How To Use Social Media For Successful Learning And Development

5 Ways To Use Social Media For L&D
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Summary: The modern workforce in any organization today mostly consists of individuals who have been using social media for at least a decade or so, and as a result, their daily habits, communication style, as well as interests have been affected by it.

5 Ways To Use Social Media For L&D

Social media is already the major source of most of the information these modern individuals consume on a daily basis, which is why it is a great idea to leverage it for better and more successful L&D. A lot of corporate organizations already use social media as a means to either train their employees, help them communicate better with each other, or to help them find material relevant to their training. But for those that are not, in this article, we’ll discuss a few ways how organizations can use social media for the better Learning and Development of their employees.

1. Onboarding

Facebook Live is a live-streaming platform which can be used to onboard new hires before they even set foot in the organization. It can be used to give the new hires a video tour of the whole organization, introduce them to the stakeholders of the organization, to their superiors as well as their co-workers, to show them the daily routine at the organization, and a lot more, depending upon how the organization chooses to use the live-streaming service.

2. Group Messaging

As mentioned before, communication is very important between coworkers in an organization. Facebook Messenger is an application which is found on every individual's smartphone, which can be used to create groups dedicated to L&D where learners can discuss the courses they took, any specific points about their training, share files or images related to training, or just get to know other coworkers taking the same courses as them. Facebook Messenger can be a great virtual meeting space for employees interested in discussing their training and a tool to boost team-building as well as collaborative learning. And not just Facebook Messenger, but WhatsApp and LinkedIn have a group feature too, which can be used in a similar fashion.

3. Sharing Knowledge And Ideas

To truly create a culture of knowledge sharing in the organization, employees need to be encouraged to use all popular social media platforms to share ideas, and not just Facebook, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. Pinterest and Tumblr are popular platforms which can be used to post text, photos, videos, links as well as follow blogs related to training or training topics, which increases engagement and gives learners one accessible location to seek out content relevant to their training and development. It also motivates the learners to actually look for good content related to their training and post it, which augments learning.

4. Identify Important Topics And Concepts

Encourage the use of Twitter hashtags to make it easier for learners to find tweets concerning the topics and concepts they’re looking for. Twitter is one of the holy trinity of the most popular social media for L&D (the other two being Facebook and LinkedIn) and should be used freely by employees/learners to tweet about their training, post-training videos, infographics, and images, as well as the key takeaways from every course they take.

5. Get Feedback About Courses From Employees

Digital learning courses are getting increasingly learner-centric, which is a good thing, as it is the learners after all which are the most affected by the courses. Get feedback from the learners/employees about whether they liked the course or not, what is it they liked or disliked and what would they like to change about the course is important, as it allows the organization to collect valuable data that can be used to improve courses. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have a poll option that can be used to collect feedback.

6. Build Buzz Around New Courses

Social media can and should be used to market the digital learning courses internally by sending posts and notifications to employees/learners about new and upcoming courses on the organization’s learning portal or app. Don’t forget to include links that allow the learners to go directly to the course.

L&D And Social Media

Learning and Development is a field that is inextricably linked to humans and technology. Thus, with advancing technology and consequently, changing human behavior with respect to that technology, L&D must always be on the move to incorporate said technological advancements into itself to help humans learn better. Social media has been around for a long time, and if your organization isn’t using it to its full potential, you’re sadly doing yourself a big disservice. It won’t take much to change that, so do it now!

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