School teachers have a lot in common with learning and development professionals. They are both charged with the difficult job of upskilling their pupils. Both introduce new ideas and engage their learners in applying these lessons. Unlike school teachers, though, L&D facilitators can’t slip homework assignments into their executives’ brief cases. To keep the learning alive, development professionals can turn to something else: social media.

Every day, people log in to their social accounts to connect with friends, download their daily news and keep themselves entertained. Capitalizing on the power of social media opens up a world of development possibilities. At Insights, we’ve built a social strategy that gets learning out of the classroom and into the “social streets.”

We’re focused on three key elements: learning, community and personality. 

Learning

“The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action,” said philosopher Herbert Spencer. After a development experience, we don’t want to leave learners without support to put their learning into action. We use social media to continue the learning journey by posting new content multiple times a week prompting employees to reflect and act on their learning experiences. The content in these posts can spur learners to continue previous conversations, revisit their learning plans and keep their growth ambitions top of mind. One of the main goals is to ensure that the posts support the lessons that were covered in the workshop environment, while also helping learners look at the same ideas in new and applicable ways.

Community

Developing a social media community around learning topics is a great way to encourage learners to support each other. Our second priority in our L&D social strategy is to create a digital environment that supports all types of learners authentically and transparently. For the most part, we set the stage and let the community govern itself. This strategy ensures that the community is addressing members’ needs and evolving organically. 

We take community very seriously and appreciate the trust our social media followers place in us. We aim to provide new learning content along with real-time responses to questions. We also designate a special customer of the month to let our followers know that we appreciate them.

Personality 

Helping people understand themselves and others is what we do, so expressing our company personality comes naturally. Social channels are great avenues to communicate who we are as individuals as well as a collective organization. Additionally, by showing our company personality in a digital space, we can attract new employees, supporting our robust recruitment strategy. Personality-centric content means anything from photos of our staff to inspirational quotes and just about everything in between.

As Insights looks to social media to grow our employer and company brands, we have to make sure we do it in a way that is true to who we are. In many ways, social media allows us to create a window for our followers to get to know us and what we care about. As Insights continues to grow as a global business, we want to be sure that our social content attracts those who will like us for who we are, what we do and how we do it.

We’ve worked hard to create a strategy that is rooted in a couple of simple ideas: (1) that new learning must be embedded in our daily lives to stick, and (2) that people’s daily lives are increasingly influenced by digital media. By connecting these ideas, we enable professional development that is more socially-minded and social content that is more fulfilling.

Face-to-face learning interventions are great for many reasons, but the learning and development industry is starting to lean more on learning outside of the classroom. Development professionals must be agile and resilient in creating learning opportunities that can extend beyond the classroom. When we take these steps, a world of inspired, strategic and viral possibilities opens up for our learners and our businesses.

Fiona Lackenby is the creative services manager at Insights Learning and Development, where she supports the organization’s mission of changing the world of work, by building the organization’s digital landscape and enabling the development of creative content that supports real learning and real conversations, in real-time.