As social media continues to grow in popularity in the eLearning industry, there are many benefits and values to using it. Instructors, educational institutions and companies can share practices, promote information and educational material, share opinions, and more. Social media can increase employee and student participation; learners are more likely to stay engaged to complete the program if they are able to reach out to peers involved

How can you use social media in eLearning? We’ve put together 5 simple tips to help you use social media to share and connect with educational material.

1.) Be valuable. Be sure your social media profiles share valuable, meaningful content with your readers. You can help drive a following by building your social learning platform on top of your existing learning and information resources, maximizing existing content and behavior.

2.) Follow the experts. If leading eLearning publications and websites are following someone on Twitter, you should too. @eLearningGuild, @learningsolmag and @elearnindustry are a few great ones to start your list with. As you build your following and list, you’ll end up discovering new eLearning blogs and sites that you may not find via Google.

3.) Organize your news. Instead of wasting hours searching through all your social media networks to find the best articles and content, utilize a social media dashboard tool. Tools like Hootsuite can help manage all your social media networks. You can easily track messages, tweets, brand mentions and more.

4.) Connect and join. Following eLearning experts and publications is great, but try connecting and interacting with them. Stay active in the community and join Twitter chats or eLearning groups and forums. Interacting is a great way to share course development tips, tricks, and tools with other eLearning professionals.

5.) Utilize Twitter #hashtags. Searching Twitter for various #eLearning hashtags can be a great way to find new and trending content. You can find trending articles this way or join Twitter chats with a specific hashtag.

Join the rest of world and begin using social media to maximize your eLearning content!

Source via eLearning Industry.