Social Media Management

Course Description

COM4564 is the capstone of the social media sequence, and it is about running the function rather than doing the posting — the difference between someone who writes content and someone who manages a team, a budget and a set of commitments to senior management.

Florida's statewide description, which UWF uses verbatim, is unusually operational: the course "explores the day-to-day operations of a social media communication team. Students will learn how to create overarching strategies, content calendars, obtain and interpret social media analytics, and be able to write metric reports for senior management. Additional time will be spent on budgeting, workflow procedures, working cross-departmentally, and managing special initiatives."

⚠⚠ Read that list carefully, because it is a job description rather than a syllabus, and it names the two things that actually separate a social media manager from a social media coordinator.

The first is metric reports for senior management. ⚠⚠⚠ This is the skill that determines a career in this field. Most people entering social media work can produce content. Far fewer can stand in front of a chief marketing officer or a hospital's executive team and explain what the organisation received for its investment — in terms that executive cares about, with honest caveats, without hiding behind vanity metrics. Reach and follower counts are not results. The course exists substantially to teach that distinction and how to report across it.

The second is working cross-departmentally. ⚠ A social media team sits between marketing, communications, legal, customer service, HR and whoever owns the product — and it frequently has responsibility for the organisation's public voice without authority over the people who create the reasons to speak. That is a genuinely difficult organisational position, and the course treats it as a real problem rather than a soft skill.

⚠ One structural warning before you plan around this course: it sits at the end of a four-course chain and additionally requires 75 completed credit hours. That is not a course to discover in your final term; see Special Information.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Develop an overarching social media strategy aligned to organisational objectives, rather than a list of tactics.
• ⚠ Set measurable objectives and select the metrics that actually evidence them.
• Build and maintain a content calendar across platforms, campaigns and business cycles.
• Design a workflow — ideation, creation, review, approval, scheduling, publication and response — and identify where it breaks.
• ⚠ Obtain, validate and interpret analytics from native platform tools and third-party systems.
• ⚠⚠ Write a metric report for senior management: lead with the answer, tie activity to objectives, state limitations honestly, and recommend a decision.
• Distinguish vanity metrics from business metrics, and explain the distinction to someone who prefers the vanity ones.
• Build and manage a budget covering paid media, tools, content production and staffing.
• Plan team structure and roles, and allocate work across them.
• Manage cross-departmental relationships — securing input, approvals and legal review without stalling the calendar.
• Plan and run a special initiative — a launch, an event, a partnership — end to end.
• ⚠ Apply community management and escalation practice, including a documented response protocol.
• ⚠⚠ Apply crisis protocol: what gets paused, who decides, how fast, and who speaks.
• Apply governance — social media policy, account access and security, brand voice standards, and records obligations.
• Apply the legal and ethical framework: disclosure of paid partnerships, rights to content, accessibility, privacy and employee speech.

Optional Outcomes

• Plan and optimise paid social campaigns.
• Manage influencer and creator partnerships and contracts.
• Build dashboards and automate recurring reporting.
• Run social listening and competitive analysis.
• Apply agency-side practice — client management, scoping and retainers.
• Prepare for a platform or analytics certification.
• Manage social media in a regulated sector — healthcare, finance, education or government.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The social media function — where it sits, who it reports to, and what it is accountable for.
• Strategy — objectives, audiences, platform selection, and saying no to platforms.
• Content calendars and editorial planning.
• Workflow, approvals and version control.
• Analytics — what each platform measures, what it does not, and how definitions differ between them.
• ⚠ Measurement frameworks — objectives to key results; attribution and its limits.
• Executive reporting — structure, narrative, visualisation and honest caveats.
• Budgeting — paid media, tools, production, staffing, and defending the number.
• Team roles and resourcing.
• Cross-departmental working — legal, customer service, HR, product.
• Community management, moderation and escalation.
• Crisis protocol and pausing scheduled content.
• Governance — policy, access, security, brand voice, accessibility.
• Law and ethics — disclosure, rights, privacy, employee speech.
• Special initiatives and campaign management.

Optional Topics

• Paid social strategy and optimisation.
• Influencer and creator management.
• Dashboards, automation and reporting infrastructure.
• Social listening and competitive intelligence.
• Agency practice and client management.
• Regulated-sector social media.
• Platform certifications.

Resources & Tools

• ⚠ Native platform analytics and business manager tools — free, authoritative for their own platform, and what you will actually use. Get access to a real account, even a student organisation's.
• Management platforms — Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Later, Buffer. ⚠ Several offer free student or trial access, and named familiarity is a genuine interview advantage.
• Google Analytics — ⚠ its free certification is widely recognised and directly relevant to the attribution material.
• Hootsuite Academy, Meta Blueprint and similar vendor certifications — ⚠ free or cheap, and they signal currency on a résumé in a field where currency is the concern.
• The Social Media Management Handbook or a current strategy text — ⚠⚠ check the edition date ruthlessly; nothing in this subject ages faster.
• Measure What Matters (John Doerr) — on objectives and key results, which is the framework most organisations actually use for the reporting half.
• Federal Trade Commission Endorsement Guides — ⚠⚠ the governing rules on disclosure of paid and incentivised content in the United States. Free, short, and a real compliance obligation rather than a best practice.
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — alt text, captions and contrast. ⚠ A legal obligation for public institutions and a reputational one for everyone else.
• ⚠⚠ Run a real account. A student organisation, a campus department, a local non-profit. Nothing in this course substitutes for having been responsible for a calendar and a set of numbers somebody else cared about — and it is the portfolio that gets the interview.

Career Pathways

• Social media manager — ⚠ the title this course names directly, running the function for an organisation or a client.
• Social media strategist and digital marketing manager — the planning end.
• Community manager — ⚠ a distinct discipline centred on moderation, escalation and relationship rather than publishing.
• Social media analyst and social listening analyst — ⚠⚠ the best-paid entry route in this field, and the one this course's analytics and reporting content leads to most directly. Pair it with COM4301.
• Content operations and editorial management.
• Corporate communication, public relations and brand management, where social is one channel among several.
• Agency account management — ⚠ where the cross-departmental and budgeting material becomes client management.
• Public sector communication — ⚠⚠ a serious Florida application. County emergency management, sheriff's offices, school districts, health departments and municipalities all run social accounts that carry emergency and hurricane information. That is genuinely consequential communication, and it comes with public records obligations most private-sector practitioners never face.
• Florida context — Miami's bilingual and Latin American digital market, Orlando and Tampa's agency, hospitality, theme park and healthcare sectors, and the cruise lines, all of which run large consumer-facing social operations.
• ⚠⚠ Honest career framing. Entry-level social media roles are competitive and often underpaid, and the work can be demanding in ways the job description hides — always-on expectations, exposure to abuse in the inbox, and being the public face of decisions you did not make. The people who advance are the ones who move from producing content to owning strategy, budget and measurement — which is exactly the transition this course is about. Ask about after-hours expectations and moderation support in an interview; a good employer has answers.

Special Information

⚠⚠⚠ The prerequisite chain is long, and one link points at a course with a known complication

UWF requires: COM 3003 AND (COM 4561 OR COM 4566), plus completion of 75 credit hours.

Requirement	What to know
⚠⚠ COM 3003	This number carries two different subjects in Florida. Statewide it is Human Communication, a theory survey. At UWF it is Integrated Advertising and Public Relations Concepts, the gateway to its advertising and PR sequence. ⚠ The UWF reading is the one that applies here — this prerequisite is asking for the strategic communication foundation, not the theory survey. Separate guides exist for both readings and for the bare number.
COM 4561	UWF's Social Media Content Development, which itself requires COM 3471, which requires COM 2713.
⚠⚠⚠ 75 credit hours	A standing requirement, not a course. It is invisible in a degree audit's prerequisite list and it blocks registration outright.

Laid out as a sequence, the commitment is clear:

COM2713 → COM3471 → COM4561 → COM4564, with COM3003 required alongside and 75 hours completed.

⚠⚠ That is four sequential terms minimum. A student who decides in the junior year that they want this cannot get there. If the social media track interests you, start COM2713 in the first or second year.

⚠⚠⚠ Do not register for the C version — no Florida public institution offers it

Florida's catalogue also contains COM4564C, under the same title.

⚠⚠ Its only carrier is a private institution. No Florida public college or university offers COM4564C. The course described on this page is the unsuffixed COM4564, which is what UWF actually teaches.

Why this matters practically:

• ⚠ If you see COM4564C on a degree plan, an advising sheet or a transfer evaluation, check which number your institution actually offers. The suffix is not a different course; it is a different institution's filing.
• ⚠⚠ The C suffix normally signals an integrated lecture-and-laboratory course with more scheduled hours. It carries no such meaning here for a Florida public student, because no public institution uses it.
• This repository covers Florida public institutions — the Florida College System and the State University System — so a course carried only privately is outside its scope. The subject is fully covered at the unsuffixed number.

⚠ The statewide prerequisite quotes a local title, not the statewide one

Florida's statewide record gives this course's prerequisite as "COM4561 Social Media Content Development with a grade of C- or above."

⚠⚠ But COM4561's statewide title is Social Media Campaigns. Social Media Content Development is UWF's title for it. Florida's carriers of that number use three different names:

Institution	Its title for COM4561
Florida statewide	Social Media Campaigns
UWF	Social Media Content Development
UNF	Strategic Social Media
FSU	Social Media Campaigns

⚠ Two things follow. A title inside a statewide prerequisite field can be a local title, so do not use it to search another institution's catalogue — search by number. And usefully in reverse: the presence of UWF's title in the state record tells you UWF contributed this entry, which is consistent with UWF being the only public carrier.

⚠ Note also the explicit grade floor — C-minus or above — which is unusual in that it is lower than the C required for Gordon Rule courses. Take the requirement from your own catalogue; UWF's published prerequisite for this course does not restate a grade condition.

Offering Notes

Institution	Its title	Credits	Contact hours	Notes
University of West Florida (SUS)	Social Media Management	3	not published	⚠ Prerequisite: (COM 3003) AND (COM 4561 OR COM 4566); 75 credit hours completed. May not be repeated for credit. Department of Communication, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

One Florida public institution carries this number, at three credits, publishing no contact-hour figure — so the 45 hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit course with no C or L suffix.

⚠ Expect the workload to run above that. A course built on a live content calendar and a reporting cycle imposes a rhythm rather than a set of deadlines, and the analytics work tends to concentrate at the end.

⚠⚠ A single public carrier is not unusual here — 83% of the 370 live COM identifiers are carried by exactly one Florida public institution, the highest single-carrier share of the fifteen prefixes this project has measured. Write off the idea that a communication course will transfer cleanly by number; plan on sending a syllabus.

Position in the curriculum and transfer

A capstone-level course, taken last in its sequence and near the end of the degree by design. It pairs naturally with COM4301 (research methods) — ⚠ the analytics and reporting content in this course is substantially better understood by someone who has done a methods course, and the combination is what qualifies you for the analyst roles rather than the coordinator ones.

Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no Gordon Rule designation and no general-education category, and marks it for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit — ⚠ boilerplate across the whole prefix.

⚠⚠ Transfer realistically: with one public carrier and a four-course prerequisite chain, this course is unlikely to be replicated elsewhere as a package. Send the syllabus, the strategy deliverable and the metric report — for this subject the work is far more persuasive than the transcript line.

AI Integration

⚠⚠⚠ This is the course in the communication curriculum where generative tools have already changed the job most, and a student deserves a direct account rather than a caution.

What has actually changed. Content production — the drafting of posts, captions, variations for different platforms, first-pass imagery — has become fast and cheap. ⚠ Social media teams use these tools routinely and openly, and a graduate who cannot will be at a disadvantage. Scheduling platforms have built them in. This is settled practice, not a debate.

⚠⚠ The career consequence, stated plainly: the part of this field that automated first is the part most entry-level applicants offer. "I can write good posts" is a weaker proposition than it was. The parts that did not automate are exactly the ones this course teaches — strategy tied to organisational objectives, budget ownership, cross-departmental negotiation, crisis judgement, and reporting to executives who will ask follow-up questions. That is a reason to take this course seriously, not a reason for gloom.

Where the tools genuinely help in the work: generating content variations to test; drafting a first pass at a calendar; summarising a month of comments into themes; producing the boilerplate sections of a report; and ⚠ drafting response templates for the community management protocol, which is legitimate and saves real time.

⚠⚠ Four failure modes, each specific to this job rather than general.

• ⚠⚠⚠ Analytics interpretation is where a wrong answer costs most. A model will confidently explain a metric — and platform metrics are defined differently on each platform, are redefined without notice, and frequently do not mean what their names suggest. An "impression" is not the same thing on two platforms. Go to the platform's own current documentation, and say in your report which definition you used. A metric report built on a misunderstood definition is worse than no report, because the executive will act on it.
• Crisis is a judgement call with a clock on it. ⚠ Deciding to pause the calendar, deciding whether the organisation should speak, and deciding what tone will not make it worse — these depend on context a model does not have and on accountability it cannot hold. Crisis is also precisely when an off-tone automated post does maximum damage: have a documented human pause procedure, and know who can trigger it at 11pm.
• ⚠⚠ Disclosure is a legal obligation. The FTC Endorsement Guides govern disclosure of paid and incentivised content, and organisations are increasingly expected to disclose synthetic content as well. Platforms are adding their own labelling requirements. This is compliance, and the liability sits with the organisation.
• Brand voice converges. ⚠ Generated copy drifts toward a recognisable register, and an account that reads that way stops sounding like anyone. Voice is the asset a social media function is actually maintaining.

⚠ And a governance point that belongs to this course rather than any other: as a manager you will be the person who sets the policy. Which tools the team may use, on what content, with what review, with what disclosure, and what never goes near an external system — customer data, unreleased announcements, legal matters, anything involving an identifiable individual. Writing that policy is a reasonable exercise for this course and a reasonable thing to have a view on in an interview.