outside of class time. Therefore, it is important that students have internet enabled devices in class so they can participate. Additionally, the course is set up in a way that students will be working on a number of projects for a client. Therefore, students will have hands on experience developing and running the social media platforms for firms. 

Course Materials:

Required Textbook:

E-Text – Social Media Marketing by Mark Wolters. Stipes Publishing e-text. ISBN# 978-1-64617-118-7. The book is published by Stipes Publishing and this is the link to purchase your e-text. https://buy.stipes.com/products/uiuc-badm-295-social-media-marketing-text

Required Social Media Accounts:

Each student must have the following social media accounts. Twitter (sign up at www.twitter.com), Facebook (sign up at www.facebook.com), Instagram (sign up at www.instagram.com), Canva (sign up at www.canva.com), LinkedIn (sign up at www.linkedin.com), YouTube (sign up at www.youtube.com, if you have a Gmail account that is all you need for YouTube).

You are not required to have anything posted “publicly” you can maintain your posts, blogs, and videos as private so that no one can see them. You will need to provide access to the blogs, posts, and videos to the instructor in order to grade.

Topics to be covered:

Topics with links to the associated landing page. They will be populated as we go through the class with the videos and replays of the lectures.

Topic 1: The Basics of Social Media

Topic 2: The Social Media Mission Statement

Topic 3: The Social Media Plan

Topic 4: Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning, & Personas in Social Media

Topic 5: Digital Marketing Maturity

Topic 6: Digital First Consumers

Topic 7: Strategic Marketing Analysis of Social Media

Topic 8: SOSTAC & RACE Models for Social Media Analysis

Topic 9: Content & Curation Topics & Strategy

Topic 10: Social Media Platforms

Topic 11: Key Performance Indicators

Topic 12: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Topic 13: Developing a Social Media Campaign

Topic 14: Advertising and Affiliate Marketing

Topic 15: Email Marketing

Topic 16: Ethical Issues in Social Media

Topic 17: Personal Branding

Schedule: All videos will be available on Compass & at www.professorwolters.com

Week of December 21-25 – All asynchronous videos

Topic 1: Social Media Basics

Topic 2: Social Media Mission Statement 

Topic 3: Social media Plans

Topic 17: Personal Branding

Homework Projects Due by Sunday December 27^th at 11:59pm.

• Social Media Sign up (5%)
• Social Media Mission Statement (10%)
• Social Media Analysis (10%)

Week of December 28-January 1 – All asynchronous videos

Topic 4: Segmentation, Customer Journey, and Personas

Topic 5: Digital Marketing Maturity

Topic 6: Digital First Consumers

Topic 7: Strategic Marketing Tools

Homework Projects Due by Sunday January 3rd at 11:59pm

• Personal Branding Assignment (10%)
• How Gen Z Shops (10%)
• Industry Key Success Factors (10%)

Week of January 4-8 – Mix of live & asynchronous videos. Live videos will be available to watch after live session.

Topic 8: SOSTAC & Other Models for Content Strategy

Topic 9: Content Strategy Development & Curation Topic Development – Live Sessions as well as videos – The link for the live session as well as the date and time will be announced via compass.

Topic 10: Social Media Platforms

Homework Projects Due by Sunday January 10^th at 11:59pm

• Content & Curation Topic Circles (10%)
• Digital & Data Privacy blog (10%)

Week of January 11-15

Topic 11: Key Performance Indicators

Topic 12: Search Engine Optimization

Topic 13: Social Media Marketing Campaign – This will be a live session. The time & date will be announced in Compass.

Topic 14: Online Advertising & Affiliate Marketing

Topic 16: Ethical Issues in Marketing

Homework Project Due by Sunday January 17^th at 11:59pm

• Social Media Project (25)

Grading Scale:

A (90%-100%)                 B (80%-89%)                   C (70-79%)                   D (60%-69%)                  

F (59% and below)

Homework Projects and Assignments:

5%: Social Media Signup: Sign up for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and have a blog with which to post your homework blogs. You will email the instructor with all of your handles. When you have turned this in you receive the credit.

10%: Social Media Mission Statement: Develop a social media mission statement for your firm/organization/social media empire. The assignment will be given in class. The social media mission statement should be included along with an explanation of what the social media mission statement stands for.

10%: Social Media Analysis: You will analyze your company’s social media platforms. The assignment will be given in class. The analysis should be 2000 words minimum.

10% How Gen Z shops: This assignment is a personal assignment that you will be doing individually. The student should write 2000 words minimum on how Gen Z shops and their shopping habits. Please use your own experiences as well.

10%: Personal Branding Assignment: This is an assignment on developing your own personal brand. This will be an individual assignment.

10%: Key Success Factors: your team will develop 5-6 industry key success factors for two separate industries. One set of 5-6 industry key success factor will be for a specific social media platform. The second set will be industry key success factors for your specific organization’s industry on a specific social media platform. The team leader will send one email with this assignment to mwolter@illinois.edu with the title “Key Success Factors – and your firm’s name.” Please include all team members names on the word document. No google docs will be accepted.

10%: Content & Curation Topic Circle: students will develop a range of content topics and curation topics for their firm to share on their various social media profiles. You will also develop the content creation circle for your firm. This will be emailed to mwolter@illinois.edu by the team leader or individual student. Please title the email “Content & Curation Assignment – and the firm’s name.”

10%: Digital and data privacy blog: this is an individual assignment blog. You will need to discuss a minimum of three digital and data privacy issues you have found online in relation to social media and write a commentary on them. Please write between 3-5 pages, 12 font, 1.5 line spacing.

25%: Social Media Project: Objective: analyze and develop a digital marketing plan for your firm. This includes a yearlong monthly social media plan as well as any other digital or guerilla marketing ideas you may have for the firm.

Format:

• 1.5 Line Spacing, 15-25 pages, Times New Roman font, 12 font size. The page numbers may go farther as you will have example posts, spiral bound
• Title page should include: company name, students’ names, please make it look as professional as you can,
• Title page, table of contents & appendices do not count toward the 15-25 pages, but are required,
• A one page executive summary of the key points should be placed after the table of contents, but before the body of the work.

Required Parts:

• Social Media Marketing Mission Statement: Write out what the firm’s social media mission statement should be.
• SOSTAC Model – explained and developed for the firm’s social media and digital marketing ventures. You can integrate the model throughout the project as many topics fall into the SOSTAC Model.
• Content Strategy – look into what they should be sharing, how they share it, why they share it, what benefits their content could bring,
• Curation Topics – main topics they should be writing about from their core business, side topics they could write about and share content from, and peripheral topics that they could curate from other sources, give them a list of twitter accounts, Facebook feeds, Pinterest, and other social media accounts or websites that they could find  information and posts to share from,
• Online Value Proposition: what are some of the online specific customer value propositions.
• Social Media Plan –
  • cover all social media platforms the firm should use, why they should use that platform,
  • which market segments they should target with each platform
• One year Monthly social media plan –
  • Have a topic for each month, ask the firm if they have different busy seasons, or products/services that sell better at any time of the year. This should influence the topics that you cover in each month,
  • Give one week of social media posts examples for all the platforms you recommend for three different weeks throughout the year, this allows the firm to understand what they should be doing with each platform and how they relate to the monthly or weekly social media plan recommendations,
  • You may want to put the sample posts in the appendix as they will take up a lot of space, or integrate them and make the paper longer
• Give the firm the industry key success factors for two different industries that the firm works in. Give them recommendations on how to do better for each of the industry key success factors.
  • One industry should be the overall industry the firm is in, the other industry could be something to do with social media, for example, YouTube videos industry, Instagram stories industry,
• Determine which Key Performance Indicators would be best for the firm to use & why. This may be a shorter segment.
• Additional Recommendations:
  • New ideas that you have come up with that could help the business,
  • Ideas gained from the in-class group chat,
  • Ideas shared by Mark, any small to large recommendations you can think of that you have not covered before, you may want to group by timeframe, short-term, medium-term, long-term recommendations,

Due Date Information: the final group project is due January 17, 2021 at 11:59pm. Multiple sections of the project you will have done in your homework assignments, therefore if you would like to finish your project earlier you can turn in the assignment any time before January 17, 2021.