It is hard to imagine a life without social media these days. We usually use social networking to get, for lack of a better word, social. Every day, millions of people around the world use social media platforms to stay connected and informed about worldwide events and news, hold meetings, share experiences, and discover new activities and people. However, in recent years, social media has emerged as a prominent tool for enhancing personal and professional development in terms of learning.
Many organizations have incorporated social media into their marketing and communication strategies to identify global trends and use them to their advantage quickly. Similarly, many businesses are leveraging the potential of Learning Management Systems (LMS), which can integrate with social media platforms, to make corporate training more interactive, engaging, and enjoyable for their employees.
Let’s explore the concept of integrating an LMS with social media platforms in more detail to understand how it can be a useful strategy for your organization.
What Is Social Media Integration?
From enabling us to share updates with distant family and friends to facilitating donations to our favorite causes, social media is completely ingrained in our daily lives. And when your LMS is integrated with your social networks, you can use the information gleaned from your networks to make informed eLearning business decisions.
For example, you can keep track of what your employees are talking about or interested in, such as trending topics, to generate ideas for future course offerings. Twitter and LinkedIn are popular social networks with large user bases that can provide valuable context for your learning business.
Let’s look at a few ways in which the integration of social media and LMS can benefit organizations:
Interactive Learning
When social media is integrated with an LMS, the administrator can generate interest-based surveys, polls, and discussion forums to engage learners and trainers and exchange information.
Discussion forums are among the most common tools LMSs use for social learning. Learners can share and comment, communicate, post queries, get answers, and share information in general. Learners can also form their own communities to share their skills and knowledge.
Measurable Analytics
Learning has become much easier since the advent of the internet and smartphones. When your LMS is perfectly integrated with social media, it offers your employees can get support from subject matter experts (SMEs). SMEs can help employees by addressing their immediate needs and concerns. This helps employees by promoting better comprehension and retention.
Furthermore, learning programs that use the Learning Record Store (LRS) have a greater capacity to store data about your learner’s experience by evaluating their social media patterns and habits. Such analytics can help you customize your learning program to your employees’ and organization’s needs. Consequently, you’ll be able to attract and retain the best candidates while improving employee skills and productivity.
Positive Social Media Word-Of-Mouth
Everyone enjoys sharing their accomplishments, especially on social media, and the same holds true for positive experiences they have had with your course. In other words, with social media and LMS integration, you can essentially power your own social media marketing efforts with user-generated content. Learners can be encouraged to share positive news and instances about your course with their social circles. This means that your business can use such social media posts as testimonials to publicize your training programs in front of your target audience and establish credibility with them in the most organic way.
Social Media Aids in the Dissemination of Critical Information
Another significant advantage of using social media with eLearning is that it provides an easy and quick way to contact people. For example, if an instructor or learner wants to share their latest updates on a particular topic, they can do so through a Facebook post or an Instagram story.
This will only take a few minutes. Similarly, instructors can also utilize Instagram Live and Facebook Live to share educational content with learners and respond to their questions in real-time.
Compounded Learning
You can get employees to learn in various ways by incorporating social learning. You can use audio, video, and infographics with the help of venngage infographic maker to create variety and distribute it via social media. By doing so, learning becomes more engaging and sharable. As a result, everyone will enjoy learning new things quickly-anywhere and anytime.
You can get employees to learn in various ways by incorporating social learning. You can use audio, video, and infographics to create variety and distribute it via social media. By doing so, learning becomes more engaging and sharable. As a result, everyone will enjoy learning new things quickly-anywhere and anytime.
It is also a good idea to encourage learners to use other platforms to supplement the training they are receiving from you. For instance, you can supplement your lessons with relevant YouTube videos.
Tips To Integrate Different Social Media Platforms With LMS For eLearning
You can ask your LMS provider to help you get your LMS integrations up and running. Once that is done, use these tips to make the most of your LMS-social media integrations:
- You can use Facebook groups to share ideas and information with your learners with the help of quizzes, pictures, posts, etc.
- You can use Facebook Live to host discussions and stream lectures.
- You can also create Facebook pages to broadcast alerts and updates.
- You can use Twitter as a discussion message board. Twitter has a character limit of 280 characters. This makes learners think critically about communicating concisely and effectively.
- Consider starting a hashtag conversation during your webinars and online training sessions. Create a unique hashtag for your learners to follow and encourage them to initiate a Twitter conversation. This makes your online training course more approachable and collaborative.
While integrating your LMS with a relevant social media platform is a crucial aspect of enabling social learning, it isn’t the only one.
Look beyond your LMS and try to integrate your entire learning experience with social media platforms. This may entail using social media platforms’ native features to disseminate information, track activity, and communicate with learners.
Conclusion
The main appeal of using social media to foster formal learning and training is that it provides learners and instructors unrestrained (albeit moderated!) opportunities to interact, collaborate, and share educational materials. Furthermore, opportunities for training and learning are extended beyond traditional “classroom hours.”
However, before you take the plunge and begin planning to integrate social media and your LMS, you must understand that these platforms, like traditional LMS systems, are just tools. The effectiveness with which they transfer knowledge to learners is determined by how well the learning experience is planned, structured, and managed.
Jack Griffiths
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