Why do we need social media training?
As we head into 2024, the latest stats show that globally a staggering 517 billion people are using social media. This mammoth number is estimated to grow by about 300 million users in 2024. One thing is clear, the need for your business, whatever the industry or sector, to be on social media cannot be underestimated!
While most businesses understand that it’s essential for them to have a social media presence, choosing the right social platform that can deliver a positive return on investment for your business is another matter altogether.
In the past, if an organisation felt that a platform wasn’t contributing to its social or business goals, it didn’t do much about it. Hootsuite’s Social Trends 2024 report has revealed that marketers are now getting serious about understanding what platforms work best for them and which ones don’t. In Hootsuite’s report, for example, data suggests that 50% of respondents don’t feel confident that their TikTok channel will deliver a positive return on investment. 
Following the recession and ongoing recovery from the pandemic, we’ve noticed an increase in demand for social media training support for in-house teams. We understand budgets can be tight, and that’s why our social media training program is available to enhance the skills of your in-house teams, ensuring they feel confident in delivering a social strategy across a variety of platforms.
Our social media training sessions are bespoke and are always created with your objectives in mind, but for the purpose of this piece, we’re going to focus on four core elements that we believe should be part of any overarching social media strategy.
Adhering to social media best practices
Success on social is defined by the quality of content shared and how this adheres to platform algorithms. It determines who views your content, how valuable it is and who engages with it. Our engaging training sessions go into essential detail on ever-evolving social media best practices, including post themes & formats, posting frequency & timings, and the importance of a channel-first approach.
Measuring social media engagement
There’s no point in executing social media strategies or creating amazing content if you’re not going to report on performance. Regular analysis is essential, to test and learn and tweak your strategies according to what is proving successful with your audiences. Ultimately being able to understand social media metrics is essential. As part of our bespoke training sessions, we’ll give you the tools you need to build and manage a bespoke social media metrics framework that encompasses meaningful quantitative and qualitative data.
Social media community management
The importance of building social media communities cannot be underestimated, they are your army of brand advocates, ready to engage with your content, build hype around new product or service launches and organically attract new visitors/followers to your platform.
As Sprout Social suggests, social media community management can be identified as the process of engaging audiences across social media networks to increase brand loyalty and grow authentic connections. Across both B2C and B2B audiences, more so B2C audiences, you get a front-row seat to your audience’s preferences, pain points and feedback. This is vital customer feedback that can help steer and guide a business’ growth strategy.
Social media crisis management
A social media storm can blow up in seconds. Judgements are formed immediately and before you know it, the narrative can quickly spiral out of control. A social media crisis management strategy should be seen as a living and breathing being that is regularly reviewed and updated.
As the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) suggests, it shouldn’t need a crisis to break out across social for there to be a need for a crisis management strategy. Planning ahead and identifying potential future issues can help mitigate reputation damage ahead of time.
Having access to or working with an agency that can access social media listening tools is advantageous and can give you the opportunity to track online conversations, measure and track brand sentiment and identify the most important voices with the biggest influence.
Social media training services provide an opportunity for in-house teams to enhance their skills and boost confidence across platforms that in the past haven’t performed as well as they could. Our team of social media specialists is ready to support and answer any questions you might have about social media training.