Extending Your Training’s Impact via Twitter Follow-up
Blog book tour for Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers
Jane Bozarth is an expert and evangelist for using social media for effective training - in fact, one of the reasons I first joined Twitter was because I’d heard her express her enthusiasm for it during her webinars. And now she’s literally written the book on it - Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Expanding Learning. I was eager to get to take a look at it as part of her blog book tour, because I’ve found her previous books to be really practical and useful.
In the nonprofit training community, many of us can be skeptical about incorporating new technologies that we’re not sure our training participants will be able to use due to time, expense, or lack of computer skills. At the same time, we all care about making sure our training is high impact, so that we can help make a difference in improving our services for our clients. So I’m going to focus here on one simple, low-tech way to extend training’s impact using Twitter, from the second chapter of Bozarth’s book - it’s a great idea I’m excited to share, because it addresses a real training challenge.
When designing training, a serious concern is “How will we help participants actually DO what they’ve learned once they get back to work?” Jobs are hectic, people forget, and behavior change is difficult. One promising solution is to use Twitter to help your participants bring your training content with them back to their real lives.
You can do this using a free application (Bozarth mentions Social Oomph, Twaitter, or Brizzly) to set up timed, automatic Tweets to your training participants periodically after the session. The messages can provide encouragement, remind participants about key points, share links to articles on the same topic, announce related upcoming events, and give gentle nudges to participants to use the skills and knowledge from the training session.
The Tweets will support your participants in implementing what they learning in training, and it will also create an extended learning community. Because you can set up the Tweets in advance and because Twitter and the Tweeting application are free, this is a training add-on that won’t take much of your time or resources.
If you’re curious about trying out social media to increase the value of training, this could be a simple yet high-impact way to start.
