Social media is now well into its second decade as a prominent part of many marketing campaigns, and it only grows more expansive each year. If you have your team planning to use social media for your upcoming marketing efforts, are you sure they know everything necessary?

Posting content there might sound easy enough. However, you need more education on details about when you post content. Also, it’s not always about posting content and hoping everyone clicks your links.

Take a look at five benefits of social training to make these issues more clear for your team.

1. Employees Learn Proper Social Media Policies

Everyone in your company is going to use social media for different purposes. Many of them are perhaps using it already for personal reasons in the workplace.

If they’ve never used it for business, you need to train them to adhere to your business’s own policies so employees don’t say or do something regretful.

Separating personal use with business use may become a giant leap for some of your workers. While maybe they can say whatever they want under their own account names, you probably can’t allow that under your company handle.

They’ll also know what the best approaches are to starting conversations or finding leads if using it for sales.

2. Training Helps Build a Strategic Plan for Your Company

The way your employees approach social media can work as a guidepost for the future of your company’s reputation. Just one social post not adhering to your company vision could throw everything off.

Group training is important here so your team are all on the same page about your policies. Having a strategic plan set on how you’ll use social media (especially on a channel where your main demographics are) will keep your reputation intact through the coming decade.

3. You Can Get Some Social Media Training for Free

Numerous online courses are available for free to help your team learn social media skills. Coursera is one good source of free training, including one course provided there through Northwestern University.

Other sources include Social Media Quickstarter 101 through Constant Contact, giving you convenient videos to watch at any time. You can even find free courses on specific categories, like training for understanding social media analytics.

A few other courses hone in on creating a social media monitoring plan. Hubspot offers a free course on content creation to learn about what content works the best when posted on popular social channels.

4. Keeping Up With Constant Social Media Changes

Free or low-cost training options can work in some circumstances. To truly keep up with social media changes, though, you’ll want to take part in recurring workshops.

Doing so helps you keep up with the myriad social changes occurring each year. You’ll also want to know about new ideas being implemented on social channels to keep your marketing campaigns fresh.

Despite some of this information being available on different websites, having recurring training through a workshop keeps it all consolidated in one place so your entire team knows about the latest.

5. Learning How to Engage With People on Social Media

Starting conversations are just as important on social media as posting content manually or through automation.

To truly grow business relationships, conversations are going to have to occur to generate leads. Training will help your employees know how to properly approach social conversations so it doesn’t look pushy.

Your team can learn how to do hashtag searches on places like Twitter to monitor conversations about your industry before starting a discussion.

Learn about my own workshops on marketing training.