net101 Social Media Strategy Canvas
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These are the explanatory notes for the Social Media Strategy Canvas which forms part of the net101 ‘Advanced Social Media and Strategy’ course. The Social Media Strategy Canvas is made up of 10 elements:
- Core Objectives
- Strategic Objectives
- Target Audiences
- Platform Selection & Audience Reach
- Content Requirement
- Budget Allocation
- Audience Actions
- Call-To-Action (CTA) Bridges
- Conversion Places, Events & Goals
- Return-On-Investment Analysis
These elements are the building blocks of a social media strategy – one which will align with your stated Organisational Objectives, while also prompting you to consider your current social media capabilities, namely your:
- ongoing ability to source, produce and publish Target Audience relevant content
- level of internal support from your direct report, colleagues and other departments (see above point)
- level of access to relevant data for reporting purposes and to draw actionable insights from
- access to budgeted funds
We have logically sequenced the canvas elements but examine them individually of you prefer. This canvas exercise can be applied at a micro or macro level, i.e. it can be mapped against your entire social media presence, or to an individual social media account, campaign, brand or geographic market.
1/ CORE OBJECTIVES
Any organisation, whether commercial, public or a not-for-profit, should be able to validate their social media presence as the means of achieving one or more of three Core Objectives:
- increase revenue (a top-line contribution)
- decrease costs (a bottom-line contribution)
- increase stakeholder satisfaction, internal or external
You need to identify at least one Core Objective for each and every social media related activity you undertake, enabling straightforward answers to base-level questions such as why are we doing this and is it working to that end? In addition to increased revenue/ profit motivations, increasing stakeholder satisfaction is a common Core Objective. Commercially orientated organisations may look to enhance their brand visibility and credibility in the eyes of key stakeholders such as existing customers or clients (as a retention play), current staff or management, local community and supported causes. Key stakeholder groups for not-for-profits also potentially include these, with the inclusion of beneficiaries and benefactors - their very reason to exist.
2/ STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES
Meeting one or more Strategic Objectives enables you to meet one or more of the three Core Objectives defined above. Common social media Strategic Objectives include:
- awareness (brand, campaign, advocacy)
- prospects or leads
- customer service
- event support
- HR/ recruitment
- crisis management
Your social media presence may serve multiple Strategic Objectives simultaneously, but each of your social media accounts must always be in service of at least one of them. Your Strategic Objectives may also change over time, and accounts might switch between different Strategic Objectives given changing circumstances, e.g. during an organisational crisis. But without a default Strategic Objective for each of your social media accounts you will have difficulty in measuring effectiveness against your higher Organisational Objectives.
NB: Customer Service or Crisis Management might not be default Strategic Objectives for any of your accounts, but any of them may be used as a customer service touch-point – for questions, comments, complains and feedback – or users may gravitate to one or more of your accounts during a crisis affecting your organisation.
3/ TARGET AUDIENCES
Targeting multiple audiences in one place at one time is difficult – the message is often delivered too broadly to resonate with any one segment. Most organisations will have multiple potential Target Audiences (or stakeholders) on social media they would like to get the attention of. This poses a dilemma: to segment or broadcast your communications?
We believe tightly defined Target Audience selection is required when publishing through social media, and doubly so when executing paid campaigns. Smaller, well-defined target audiences who receive timed messaging which is aligned to their tastes and preferences achieves better strategic-level outcomes. There are several ways you could define your Target Audiences:
- by demographic - commonly defined as age, gender, location
- by affinity group - people linked by a common interest or purpose
- By buyer persona - semi-fictional representations of your ideal ‘customers’ - includes demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations and goals
- Your current social media fans/ followers
- Your current website visitors (Google Analytics report: ‘Audience’ > ‘Interests’ > ‘Affinity Categories’ or ‘In-Market Segments’ – find out more about this report)
Once you have defined your Target Audiences – which are aligned to your Strategic Objectives – select the social media platform/s you believe they are active on. Try not to set up a new social media account without first knowing what Strategic Objective it will serve, and by extension who your Target Audiences is you expect to find there.
4.1/ SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM SELECTION ![]()
The Social Media Platforms listed below are common options open to organisations operating within the Australian market in 2019 (and which are covered extensively across our net101 public course programs). To simplify the canvas we’ve excluded platforms which are serving demographic niches such as Snapchat and Weibo.
- YouTube
- blogs
Your Social Media Platform mix should be based on:
- your Strategic Objectives
- your defined Target Audiences against your Strategic Objectives
- identification which Social Media Platforms your defined Target Audiences are active on
Target Audience Insights – Who’s on What? Knowing where to reach your Target Audiences on social media can be an intuitive-based decision or sometimes trial by error. There are also resources and tools to assist your decision:
- country specific third-party research data, e.g. something like this or the annual Sensis Yellow Social Media Report
- your own social media accounts – platforms often provide segmented demographic data relating to your existing fans/ followers and other engaged users
- platform user databases, e.g. Facebook Audience Insights
- publicly accessible competitor social media accounts
Your platform mix may also change over time with changing Organisational and Strategic Objectives, changing Target Audiences, changing resource capabilities (time and money), or simply as Social Media Platforms fall in and out of favour.
4.2 TARGET AUDIENCE REACH
Now that you have selected the social media platform/s platforms your primary target audience frequent, and you know what content formats you will be using and the substance, the question is now one of achieving target audience reach. ‘Reach’ is a common social media metric which signifies the number of unique individuals who were physically served your post (not to confused with ‘impressions’ which is the number of times a post was served). Total reach can be measured in aggregate across all of your posts on any social media platform within a specified time-frame, or just for specific posts. Total reach can in turn be broken down into its organic and paid components.
Organic Reach
Organic reach is published social media content that was served to a user-base without you paying for that to happen. People are able to view your content organically (for free) as a result of:
- Users who visit your account/profile page directly and view your content.
- Users who perform a platform-specific keyword, hashtag or geo-tag search which aligns with an aspect of your content.
- Users who are subscribers - your fans or followers – and your content is served onto their newsfeed (referred to an initial reach).
- Users who are your subscribers, served your content, and who then push it onto the newsfeeds of their personal connections as a result of engaging with it – liking, commenting or sharing (referred to as viral reach).
The extent of your organic reach within any given social media platform is determined by a combination of factors: the number of direct visitors to your account, the number of fans or followers you have, the level of user engagement with your content, and each platform’s unique newsfeed algorithm. These algorithms - sometimes referred to as quality filters - determine the type of the content each user sees (and doesn’t see!) on their newsfeed, and from which sources and in what order.
A Note on Search
Your blog content and your public YouTube videos are also able to enjoy extended organic reach via internal search and external search engines such as Google. The content you publish through these platforms gets crawled and indexed, and is stored indefinitely within the search engine data centres which drive any given search result. This is not the case for most of your published social media content, hence the requirement to publish regularly to maintain your visibility.
Paid Reach
Most social media platforms offer paid options to achieve target audience reach. Paid reach is often used to supplement organic reach, or for more granulated targeting. Paid content typically presents on a user’s newsfeed as ‘sponsored’.
Paid Reach - Promoted Content
Most social media platforms allow you to individually select already published posts and pay for it served onto the newsfeeds of specified user groupings. This is commonly known as promoting or boosting your content. Promoted content can be targeted to existing connections, their connections, or to users based on filters of differing granularity, depending on the platform.
Paid Reach – Advertising
Most social media platforms also provide a targeted advertising option across a range of formats and placements. Content which is served to specified users via this option is (usually) not visible on your own page/ profile. An ‘ad’ – any post serving any purpose - can be also be targeted to existing connections, their connections, or to users based on filters of differing granularity, depending on the platform. In some cases, the targeting and reporting capabilities of ad-served content is greater than that of promoted content. In addition, ad-served content typically incorporates clear buttons or links to drive consideration or a conversion action. Facebook for example allows advertisers to select from a number of call-to-action buttons for their ad-level content:
- See Menu
- Apply Now
- Book Now
- Contact Us
- Download
- Get Showtimes
- Learn More
- Send Message
NB: Additional organic reach can be achieved off the back of sponsored content (boosted content or an ad) if users engage with it. Depending on the platform, user engagement often times pushes sponsored content onto the newsfeeds of their close personal connections.
5/ CONTENT REQUIREMENT
Content is the ‘media’ in social media. It’s easy to underestimate the ongoing time and effort required to produce relevant content to be able to publish through to your Target Audiences. The types of content produced should be determined by your Strategic Objectives, which Social Media Platforms your Target Audiences are active on and their content preferences. There are six principal social media content formats (and numerous sub-formats):
- short-form text, e.g. an update, tweet or caption
- long-form text, e.g. an article
- images, e.g. as part of an update, carousel or album
- short-form video, i.e. running under a minute
- long-form video, e.g. a typically YouTube video running longer than a minute
- audio, e.g. a podcast
Ideally you will be comfortable producing in any of these content formats so as to reach any Target Audience on any Social Media Platform in any format. The chart below shows which content formats are supported - commonplace or not -across our principal Social Media Platforms.
Considerations for Content Selection using Facebook as an Example
- facebook supports all six content formats but not all are commonplace. Just because you can publish long-form text, long-form video and streaming audio is not to say that it’s expected or wanted by Facebook users (the general preference is for more bite-sized content)
- produce content in the formats that each platform supports and is based on the specific preferences of your Target Audiences
- publish to your capabilities. If you determine your Target Audiences on Facebook prefer short-form video content, what’s your ability to produce or curate relevant video content to serve through to them?
In Summary So Far...
You should now be in a position to articulate the following for each social media platform within your control:
- What is its primary Organisational Objective?
- Given our primary Organisational Objective what is our primary Strategic Objective?
- Given our primary Strategic Objective, who is our primary Target Audience?
- Knowing who our primary Target Audience is, which Social Media Platform are they active on?
- Knowing which Social Media Platform our primary Target Audience are active on which Content Formats does that platform support, is commonplace, meets the preferences of our Target Audience, and we are capable of continually producing?
Example 1 – A Cooking School
- primary Organisational Objective: increase revenue
- primary Strategic Objective: brand awareness
- primary Target Audience (demographic): males & females, aged 25-65, who live in Bendigo
- Social Media Platform the Target Audience is active on: Instagram
- Social Media Platform content requirement and target audience preference: Instagram commonly supports short-form text (captions up to 2200 characters), images (standalone, carousel and GIFs) and short-form video (up to 60 seconds excluding IGTV). You believe your target audience will value aspirational images of completed dishes, table settings & cooking equipment, simple text-based recipes under 2200 characters, and short-form cooking tips and how-to videos. All content is strongly branded.
Example 2 – An Electrical Engineering Company
- primary Organisational Objective: increase revenue
- primary Strategic Objective: leads
- primary Target Audience (affinity group): operations executives within the national and international mining sector
- Social Media Platform the Target Audience is active on: LinkedIn
- Social Media Platform content requirement and target audience preferences: LinkedIn supports short and long-form text, images, short and long-form video. You believe your target audience will value detailed technical information, case-studies, articles related to mine safety and downloadable spec sheets. Low emphasis on images and high emphasis on in-situ equipment demonstrations using long-form video. Clear calls-to action in place, e.g. online forms or bridges through to the website with further bridging options through to the contact centre (to capture leads).
6/ SOCIAL MEDIA BUDGET
Given who your Target Audience is, and the variability of the newsfeed algorithms which determine the extent of your organic reach, you might find it difficult to achieve your Strategic Objectives without some monetary spend. Regardless of your current organic reach you can optionally supplement it with paid reach, i.e. by promoting selected content and/or running targeted communications through an advertising panel, e.g. Facebook’s Ads Manager Paying for audience reach has the advantage that it can be targeted to users based on granular profile characteristics, and in some instances their online behaviour. In some instances, paying to reach to reach select Target Audiences might be your only option to reach them. Because social media paid campaigns are generally more targeted than traditional off-line channels campaign budgets are often smaller. Budgets can optionally be applied on a per campaign or rolling basis with specified caps. Paid campaign settings, including spend, can be fine-tuned as you go.
Just reaching your Target Audience - by organic or paid means – may be enough, e.g. if your Strategic Objective was Awareness. To meet others Strategic Objectives however you may need move beyond reach and elicit a subsequent action. There are four general types of Target Audience actions:
- engagement
- media Consumption
- participation
- moving across a CTA (call-to-action) Bridge
Engagement Actions
Social media Engagement can take the form of a received like, comment or a share. Engagement is desirable in that it can increase the (viral) organic reach of your content and potentially the organic reach of future content posted through your account (Facebook’s algorithm uses aggregate account engagement as a quality indicator for an account). Organisations may wish to maximise engagement for other reasons, e.g. to solicit feedback or to create a sense of community by allowing users to express themselves and to communicate with other fellow users.
Media Consumption Actions Media Consumption requires users to click within a social media post to more fully access the media contained within it. Examples include the starting, replaying or unmuting of a media stream, moving through a carousel, viewing an image gallery or downloading a file. Media consumption actions are important because they increase your media reach and imply audience interest. NB: auto-play media may count as a view (past a certain time mark) but it’s technically not a consumption action because no user-action took place. Video content which is hosted on YouTube and syndicated through social media (which doesn’t autoplay) does count as media consumption and can be measured via the platform it was viewed through, as well as through YouTube’s own analytics dashboard.
Participation Actions Participating through a post is another valuable and measurable category of user actions. This could take the form of a poll response, a competition entry, an event RSVP (‘interested’ or ‘going’), joining a live stream, claiming an offer or completing a form. Inviting participation serves several potential and useful purposes: community involvement, market research, feedback, commitment, two-way interaction, leads, sales, and as a source of user generated content.
CTA (call-to-action) bridges Social media reach can facilitate awareness, invite engagement, media consumption and participation as described above. But in order to meet certain Strategic Objectives you will need to encourage users to move across a CTA bridge to another online or offline location. These are known as ‘conversion places’ and potentially include:
- your website
- another social media location
- a physical location
- your contact centre
Common CTA bridges to conversion places:
- CTA buttons, e.g. ‘learn more’, ‘buy’, ‘donate’, ‘call’, ‘message’
- hyperlinks and hypertext (to websites)
- telephone numbers & street addresses
7/ CONVERSION PLACE EVENTS & GOALS
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Moving a Target Audience to a Conversion Place such as a website or to a public event can be an end in itself, but usually additional actions need to be undertaken. For example, a social media CTA bridge in the form of a ‘buy now’ button would typically land a user at the head of an ecommerce funnel with a further action required to complete the purchase.
Conversion Places: The Website
Moving a Target Audiences to your website is common for lead generation, customer service, ecommerce and for publishers. A social media user who crosses a CTA bridge to a website landing page is typically invited to move through one of several possible conversion goal pathways, each with a corresponding conversion goal. Examples include:
- making an online payment (ecommerce)
- making a reservation
- making an appointment
- becoming a partner
- creating an account
- viewing product or service details
- getting a quote or estimate
- checking an inventory or schedule
- finding a location
- making a donation
- making an enquiry
- applying
- subscribing (to an EDM)
- downloading, using, viewing, watching, playing (page engagement actions are commonly called ‘events’)
Website goals can be measured as time on site, pages viewed per visit, or more commonly as a destination page reached. A ‘destination goal’ is the final page in a conversion step-process, e.g. the confirmation page for a purchase, newsletter sign-up or contact form completion. In some instances, the website only serves as an intermediary bridge to conversion place, e.g. to a physical location or through to the contact centre.
Website Analytics & Social Media Conversion Tracking
Your website analytics - most likely Google Analytics – will automatically categorise your social media derived traffic by ‘medium’ and ‘source’, e.g. ‘social media’ as the medium and ‘facebook’ as the source. Once you’ve set up website conversion goal tracking through your Google Analytics account you’ll be able to report on the number of goals completed through your website, which in turn be can be attributed to the medium and/or source which facilitated those goals. This is known as ‘last click’ or ‘assisted’ goal reporting and can be applied against all of your social media platforms or to any other online channel which is driving traffic to your website, e.g. organic search, paid search, newsletter or referrals.
At advanced level your social media CTA buttons and hyperlinks can be tracked individually using campaign URLs, sometimes called ‘UTMs’. Campaign URL strings contain additional descriptive information which you assign yourself, e.g. a campaign name. Campaign URLs are installed behind a social media CTA button or alternatively converted to a shortened hyperlink. Any visitor who lands on your website via a campaign URL is identified in your Google Analytics dash as coming from the campaign name, medium and source you assigned to it. This enables you to attribute website traffic and website goal data to specific social media posts or campaigns, and not just to ‘social media’ or a particular social media platform. Any CTA button, hyperlink or hypertext which you have control over and clicks back to your website can incorporate a uniquely identifiable campaign URL. They are free and easy to create and are commonly used for paid campaign tracking where the website serves as the intermediary or final conversion place.
Conversion Place: Other Social Media
You may wish to move users from one social media platform to another to drive awareness of it, to gather new followers or to join a group. A social media post could also be positioned to bring users to an event page or form or to a social media live stream.
Conversion Place: A Physical Location
Bridging users from social media to a physical location can facilitate product or service trials, browsing or purchases, to meet with your people or to attend an event. Common CTAs which facilitate physical visits include find nearest location, use an interactive map, find a street addresses or opening hours, view travel directions, find public transport options and parking options. Tracking the online medium, source and campaign name which may have prompted a physical visit is more difficult to measure than it is for a website visit. This is known as the attribution problem and much has been written on it. Campaign specific offline redemption vouchers are one possible means of mitigating this common online/offline disconnect.
Conversion Place: Contact Centre
Bridging users to your contact centre – or any organisational interactive touch-point - can be a Strategic Objective in itself, e.g. for customer service, or as a means of achieving some other Strategic Objective such as lead generation or sales. Social media offers multiple CTA bridge options through to an organisational contact centre: phone numbers, call now buttons, email addresses, postal addresses, contact forms, live chat, chat bots and direct messaging. Even without overt contact centre CTAs in place social media users may still reach out to you directly through your social media account or by tagging or mentioning you in a post.
MEASUREMENT POINTS AND METRICS
The canvas incorporates a sideways funnel overlay which narrows to the right which can be summarised as Awareness > Actions > Conversions. These are enabling points which users need to cross to achieve different Strategic Goals:
- reach enables target audience awareness
- target audience awareness enables user-actions
- user-actions enable engagement, media consumption, participation or bridging to conversion places
- conversion places enable conversion goals and events
Potential Measurement Places sit across all of these points depending on what your strategic goals are. Measurement Place metrics include:
- total reach – the number of people who saw your content, broken down by organic and paid
- engagement – the number of likes, comments, shares
- media consumption - the number of views, plays, downloads
- participation – the number of poll responses, entries, RSVPs, etc
- website – the number of visits and/or attributable website goals and events completed
- physical location visits – the number of visitors (potentially difficult to isolate the source)
- contact centre engagements – the number inbound contacts received (potentially difficult to isolate the source)
The Measurement Place metrics you choose to report on should directly support your Strategic Objectives, which in turn supports one or more of your Organisational Objectives. Examples:
Strategic Objective 1: awareness (of product range) Measurement Place and reportable metric: reach (organic and paid) Core Objective: increase revenue by driving more store visits and in-store purchases
Strategic Objective 2: lead generation Measurement Place and reportable metric: applications via the website Core Objective: decreased costs
Strategic Objective 3: customer service Measurement point and reportable metrics: social media actions (engagement and media consumption) Core Objective: stakeholder satisfaction
Assigning Values to Metrics Assigning values - relative weights - to your reportable metrics is useful in three ways:
- for internal relative weighting purposes. For example, a video would typically carry less weight (less importance) than a lead, which in turn might carry less weight than a sale. A common technique to weight relative value is to assign a local currency equivalent, i.e. asking yourself how much you’d be prepared to pay for something to happen. For example, you might value an incremental video view to completion at $0.10 and a lead generated from an online form submission at $50. These are internal value assignments only – they are not real money.
- for Attribution purposes. Strategic Objective metrics with weighted values expressed in your local currency can be often be attributed to the various online mediums, sources and campaign URL’s which drove the outcomes. For example, attributing the relative values of website traffic and goal or event completions back to Facebook.
- for return-on-investment (ROI) analysis: If you can measure the values of your Strategic Objective metrics in your local currency equivalent you can compare the value generated against what you've spent.
Assigning Dollar Values to Metrics
Strategic Objective metrics, as mentioned, can be assigned nominal currency values, i.e. in $AUD if you’re operating in Australia. This is not as difficult as it may seem and chances are, you’re doing this in various offline contexts already. For example, to achieve target audience reach through a magazine you might commission a ¼ page display ad with supporting advertorial for $5000, i.e. you are paying a defined dollar value to reach somewhere in the vicinity of the magazine’s circulation (their reach). If you weren’t happy with the anticipated reach and the audience make-up you wouldn’t pay the $5K. That same calculus can be applied to social media. What would you be prepared to pay in $AUD to reach 1000 users within a tightly defined target audience on Facebook? What would you be prepared to pay for 500 users to participate in a poll on LinkedIn, or to contact you, or to visit your website, or to register for an event?
Internal Benchmarking & Target Metrics
Your expected nominal dollar value returns for your social media investments will become clearer over time. The more you do in social media and the more campaigns you run the easier it is to establish internal benchmarks. If you don’t know what a reasonable cost is to reach a target audience on social media you might consider what you’re currently paying. If it were costing you $10 on average to reach 1000 users, and you are satisfied with this as a return, you could establish this an internal benchmark, i.e. 1 user reached for 1 cent. Benchmarks are based on what you have been spending and your satisfaction of the measured returns. A average per unit outcome must be satisfactory for it to be a benchmark. Here are several examples of potentially satisfactory outcomes:
- $100/ 8000 reach = 1.25 cents per person reached
- $100/ 100 engagement actions = $1 per engagement action
- $100/ 5000 video views = 2 cents per video view
- $100/ 3 leads =$33.33 per lead
- $100/ 200 competition entries = 50 cents per competition entry
- $100/ 20 website visits = $5 per website visit
- $100/5 website registrations (conversions) = $20 per website registration
- $100 = $400 ecommerce sales
- $100/ 6 store visits = $16.66 per store visit
- $100/ 15 direct messages (to contact centre) = $6.66 per direct message
Benchmarks are useful because you are using the common denominator of your local currency to make like-for-like comparisons of your different campaigns.
Cross-Benchmarking Like-for-like benchmark comparisons can be applied across different target audiences, different social media platforms and different channels, for example:
- target audience 1 vs. target audience 2 (same platform)
- social media platform 1 vs. social media platform 2 (same campaign)
- social media channel vs. another digital channel (same campaign)
9/ RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI) Once you’ve established internal benchmarks for all of your key metrics, they can be used to calculate the returns on any social media financial investment. Example 1:
- campaign Strategic Objective: brand awareness
- budget: $80 in time and money
- campaign measurement place & metric: total reach (awareness requires reach)
- internal benchmark for reach: $1 for 100
- campaign results: 756 organic reach + 12,881 paid reach = 13,637 total reach
- average reach per dollar spent = 170 (13,637/80).
If your internal benchmark for reach was 100 per dollar spent, then any campaign result below a 100 per campaign dollar is a negative return and anything above 100 is a positive return. This campaign example therefore would have delivered a positive return (13,637) for an $80 investment Example 2:
- campaign Strategic Objective: participation (competition)
- budget: $300 in time and money (a prize)
- campaign Measurement Place metric: competition entries
- internal benchmark for a competition entry: $1.20
- campaign result: 180 entries
- average cost per entry = $1.66 (300/180)
If your internal benchmark for an incentivised competition was one entry per $1.20 per spent, then any campaign result below a $1.20 is a positive return and anything above is a negative return. This campaign example therefore would have delivered a negative return (180 entries) for the $300 investment.
Closing Thoughts
The Social Media Strategy Canvas need not form the basis for every social media related activity you undertake. It has a strong transactional focus and is suited to social media when you are in ‘campaign mode’ (which you should be in the majority of the time). The canvas doesn’t really address the relational side of social media, for example, community engagement and two-way dialogue which flows through to increased organisation-level trust and reputation – such qualitative outcomes are harder to pin down. If however you need to present a social media related business-case to a client, a direct report or any other stakeholder group the canvas framework should prove useful. We are big fans of tight reports – here’s the outline a one-pager social media business case:
- why: to help meet this organisational objective…
- how: by meeting this strategic objective…
- who: by targeting this audience…
- where: on this social media platform…
- what: using these content formats…
- target: reporting on these metrics…
- investment: required this amount of time and money…
- ROI: measured against these dollar-value internal benchmarks…
If you would like to have this strategy canvas exercise presented as part of a conference presentation or workshop, or an in-house training session, please contact Tim Martin here. If you would like to attend the Advanced Social Media & Strategy public course instead, the dates are here.