It’s become an essential way for soon-to-be employees to understand tools that are used in the workplace. Without instruction in higher education, businesses have to invest more time and money into teaching these necessary skills. How educators are teaching social media in the classroom Karen Freberg, a professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, teaches a communications class that focuses on social media for business. Freberg uses Hootsuite’s Student Program, which offers free coursework to help professors and educators teach social media in their classrooms. In their audit, students are asked to evaluate their own social channels and compare them to brands or professionals they’d like to work with. Every research project needs to include information on the brand’s assumed target audience, popular content channels and types, and recommendations for future marketing activities on social. Coursework from Hootsuite Academy helps students learn how to implement their strategy using Hootsuite. Students learn: New professional skills on a social network How to improve public speaking The best ways to knowledge share Social media for educators By teaching social media in the classroom, educators make a commitment to become social media users themselves. It gives them the opportunity to apply marketing and communications principles to a new channel, and to learn from their students about this quickly-changing industry. Hootsuite dashboard: Students and educators get free access to hands-on learning with Hootsuite, the world’s most widely used platform for social media management.
Every year, U.S. businesses loses
around $1 trillion dollars due to the “digital skills
gap”—where employees don’t know how to use, or aren’t aware of, the
technology available to them. According to a Harris poll survey in
Entrepreneur, only one in 10 American workers have mastered
their employers’ tools.
To address this growing issue, professors at higher education
institutions have begun to integrate technology education into
their curriculums. It’s become an essential way for soon-to-be
employees to understand tools that are used in the workplace.
Why social media in higher education?
Social media has become ingrained in our lives and industries.
Pew Research Center charts the “meteoric rise” of social in
U.S. over the past decade: the number of social media users has
jumped from seven percent in 2005 to 65 percent in 2015. There are
now
2.3 billion active social media users worldwide.
As
social media adoption is nearly universal among global brands,
there’s a growing expectation that employees understand how to
professionally manage their social media presence. Without
instruction in higher education, businesses have to invest more
time and money into teaching these necessary skills.
How educators are teaching social media in the
classroom
Karen Freberg, a professor at the University of Louisville in
Kentucky, teaches a communications class that focuses on social
media for business. It’s an inspiring and demanding course that
asks students to dive into a quickly-changing industry,
she says.
Freberg uses Hootsuite’s Student
Program, which offers free coursework to help professors and
educators teach social media in their classrooms. Here are some the
topics covered:
Online reputation audit
An online reputation audit gives students a better idea of the
quality and strategy involved in running social channels for brands
versus their personal accounts. In their audit, students are asked
to evaluate their own social channels and compare them to brands or
professionals they’d like to…
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