More Effective Training with Social Media

It is no secret that the popularity of social media has a major impact on almost every aspect of daily life – from business and politics to education and culture.

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Using social media is an easy and affordable way to make your training more interesting and engaging. Instead of investing in new technologies, you can use the tools your learners already use.

Social media strategies you can use in your training

eLearning has many successful strategies, but online courses are often not social and collaborative enough, unlike face-to-face training. To change this, you can use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They will make your training more engaging and will appeal to more learners.

Before the course starts:

Change management. Create buzz and excitement around your course. Use social networks to send your learners a marketing message about the upcoming training. This will make your new course more popular even before it has started.

Personalized learning. Similar to how Amazon and Netflix make recommendations to their users based on their interests, you can tailor your training to the individual needs of learners.

Pre-course preparation. Send materials or direct learners to a YouTube video before the course begins. Send the documents through tools such as Slack, Google Docs, or Dropbox.

During the course:

Create a community. Increase collaboration among learners by creating learner communities. Use familiar tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

Encourage participation. Use gamification elements such as badges and leaderboards in your training to encourage friendly competition and increase learner engagement. Take a cue from sites like Udemy and organize online Q&A sessions or discussion panels. Encourage participants to tweet, blog, or share what they are learning.

Additional content. Direct learners to external activities and materials that support the achievement of learning objectives. Take examples from relevant sites or use YouTube videos.

After the course ends:

Feedback. Ask learners to rate and recommend your course. Collect survey data and share the results with participants.

Follow-up actions. Assign post-course activities, provide support after the course ends, and encourage self-development. Use social networks to ask how learners have applied the new knowledge in practice.

Ongoing collaboration. Encourage training participants to continue exchanging ideas, resources, and best practices. Use Facebook groups, Twitter, wikis, blogs, and other useful tools that promote the ongoing exchange of information.

Conclusion

A large part of modern people turn to social media when they need to find answers or solutions.

Many social networks are free or available for a minimal fee. And since learners already use these tools, the barriers to their use in the training process are easy to overcome.

Creative use of social media can increase learner engagement and their cooperation with minimal resource investment.

We can help you create training. Contact us at tel.: +359 878 685 304, e-mail: office@nitbg.com.