When discussing your business’ marketing strategy, training your team on the benefits and tactics of social media marketing and their proper usage isn’t a bad idea.
Although you may not initially think it, social media as it stands today is one of the largest hubs for business marketing and houses a plethora of fresh business opportunities. Regardless of whether you’re the brains behind an innovative SME or the founder of a large corporate conglomerate, continually educating yourself and your team on the proper usage of social is critical to securing your position as a forward-thinking brand.
11 reasons for social training
If you don’t believe me? Here are 11 reasons why investing in social media training can benefit your business or brand.
1 – Strengthen your brand’s presence online.
Let’s face it, social media has split the business world in two – businesses either have a social presence or they don’t. It’s worth noting that getting social says a lot about you and your business. As a business maintaining a professional and thought-out social presence, you’re actively demonstrating to your clients that you’re both adaptable and forward-facing – typical traits of an industry thought leader. So clients are more inclined to invest in and be associated with your brand, product or service. Being trained in how to create this from the start is the icing on the cake.
2 – Remain current within your industry.
Today industry is fast-paced, so it’s important for you and your team to keep up! A properly managed social presence acts as a reminder to existing or potential clients that you’re on top of your game. Training teams on content creation and to harness the social analytics, will enable your business to get the most out of social media from the outset. Therefore, all the work you put into sharing industry and company news, recent success stories and engaging with the latest trends, is far more likely to provoke a strong following and those spikes in engagement we all crave.
3 – Acquire new customers!
Expanding your business into the social stratosphere opens the door to a new pool of custom, who otherwise may not have found you! Therefore, it’s important you as a business engage and interact with this new traffic in the most effective way possible. But this isn’t as easy as it sounds! No company wants to lose potential clients because of simple mistakes made in the heat of the moment. Knowing the ins and outs of each social platform as well as the major dos and don’ts makes getting it right the first time a whole lot easier.
4 – Increased (CTRs) click-through rates.
Think of social media as an ‘add on’ working in tandem with your website to drive traffic and increase sales. It’s common knowledge that today’s consumers favour both speed and ease online, so using your social platforms to shout CONVENIENCE isn’t a bad idea. This could be as simple as substituting the classic call-to-action ‘visit our website for more information’ for a direct link to a product page. Not only do strategies like this make your social content more consumer-friendly, but they also act as a tool to get consumers viewing pages on your website. Hence why these and other methods are well-worth learning about!
5 – Polished online communication
Communication sits at the heart of any successful business and is just as important online as it is in person – if not more! Over social media, maintaining a strong style and tone of voice is key to standing out from the crowd, especially when your competitors are trying to push a similar product or service. A distinguished brand voice is what gives your business a personality and will encourage people to continually engage with your content. Learning exactly how to maintain this voice is essential.
6 – Demonstrate your expertise.
It’s pointless being the industry experts and producing great social content to shout about it, if you’re not been recognized by potential clients or other industry players! To do so, having a thorough understanding of each social platform and how to get the most out of them is key. Once applied, such knowledge can prove immensely powerful in growing a company’s social influence, reach and engagement.
7 – Unlock the power of data!
Data is the driving force behind today’s marketing and has quickly become a powerful business asset. The more data a business has, the easier it can identify trends and tailor its practices to best enhance its performance. Apply such knowledge to social, and businesses can build up a detailed customer profile and align their marketing practices with current trends. As a direct result, it’s far easier to strategically get posts under the nose of the right people and increase the chances of engagement and conversions.
8 – No more social media hiccups.
When talking social media, you’ll often hear the phrase ‘public domain’. In short, this is a technical way of saying that content is visual to anyone online, be they a client, customer or rival company. While this is great for plugging your company’s achievements and advertising a product or service, it does mean that if something incorrect, or worse inappropriate, finds its way online that these same people may come across it. Train your team in the ethics of social media and this is far less likely to happen!
9 – Increase employee engagement.
Did you know that 83 percent of the adult population are active on at least one social media account? Ask around your team and chances are many of them have a personal social media page, with its own network of loyal followers. With the proper social media training, you can create the content that’ll get these networks talking about your business and sharing your achievements – employee profiles are a great example.
10 – Save time.
Education is key to establishing rapid growth over social. Choose to go about it uneducated and you run the risk of wasting more money, time and effort targeting your content at the wrong audience. To perform best over social, you must be aware of your target consumers and how to tailor your content to best prompt engagement. If you don’t have time to waste, then investing in training should be a high priority.
11 – An intuitive team.
Your team is what holds your business together, so investing in their education makes perfect sense. By training them in the proper use of social media, you’re investing in their self-development as well as your business. Moreover, training everyone in the usage of social media increases understanding across your business and ensures that everyone is aware of what your marketing department does and how it functions. Awareness that can ease understanding between departments and increase productivity within your business in the long run.
So, now that you understand the benefits of social media training for your team and business, get in contact with us today and we will do our best to take you on your journey to better content.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
