marketing online courses (using social media)

Does anyone have ideas on how to marketing online training courses (via social media or other methods)? We are trying to generate leads. For the most part, our leads come from email blasts (sent to both the house list and rented lists). My company has a Facebook page, we are a group on LinkedIn, and we're also on Twitter. We have not been very active with the social media, though.

Since the courses are online, it is fine if the leads are international. Our target market is IT people.
Thanks for any input!

 

well i will say - avoid email blast. if you have collected emails via optin then it is fine , otherwise its not a good idea.

You can get traffic from facebook and twitter. There are some good tools and tricks to make more fans and friends in these websites. Also try having targeted traffic and facebook FAN pages and groups.;

Ii have got a very good TARGETED traffic for one of my client via facebook only...so don't miss that

 

It does help to have a clear outline on what you want to achieve. Social Media involves a lot more than just being active on some sites like Facebook and Twitter. It is helpful to understand your goals, and your market before trying to market the training courses using social media.

The easiest mistake I see at this point is that you are not where a typical IT guy will be. Think about it for one second. There are hundreds of websites that cater for the IT market and these are the sites you need to target. Where would the typical IT guy with the long ponytail spend his nights on the web? Twittering away or communicating with others just like him on interesting forums. Probably the latter. It's not to say that IT people don't use Twitter...but Twitter is generally used by businesses. The average person looking for entertainment gets bored of Twitter really quickly and will not stay long on the site to find 'Training Courses.'

From a small survey I have done within the hotel industry here in the UK ( just a small hotel chain), hardly any professional uses Twitter. Some have played around with the site and some tried to use it for their business and others literally got bored with it within a month and then went back to Facebook. On Facebook your best bet is to look for groups. Join the groups and then see if you can find people that way. Do not spam them with irrelevant information. Be informative and you will have some success.

 

This is interesting.. Well not only to IT students.. But also to people who spend most of the tie on the computer.. This is big help..

 

We2.0 have given us great Social Media tool and work better.