How to Scale Social Media Learning for Your Employees

LinkedIn data shows that employee-generated content receives 8x more engagement than content that brands share. As we’ve previously covered, social media is no longer a ‘cute idea’ but a powerful driver of real business results.

Many companies are now aware of the results that social media can bring and investing in social media learning programs. But they don’t just want employees to share or post content, but to engage authentically, generate their own content, and become thought leaders themselves.

So, businesses invest in smaller programs and get great results, but then wonder how they can replicate that success to make everyone more active or turn them into thought leaders or influential experts.

In a recent LinkedIn Live, myTribe Product Manager Sophie Nicolay Gwin and Tribal CRO Felipe Torres discussed what companies can do to scale their social media learning. Listen to the recording on our podcast, or read on for the key takeaways.

Common Challenges Scaling Social Media Learning

Companies often have hundreds – if not thousands – of global employees, with many working remotely or hybrid. These models create logistical challenges when it comes to organising training.

Many companies also don’t have in-house expertise or their programs aren’t scalable, so they need external support. And employees have different social media experience levels, creating further training challenges.

Knowing what to report, where, and when, can also present its own challenges.

The Social Media Mountain

At the top of the social media mountain, you have employees who already generate their own content.

At the base are employees who aren’t yet active, haven’t grown their network, or lack confidence.

Companies must find a way to train employees with different skill, confidence, and motivation levels.

If posting on social media isn’t part of someone’s job, they may feel like it isn’t something they want or need to do. Companies need to find ways to show the value of social media to everyone, which will help change habits and behaviours.

Establishing Your Current Social Media Landscape

As well as having different motivators, people learn in different ways. And not everyone will want to be an influencer, nor should we expect them to be – that isn’t the goal.

At Tribal we work with customers to find out where they sit on the Social Maturity Model and use this to build employees’ confidence on social media alongside promoting the company.

Tribal Impact Social Media Maturity Matrix

It’s important to step back and analyse the business’s current social media landscape.

Look at things like:

How many employees are active on LinkedIn?
How many of those are executives?
How many are sales and marketing people?
What’s the snapshot of the organisation today? What’s the aim for 6 months’ time? A year?

Knowing these things will help you identify gaps and work out how best to engage these groups. You can then create meaningful training for them that meets them at their current level of social media maturity.

How to Measure Social Media Success

Each training comes with its own metrics for measuring how something works and if it’s successful.

When we do smaller training with some of our customers, and we can report on individual employees’ levels of social maturity, we can measure their improvement over time and the wider factors for the company, such as:

Did this program increase pipeline or leads?
Did it lead to more engagement?
Did it lead to more people at an event?

How to Get More from Social Media Learning

Social media enablement is often seen as a tick-box exercise, but this just doesn’t work. Social media learning isn’t about social media awareness or social media policy dos and don’ts.

Businesses need to make employees want to take part. That’s why multimedia training is so important. Employees won’t feel like they’re a part of something if they just need to keep clicking through to confirm they’ve completed a training.

Employees need to learn practically to change their habits. It’s not until they do it that they see the rewards.

An Alternative to Webinar Training

Small, bite-sized courses, where employees can learn a specific skill or topic – like how to take great mobile photos – create specific habits and are more easily achieved.

Not having a prescribed path means employees can dip in and out and choose what they want to learn more about.

Meeting people where they are today means that tomorrow, they can do a little more. Bite-sized programs help them creep up the mountain, making it less daunting and showing them success sooner.

How to Support Top Performers

Once you have everyone on the same program, in the same learning framework, you can see things like how many people are taking part and how many are producing content. Then show how the learning you provide is helping them evolve.

You can also tap into the groups who are ready for more, for instance, who’s ready for training on ways to create long-form content.

You can then support your top performers and share their success stories for people to emulate.

Creating Content for Different Regions and Learning Styles

Different regions will require different approaches, so have a clear setup that you can incorporate different languages into in the future. People always learn faster if they can learn in their native language.

People also have different learning styles.

Relevant E-Learning modules could be where they go through the activities, behavioural change, or practical tasks before a webinar.

Then, in the webinar, you could focus on specific issues or have it as more of a discussion, rather than doing practical things that can easily be self-paced.

Sometimes a webinar can also offer the reassurance that you’re on the right track.

For a lot of these topics, it can be about confidence. Something might seem obvious once you know it, but you need to be told first. A webinar allows employees to ask a little bit more and get some reassurance.

Scalable, Dynamic Social Media Learning

Any training you offer has to be dynamic and easy to adapt to platform changes, trends, and behaviours.

Resist the temptation to create more training to solve problems. Instead, tailor it to what your employees need and meet them where they’re at.

If you’d like help with scaling your social media learning, get in touch to discover how our scalable learning platform can help you.