Social media courses: full of potential or full of crap?
This is a question I get a lot. Everyone wants to know if they should sign up for an official class in social media. It’s a tough call, especially since so much of social media seem intuitive right now, right? You just use it and that’s how you know. Maybe. And maybe not.
The truth is, I’m self-taught. I’ve made my career happen based solely on intuition. I didn’t take any courses in social media, and I’ve never even taken any substantial classes in business or marketing, period. In fact, I was never a good student in any classes. But that seemed to work out just fine for me.
If I’m being honest, I think that ninety-nine percent of people on social media are clowns; they’re just reading headlines, rather than being actual practitioners and going deep within each platform. I’m even scared of people taking a course because most of the courses I’ve been exposed to during speaking engagements were jokes — either the course itself or the teachers involved came off as uninformed.
Social Media right now is in a very awkward and early stage. It’s still growing and changing in very significant ways. Hell, I even I wrote a book all about how to market on it and I’m the first to admit that some parts of it have already changed (but not all of it, mind you). If you look back at the early internet marketers of 1995, they were coming with a lot of garbage about what the internet was capable of. And I’m sure courses were offered then on the subject, with very little information to go off of.
Conclusion? Might not the best time to enroll in that $1000 course. The timing is difficult right now. But I can say confidently that I would feel a lot better about someone taking a “course” five years from now rather than today.
The most important thing you can do when it comes to anything in life is to become an actual practitioner. However, for this particular instance, there’s too many variables to consider. Are the courses good? Can you actually learn in those environments? Do you, as a person, respond to courses better? I know I wouldn’t. Hence: my advice is to become a practitioner as best you can. Because that’s what I did and continue doing, and it’s certainly working for me.
