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The widespread access of the internet and social media globally has given a lot of hype to social media influencing or what some might call "next-gen marketing". The ability of social media influencers to reach out to a large number of people and connect them to various brands and businesses make them very essential in the modern way of marketing.
Social media influencing is a skill that you can refine over time, and it has a lot of opportunities if you choose to opt for it as a career. Influencers can help brands generate a lot of revenue and consequently earn money for themselves.
People regularly share information on social media. When somebody recommends a product to someone, they are likely to be influenced into buying or opting for it, especially if the recommendation is from somebody well-known. A survey reported that 94% of the people share information on social media to pass valuable information, and 49% of these respondents influence action about products by sharing. Such an impact on the psychology of the masses can be extremely beneficial to many companies.
Social media influencing as a career has a lot of scope - from business promotion to the promotion of political parties. One might even say that the scope of this career is only limited to your imagination!
Influencing is like building a brand and a company, so you need to understand the basics as you would for any business! Even if you outsource and hire help, you do not want to fly blind and waste time and money.
To the eyes of a layman, the life of social media influencers can seem like a bed of roses, and some might even think that it is just happenstance to lead such a life. Nothing can be far from the truth, at least most of the time. It is imperative that influencers possess tech skills to climb the ladder of success and attract brands.
Social media platforms greatly rely on certain algorithms that help them function the way they do. By analyzing these algorithms through educated usage of the platform’s features and analytical tools it provides, social media influencers can make the most of the resources at their disposal. This will help the influencer create an impact in the following ways:
The degree of necessity to learn tech skills primarily depends on the following:
A large social media influencer typically has a dedicated team where each member specializes in a particular task. However, if you are just getting started as an influencer, then you are likely unaccompanied in this endeavour and as a result, have to learn the tech skills of all the members of a typically small content creation and marketing team.
Limited financial resources can hold you back from procuring expensive machinery and accessories. But that doesn’t stop you from creating amazing content for your audience or the brands you endorse.
Intelligent exploitation of free social media websites and open-source computer languages like Python combined with knowledge in data analytics for social media is bound to set you on the right path.
Willingness to constantly improve knowledge, learn new things, and be open to changes is crucial to developing tech skills for influencers.
If you are a novice to the realm of social media influencing and have a thirst for knowledge, then you can quickly learn useful skills for networking and influencing.
Some of the most relevant technical skills for influencers are:
You don’t necessarily have to master all of the above-mentioned tech skills, but it is of the essence that you have a rudimentary understanding of them and develop a basic skill set to get you going.
Given the popularity and growing user base of Python, you may ask “should I learn Python?". Well, a straight-up answer is "yes".
Developing basic skills in programming languages for digital marketing like Python helps in web scraping, creating automators, and is also useful in data-driven marketing. According to Forbes Insights, 70% of marketing executives say that data-driven marketing is a core element of all or nearly all campaigns.
In the world of marketing, data gives you power. Python is considered to be one of the most powerful machine languages for data analysis and machine learning. Furthermore, it is also one of the less complicated and more comprehensible programming languages for digital marketing, syntactically.
With a beginner level knowledge in Python programming, you can start scraping the web and extract data that might be useful to grow your social media influence and build your career. With more knowledge, you can proceed to create automators using Python that saves you a lot of time and energy, especially on repetitive tasks.
Many influencers pose the question “should I learn to code?”, and the definitive answer is again a “yes”. Mastery in coding is not a requirement to gain momentum in the career of social media influencing, but a basic understanding of coding and web development will take you a long way.
Skills in coding for digital marketing and web development also help you to gain an intuitive understanding of how websites, search engines, and social media platforms work. Understanding their algorithms and framework in addition to understanding your audience is an acquired skill set you would not want to forgo.
All of this will help you build the network you need for a stable career in this field. You can create APIs, apps, and websites to build your community of followers and consumers. This will enforce your ability to endorse a brand or even build your brand. Furthermore, if you are stuck somewhere and need to outsource help, then you would always have people to help from the very community you built.
When it comes to the internet and social media, data is the crux of your marketing campaign. An Oracle-Forbes research of high-performing brands and agencies that reap the greatest reward for data-driven marketing strategies uncovered that 42% of them use data-driven marketing strategies for the majority of campaigns while for another 28%, data-driven marketing is a core element of all the campaigns.
As a matter of fact, 38% of respondents in a 2019 report noted that a culture of data and analytics will be the biggest game-changer for analytic success.
Further, data analytics helps you, as a creator and an influencer, to understand what kind of content is working best for you and your audience. This will help you to curate your content better and also provide insights to correlate different platforms with different consumer bases. This is also one of the very quick and efficient ways that will set you apart from the others.
Skills in User Experience (UX) Design are essential and even customary if you are leaning towards creating your community. You need to provide your audience with a carefully crafted and seemingly perfect experience in any interface you design or on any platform you communicate by bringing them together.
A great UX is an iterative process. Your acquired skills in coding and data analytics will surely complement your skills in UX to better align business and product goals with user needs. This will help you build beautiful experiences for your followers across your entire network.
Check out our well-structured User Experience Design courses
There are many platforms and sources, both online and offline, where you can learn useful tech skills that will be advantageous if you are on the path to make a career in social media influencing. Doing an influencer marketing online course is a good way to get started. However, choosing the right course or platform can be a bit exhausting.
At the end of the day, it boils down to why you are opting for these courses and if you can afford them.
Xccelerate is a platform that offers career-enhancing courses in Python, UX Design, AI, and more at competitively affordable prices to help you kickstart your career in social media influencing.
From "Coding for Absolute Beginners", "Mobile App Development", "User Experience Design" to "Data Science & Machine Learning", Xccelerate is one of the ideal one-stop-platform to learn all the tech skills you would require to start your career as a social media influencer.
To start a momentous career, you would need good mentors, expert instructors, flexible training methods, and intricately structured programs.
According to a report by Fast Company, just reading books and remembering its content will not do much good. The learner has to actively participate in activities where he/she user their acquired skill regularly until it becomes a habit. This is especially true in the realm of data science and data analytics.
You may find platforms providing courses and content for free. What sets Xccelerate apart is the 91% graduate job placement rate, 90% satisfaction rate and “The Xccelerate Experience”. From expert instructors, exclusive learning community to the well-curated hiring network, everything is at your disposal from the moment you join us.
Another report from Harvard Business Review states that one in four senior managers report that training was critical to business outcomes.
Learning technical skills is an important aspect of building your career in social media influencing. Some of-the-top benefits of this include:
There is a lot to learn in the realm of technology. Learning new tech skills will help you stay on track regarding the advancements of technology, make you aware of more opportunities and room to grow, identify trends in the market to optimize your marketing methodology.
Brands and businesses prefer to employ a skilled workforce. But a highly skilled workforce comes at an expensive price, especially if it is more than one or two people. An influencer having numerous skill-sets readily becomes a priority for companies since they do not have to worry about hiring a greater number of people to do the same task that a single influencer is capable of doing.
Developing skills in tech saves a lot of money for both the brand and the influencer. The brands do not have to employ multiple personnel to do a job while the influencer need not worry about outsourcing certain aspects of the work to third-party workers.
People always tend to spend a lot of money over things they are not aware of when, in reality, you can develop these skills yourself and save a lot of hassle.
With a large workforce comes another requirement – managing that workforce. Developing tech skills for influencers eliminates the need to hire a greater number of people to meet client requirements, and this further eliminates the need for an extensive managerial process that is often stressful and time-consuming.
Firstly, the answer to the question "should I learn tech?” is a definitive “yes” if you are looking to make a momentous career in social media influencing. Moreover, the influencer can save a large amount of money from the benefits that learning technical skills bring with them.
Secondly, it is imperative to make educated and well-researched decisions before finalizing the platform to learn tech skills by investing your precious time and money. Make sure that the platform and its courses offer resources that are beneficial to the career you are seeking.
Lastly, coding for marketers is a highly advantageous skill. A good programmer typically has a better understanding of the technology and software which enables him/her to optimize their content for maximum visibility and impact.
If you are at a choice point in your career and need someone to help you navigate professional challenges. You can make an appointment to our free 1-on-1 Career Consultation and receive personalised career advice.
