Every organisation will have a few different roles that need to be fulfilled in order to successfully carry out the social media function in the business. It is important to decide on your resources from the outset and define who needs to be trained; and what skills and knowledge they need.

Your business social media training needs will change over time, so just remember to introduce a training calendar that ensures your staff are regularly trained over time. Social media changes frequently as you know, and new channels start up all the time. So your staff need to know, which are the ones to pay attention to, and which are not and then how to grab those opportunities when they do come up.

Start at the beginning…

In the beginning you may well only have one person that takes on the overall co-ordinating role for social media. However it is a very collaborative strategy so you’ll find that you will have different people across the organisation that will be helping to contribute towards the strategy. They could be contributing by way of:

• sourcing content,
• creating content,
• managing it,
• lead management,
• images and pictures,
• client stories,
• testimonials, or even
• community management.

It’s really key to understand and identify who all those individual are who will need the training. Because they all need to work out how they are the supportive cogs within the larger wheel.

Who’s involved in actually contributing to your social media strategy? Which skills or knowledge do they need to help facilitate the smooth running of your social media function?

Who are the people that need training?

In my experience, from training my clients, some of the examples of who you might need to train could be coming from the following areas.

• Sales and account management: remember that they are very much customer based, they maintain the relationships with your customers and are the first port of call for your customers, so they really need to understand what is going on in social media, and even be helping contribute to the content.
• Business development people: They need to be able to have their ears on the ground and spot opportunities, and also to stay ahead of your competitors. One of the ways to do that, is to be mastering platforms, like LinkedIn, and other professional networking social media platforms.
• Customer support team: They already are communicating via telephone, email, and possibly even face to face with your customers. They also need to cover channels like Facebook and twitter, for customer enquiries, questions, or complaints.
• Public relations and marketing department: While social media for many, might seem like it sits really comfortably with the marketing department, this doesn’t automatically mean that marketing people are naturally skilled at social media. It can be a similar skills set but it needs some really specific people-based skills.
• Senior management and director level: Now, this is an important bunch that you really need to focus on quite early on in your strategy, because social media is such a big resource cost for businesses. If it’s not managed right, it can be a strain on your existing staff who will be lumbered with an “extra task” of social media, but actually don’t focus on it holistically.It’s essential to get the buy in from your senior management and your directors in order to ensure that you are budgeting for the necessary resourcing (money, time, people). Something else to allow for: show how the function of social media is going to grow and mature over time. This will map what kind of resources you are going to need, in order to help facilitate that growth over the longer term.

I have been working with lots of micro, small, and larger firms to create social media teams that function really well together. I’ve trained client staff in sales, customer support, and marketing.

Identifying who needs to be trained really does depend on the type of organisation and how the structure of the organisation works. You really need to understand people, how they work together, how they function in groups, what your technology is like, and what are the communication channels at the moment that are in place. And the most important thing is: are you putting the right people in the right roles.

If you would like a conversation about your organisation, feel to free to get in contact or comment below.

Please do give me your feedback, I would love to hear from you, and, possibly what you would like to hear out of a future podcast. You can hear the podcast for this by clicking here the player at the top of this post.