Social media is an extremely powerful tool when it comes to digital marketing. No matter what your business is, it offers you an excellent way to grow your brand, increases your traffic, and sell more of your product and service.

It also gives you a powerful tool to engage with your audience on a more personal level, and, in the process, you connect with your audience, build relationships, and build customer loyalty.

Now, social media and online courses have always been an excellent match for each other. It gives you a platform to promote and market your courses and the opportunity to engage with your audience, which is especially important with online courses where you want to build a relationship and community around it.

So, now the question is how you would monetize your audience as an online course creator. With this post, we'll look at this question in more detail and give you an easy guide that you can use to monetize your audience on a few platforms.

How To Monetize Your Social Media Following?

As an online course creator, social media is the perfect platform for selling your product if you think about it. Unlike other digital marketing methods, you can create a community with social media. As you post valuable, relevant, and educational content to this community and create value for your customers, they'll be more likely to invest in further learning and all your other courses.

Now, apart from this, you also have several other opportunities to monetize your social media audience, like, for example:

• You will be able to earn an income through affiliate marketing. Say you use a specific product or platform in your course, you can, through affiliate programs, earn some money when your students buy that product.
• You can sell your courses directly on social media. So, this could be a perfect place to sell an introductory course that, after completion, would point customers to your other courses on your website or platform.
• Using social media to drive traffic to your website or online course platform. This can be an excellent way they drive prospective customers to your website where they can see and find further information on your courses or have all their questions answered.
• You can use social media as a lead generation tool. Obviously, you want to create an online community around your coach or courses, which is an excellent way to generate leads for further sales.

Keep in mind that this is just a small sample of what you could do to monetize your audience on social media and that there are many other strategies and tactics out there that you can use. With this in mind, let's look at some specific social media platforms and how you can monetize your audience on them.

Facebook

Facebook is arguably one of the biggest social media platforms on the Internet today, and its usage numbers are staggering. For example, 68% of Americans use Facebook, and of this, 66% use it daily. About 200 million people are on Facebook groups, and 78% of American consumers say they have discovered and bought a product through Facebook.

Considering these numbers, it's easy to see why you should consider Facebook as one of the platforms to monetize your audience. Now, if you do, you have several options:

• The first would be Facebook Advertising. This is often the most obvious choice. Here you create paid ads that promote your product to your audience. Facebook Ads allow you to target very specific customers based, for example, on their demographics, their location, and what they're interested in.
• Another option is Facebook Groups. Here you have two options; you can use either other people's groups or your group created around your course. The first is simple, you join the group, and you'll offer valuable content to members, which can generate some valuable leads. You'll just have to make sure that you can post regularly and that their rules fit in with your goals and purposes. Your group's other option is a perfect way to promote your courses and increase engagement with your customers and build valuable relationships. In both cases, you can also answer questions and advise on your specific niche, making them even more effective.
• Facebook Messenger is also a good option. Although this can be somewhat time-consuming, studies have shown that people are more likely to open a Facebook message than an email. One of the simplest ways to use messaging to monetize your audience is simply sending messages to people who comment on or like a post related to your course. If you don't want to do it manually, you also have the option to use a chatbot to engage with prospects on Facebook Messenger automatically.

Twitter

With about 126 million daily active users, Twitter is also one of the biggest social media platforms and the perfect place to build your audience if you're an online course creator. The platform differs fundamentally from Facebook, so the methods differ too.

Unlike Facebook, there are no groups or, for instance, things like product pages. You have your own Twitter account, and you might create a Twitter account for your course, but the core principle here is that you engage with prospects directly on the account. In this way, you build the following that you can market and promote your courses to, but the key is to create and share regular content relevant to your customers.

Like Facebook, though, you can use some of the following to monetize your audience:

• Using Twitter Ads. Like Facebook ads, you can use Twitter ads to not only promote your courses to your followers but to target audiences that might be interested in your courses.
• Using hashtags. If you're looking for a more organic approach, you can share and create content with relevant hashtags that will make users find your feed, from where you can generate traffic to your website or course platform.
• Engagement. Because you can find Twitter users that might have interests relevant to your courses by using hashtags, you can also engage and interact with these users by, for instance, answering their questions or giving advice. This will, in turn, grow your following and allow you to create greater awareness around your courses.

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest website after Google, with more than two billion monthly users. Here, 74% of adults in the United States use YouTube, and 77% of 15-to-35-year-olds in the United States use the platform. It's a massive platform that you can use to build a following and monetize your audience.

Here, you also have a variety of options:

• Advertising. Like other social media platforms, you're able to use ads to promote your content or courses. You could, for example, use paid ads to promote a specific course that will generate website traffic to your website or course platform where customers will be able to find your other courses. Another option would be to promote your YouTube channel, where you'll be able to promote your courses and engage with your audience on your channel.
• Free content. When it comes to building a following on YouTube, free content is invaluable. You could, for instance, create a free course that you host on your YouTube channel and create other relevant content that relates to this course. This will grow your following, and if users like your content and find value in it, they'll look to buy your other courses as well. You could even use some of your free courses and convert them to paid courses on your platform later, or you could make the first part of the course free on YouTube and then require a purchase or subscription if your audience wants the later part.
• Monetization options. Although you could make some of your courses completely free on YouTube, its monetization features allow you to earn money on your free content. In this way, you need to accept that your videos have promotional content or ads from other content creators and businesses included in them. At first, these payments might not amount to much, but as your following and channel grow, you will be able to earn more from these monetization options.

Instagram

Instagram, the popular photo and video sharing social network service, can also be highly effective when you want to promote your courses and monetize your audience. Because it'sFacebook owns it, its monetization options are very similar to what you'd find there.

So, you could, for instance:

• Teach relevant skills. You could use Instagram's format to teach your followers relevant skills that relate to your course. For example, if you have a software development course that you're selling, you could use short videos or images to teach smaller and easily digestible concepts using Instagram. This, in turn, promotes your courses to your followers and generates traffic to your website or course platform.
• Use ads. Like the other social media platforms, you can use paid ads to sell your courses or generate traffic to your course platform, where users will be able to buy what they're looking for.
• Engage and interact. As your following grows and more followers find value in the content you produce, you'll be able to engage and interact with your followers by answering their questions or giving them advice relevant to the courses you're selling. This is a perfect opportunity to get visitors to your site where they can buy your courses, and if they've engaged with you before, it's more likely that they will make a purchase.
• Sell affiliate products. Instagram also gives you an excellent opportunity to promote affiliate products and earn an income in this way. Here, you can promote some of the products and services that you use in your courses, and if your followers buy them, you'll earn a small commission.

TikTok

A recent entry in the social media space, TikTok, uses short-form mobile videos so that users can quickly and easily create short videos using their smartphones. This enables anyone to be a media creator. Considering that there are more than 800 million active users globally, it's a perfect place for you to build and monetize an audience.

Here, your options are:

• Promoting and selling your courses. You can use short-form videos to promote your courses and generate traffic for your website or online course platform. By creating content that's educational, relevant, and creates value for your customers, you'll engage them, and you'll be able to create awareness around your brand.
• Live streaming. With live streaming, you'll be able to create content that's relevant to your audience and courses. Users can then use coins that they buy via in-app purchases to tip you if they found your content valuable. TikTok passes 80% of the value of the tips onto you, which means that you earn money for creating relevant and valuable content that your followers find engaging.
• Affiliate marketing. Like some of the other social media platforms, you can also use affiliate marketing here, but you must use it differently because TikTok doesn't allow you to put any clickable links in your bio or videos. A solution to this would be to create an affiliate link page on your website and then use an URL shortener to create a name for the link that's memorable, catchy, and short so that users can easily enter it into their browser. On this page, you'll then promote the affiliate products that you use in your educational content.

Clubhouse

Clubhouse is the latest entry in the social media space that's taking the world by storm. It's an audio-based app that lets you listen in on other people's live conversations. Think of it as almost listening to a podcast and allows you to listen to famous and influential people casually talking as if you were in a room with them.

Despite the platform being relatively new with no monetization options as of yet, there are some ways you can use it to monetize your audience:

• Brand Partnerships. You could join with other course creators and create brand partnerships to promote and cross-promote each other's content.
• Membership fees. There's talk that club creators will soon be able to charge a membership fee for a club. This means that you could create a club related to your course and charge your audience a membership fee to join the club and the conversation.
• Ask me anything rooms. If you're an expert in your field and you've created a following of users that find value in your content and courses, you could create a room and charge people a fee for answering their questions. This could be an excellent opportunity for customers who want advice or more in-depth explanations of some of your courses' concepts.
• Talk about your courses. Another option would be to simply talk about your course and what benefits it could give customers if they enroll. You should just be careful not to make the discussion about your course all the time and instead focus on engaging your audience with relevant and valuable content that will make interest in your course grow organically.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this guide to monetizing your social media audience as an online course creator was helpful, and you found some valuable tips you could use to grow your audience and increase your revenue.

If you look at all these social media platforms, it's clear that the key takeaway is to shift your focus from selling to helping. In other words, if you move away from selling your course constantly to rather solving your audience's problems by providing value, the sales will follow naturally, and your audience will keep growing.

At Gurucan, we provide you with all the tools necessary to create, sell, and promote online courses while also making communication with students easier. With the platform, you can create online courses, including text, video, audio, images, and so much more. You can also create webinars and challenges, and it has all the features to optimize your business, like marketing automation, a CRM, and membership payment models.

If you'd like to find out more about our platform, feel free to visit our website for more details