Working. Leaking. Missing. Score your business page in eight minutes

One hundred and ten people registered. Fifty-nine were in the room at four o’clock. The number I keep coming back to is neither of those — it is that when we reached six, the room was still there.

On Tuesday 1 September we ran our free masterclass and open day. Two hours is a long time to hold anybody’s attention on a Zoom call on a Tuesday afternoon, and I had prepared myself to watch the list thin out after the first thirty minutes. It did not.

I want to tell you what we did with those two hours, because a good deal of it is useful to you whether or not you ever enrol with us. And I want to tell you what happens next, because there is a deadline attached to it and it is close.

We started by taking the word “posting” away

Most digital marketing training in this region begins with a platform. Open Meta Business Suite, here is where the button is, now go and post.

We began somewhere else — with the argument that digital marketing is not posting at all. It is a system that produces a business result, and posting is one part of one stage of it.

1. Positioning — who exactly should care?
2. Content — what should we say?
3. Distribution — how do they actually see it?
4. Capture and conversion — what happens after someone becomes interested?
5. Measurement — did anything valuable happen?

That framing does two jobs at once, which is why we opened with it. If you want a career in this work, it tells you what to stop being: the person who can post. If you run a business, it tells you what you are actually buying when you hire somebody, and why “can you manage our page” is the wrong first question.

Then we took a real business page apart in front of everybody

This is the part of the session I would send you to if you only had twenty minutes.

We put a real business page on the screen and scored it against those five stages, using three words and nothing more:

That is the entire diagnostic. Positioning — working, leaking or missing? Content — working, leaking or missing? Down the five. No jargon, no scoring matrix, no software. Three words, five stages, and within about eight minutes you can see precisely where a business is losing attention it has already paid for.

Then we put the clock on and handed it over. Five minutes, score your own page, put your weakest stage in the chat.

What came back in that chat is the most interesting data of the whole afternoon. Barely anyone wrote content. The chat filled up with capture and measurement — the two stages either side of the noise. People were producing plenty. They simply had no route from interest to sale, and no way of proving whether any of it had worked.

Do that exercise this week on a page you own or know well. Be honest about which parts are missing rather than merely leaking. It is worth more than the two hours were.

Why we put businesses and job seekers in the same room

We did something at this masterclass that open days do not usually do. We invited the people looking for work and the people doing the hiring, and sat them in front of the same material.

That decision comes from our own numbers. Over five months we tracked thirty-two hiring requests from businesses looking for a skilled digital marketer.

• 32 hiring requests from businesses in five months
• 8 roles actually filled
• 24 businesses left with nobody to hire
• 37.5% told us plainly the role stayed open for lack of the skills

Meanwhile youth unemployment in Uganda sits at 17.9 per cent for ages 15 to 24, and 89.2 per cent of all employment is informal. These young people are not digitally illiterate. They are on these platforms every day. What is missing is the layer between using a platform and being paid to run one.

You do not fix that by training people behind a closed door. So we opened it — and by six o’clock I think both groups had understood that they are two halves of one problem.

What we told the room we do not have

We spent the last stretch showing the school as it is. The eight modules and what you walk out of each one holding. How a class actually runs — 45 minutes of concept, 60 minutes of hands-on demo, 45 minutes of questions and the assignment, 30 minutes of reflection. Assignments set on real brands with real owners, which is the only reason they become a portfolio. Assessment on the work, not an exam.

Faisal, Kenneth and Isaac taught alongside me, and Emmanuel held the whole thing together. Every one of them is doing this work for paying clients right now. That is the requirement to teach here.

Two people in the room won copies of Make Social Media Work for You. If that was you and you have not claimed it, message us.

Watch it yourself

The full session is now public. We are not keeping it for the people who happened to be free on a Tuesday afternoon.

The full two hours. If you are short of time, go to the live page audit — the stretch where we take a real business apart against the five stages. The slides and materials are here — yours to keep and yours to share.

And if you want to come the whole way

If you were going to think about it, think about it this week rather than next.

And if you are still deciding, message me. I answer these myself, including the awkward questions about money. Especially those.