Period: 1/12/2011 – 31/12/2011

The posts collected were divided into the following Tech classes:

•Web•News•Blog•Microblogs•Media

Summary The majority of the relevant posts found were broadcasts advertising social media training seminars, webinars, and courses. Very few posts were from potential training clients. There was a large amount of noise in the data set; all possible attempts have been made to remove it, but we cannot guarantee that the final data set is 100% clean.

Posts by day mentioning Twitter training, facebook training, Linkedin training, or social media training.

Commentary

Social Media Monitor Report for

Social Media Training 2011

The volume of posts about social media training was at a very low and fairly steady level

through the first half of the month, but then increased, as shown in the graph above. This was

probably due to errors in the set up of the search, or increased noise in the second half of the

month, and will investigate this effect further.

Pie chart: Facebook training, Twitter training, Social media training, and Linkedin taining.

CommentaryThe majority of the relevant posts found were about Facebook training (a total of 3142, or 65.9% of the total). The majority of these were on sites classed as “Microblog” - twitter, freindfeed, facebook, linkedin, and omgili (a service that distributes posts from forums and bulletin boards) – 3066, or 97.6%. An example of these posts is:

This FREE 86 min training will take you step x step to tap into facebook. Step out of the dark! http://t.co/K0i4OXhs

Posts about Twitter training made up a total of 815, or 17.1%, with 794 or 97.4% of these made on microblogging sites. An example of these posts is:

This free training will show you how to turn Twitter into a Cash generating monster. http://t.co/KPuOvzTY

There are also a considerable number of posts regarding training in getting a large number of followers on twitter. Please note that the majority of the posts appear to be aimed at people using social media as part of an MLM or affiliate marketing scheme; if qSocial media is to be heard above this noise, it is important to carefully differentiate the message.

Social media training: types of training over time. .

CommentaryThere is no difference in the pattern of the discussions about the different types of training over the month under consideration.

TimingThe large volume of posts, and their international nature, means that it is difficult to discren any patterns of timing in the data.

The challenge for qSocial Media will be to differentiate the nature and purpose of the training they provide from the majority of the posts found here, which focus on the MLM and affiliate marketing area, and on getting followers. As microblogs are, by their nature, short, any posts used to promote training will thus have to be carefully worded.