social-ology

Every day, you’ll find social media workshops being promoted online. With so many social media workshops out there, which one should you invest your time in?

A good social media workshop will show you a system or a process for conducting a social media program. Why? Because a process is what keeps a social media team accountable. It gives them a vision for the course of work they are about to do.

There can be niched social media workshops, i.e. niched by industry, or generic social media workshops, where the principles are taught generically and must be adapted to your particular field.

A worthwhile social media workshop will focus on strategies as well as tools. Why? Because social media strategies are more stable than social media tools, which tend to change every week.

The workshop should discuss different ways to achieve different business objectives, from increasing brand awareness to creating more loyal customers. It should also reveal how social media marketing is different from other types of marketing in the sense that social media marketing is a 2 way communication channel, where the marketer needs to listen to the audience rather than simply blasting out sales messages to the audience. It’s what social media marketers often refer to “engaging” and “connecting.

A niched social media workshop should be very focused so that the attendees could leave with the information they’ve learned an immediately begin to apply that training to their social media programs. Attendees of a niched workshop are generally looking for cookie cutter solutions laid out for them.

For example, if the workshop covers the ins and outs of social media monitoring, the niched social media workshop should give specific examples related to the niche of terms to monitor for.

While you can find free social media workshops, you should expect that the better ones are going to cost money. The price of attending a social media workshop can get high when one considers also the travel involved. It wouldn’t be uncommon to spend $2,000 or more to attend a single day social media workshop if it’s held out of town.

Perhaps a better idea is to look for an online workshop, as long as it’s a thorough one.With an online workshop, there’s no cost for travel and the student can learn when he or she feels like it.

Please note that as the author of this post, I am the owner of The Social Media Road Trip Workshop, to which the link above goes.