Most of us engage personally with social media every day. But do you leverage social media to encourage learning and collaboration in your organization?

For learning and development (L&D) professionals, marketing isn’t typically a necessary skill. But let’s look at four main things L&D professionals can learn from social media marketing:

1. Leverage Your Influencers

Social media influencers can play an enormous role in the success (or failure) of brands and their products. For example, after Kylie Jenner tweeted that she no longer used Snapchat – it lost $1.3 billion. So, don’t underestimate the power of social media influencers.

L&D has its own influencers. They’re the ones who regularly engage with your content, promote your learning initiatives, and provide you with impressive evaluation data. But are you taking advantage of these internal influencers?

Your internal influencers can be an effective resource to engage others. They can help spread good news and build curiosity and excitement that encourages other employees to participate.

Tip: Leverage your L&D influencers to promote your training content.

2. Leverage Engagement

The main goal of social media is engagement and interaction. Brands share interesting content, regularly engage with their audience, and encourage followers to tag, comment, and share their content.

In L&D, we communicate with our employees when we have a training program to promote. But how can we keep our learners engaged all the time?

Find ways to interact with your employees – even when there isn’t a new course to advertise. How can you accomplish this? Partner with functional departments, attend meetings, and be part of the team. You’ll learn more about what your learners need when you work closely and get to know them.

Tip: Engage with employees frequently – out of sight is out of mind.

3. Balance Creation and Curation

There is often a mix of creation and curation in social media. Someone creates fresh content – then piggy-backs onto great content and reshares it (possibly making it “go viral”). Popular social media brands have discovered the value of sharing important content from other platforms to keep their audience engaged.

Unfortunately, many L&D professionals think they need to reinvent the wheel and create their own content in-house. However, content curation is just as credible and valuable.

According to Training Industry, content curation is the process of sorting through massive amounts of web content and presenting it in an organized and helpful format. Someone who performs this activity is known as a content curator.

Tip: Find a balance between creation and curation. Create where you can add the most value – and curate the rest.

4. Data

Without question, data has helped make social media successful. First, brands take advantage of the data available within social media platforms to find and target the people who are most likely to engage with their content. Then they use the data to measure the success of their ad campaigns through metrics. Finally, they can make adjustments as needed to get the traffic they want.

In L&D, data and analytics are vital to track and measure what your learners need from you and your team. If you aren’t aligning your L&D strategy to data and metrics, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to understand and engage with your audience.

Tip: Use data to measure the success of your learning initiatives or strategy – from identifying a need to evaluating a training program.

Final Thoughts

As L&D professionals, we can leverage the successes of social media in our learning initiatives and strategies. So, engage with your internal influencers to build interest and excitement. Connect with your employees and get to know their needs. Concentrate on curation and create where you can add value. Finally, use the data to measure the success of your training programs – and make adjustments as needed.

Impact Group Training is located in Bryan/College Station, but we can work with you and deliver your training materials worldwide. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help you use social media to impact your next training program.