The time of year is drawing near when students, teachers, and staff members will once again join together to begin a productive academic year. Yet, many teachers devote the weeks preceding the start of each semester to planning and preparing for their lessons and upgrading their course materials.
The fact that this was a point of discussion in the Facebook group I founded, the Social Media Professor’s Community, made it really meaningful to me. As social media is ever-evolving, educators everywhere are in the same situation. Despite the fact that I only teach a course specifically on social media once a year, I make every effort to incorporate concepts from it into my more frequent Public Relations and Strategic Communications classes.
Which is how I ended up here. What will be the most important changes that we need to be aware of in the next year?
What do I say? Whilst there are many, it’s important to remember that no two courses or teachers will have the same emphasis or approach. We can do some research to find out what’s available, what’s still relevant, and what we should be watching and incorporating into our lessons. Here are a few things to keep in mind regarding changes for the next semester.
It’s difficult to stay abreast of the developments occurring on all the different platforms.
This is challenging and something instructors of social media need to keep in mind: preparing to teach social media is something they’ll have to do every semester. Only in the last several months, we’ve witnessed a lot of shifts. You may now make your own geofilters to use in Snapchat, record longer films, and include links in your videos. Instagram has followed suit, and they’ve even added its own stickers and geolocation features. Instagram now lets you respond with both videos and photos. The scope of Messenger’s applications continues to broaden, with new ones emerging every day, including customer service. Yet, the revised Conversation Prism provides a useful jumping-off point for both students and teachers in demonstrating this pattern.
As a natural consequence of these developments, it is not always easy to spot their practical applications. Delmondo, Social Media Examiner, and Social Times are great places to start when you need to know what the latest trends are, how they are being implemented, and what other books you might want to add to your reading collection.
Describe how you plan to apply the ideas to specific instances and marketing initiatives.
This is what best illustrates the relevance of our classroom material to actual life. We want to be able to show our students examples of successful and unsuccessful social media campaigns run by agencies, businesses, professionals, and others, and to discuss the lessons that may be learned from them.
Make use of contemporary means of assistance.
Social media platforms are inherently fluid, therefore we need to be cognizant of the ever-expanding set of resources that coincide with these shifts. In-app content creation and analytics, or platform-specific data analysis (ex. Snaphat geofilters). These are important to keep in mind. You might recognise a few of these, but there will also be some that are brand new to user.
Stay current on what is included (and offered) in brand certifications by reading their FAQs and other online resources. As teachers in the field of social media, this is one of the many benefits we enjoy. Through our partnerships, we are able to provide our students with access to the certification programmes of companies like Hootsuite, HubSpot, Meltwater, and others.
These are only some pointers for the remainder of the semester.
Certainly, there will be other shifts to observe and test hypotheses about. Finding groups (like this one) where people are willing to share their knowledge and engage in discussion is crucial. Once more, we are all in the same position and may benefit from the experiences of others.