It’s Time to Go Back to School for Ad Agencies

Social media giant Twitter is excited to launch a training program for advertising agencies in order to ensure they, as well as their clients’ dollars, will stick around.

The aptly named online program, Flight School, focuses on familiarizing agencies with the social media platform, as well as helping them to stay current with its new features. In the ever evolving world of advertising, staying abreast on and creating trends is an absolute must.

“Social media is a pivotal point for any business because there’s a market for almost every medium,” said Darren Eiswirth of the Woodlands Ad Adency, “For business its LinkedIn, for the general public its Facebook; for news, sports, and marketing its Twitter.”

Twitter quietly took the online training program for a practice run with large agencies, in addition to a dozen smaller ones. Due to its success, it now plans on opening the program up to other interested agencies.

Twitter, along with other social media platforms, can be incredibly valuable to an agency and their clients when integrated with their overall marketing strategies.

It’s easy to see why Flight School is necessary. Recently, Twitter has experienced major changes, including the introduction of nine new products during the second quarter, the release of new ad formats in the beginning of August, followed by several timeline tweaks. It also has plans to unveil several other new features, all in an effort to attract new users and retain existing ones.

Entire agencies are encouraged to sign up for the training, as opposed to just social or media teams within the company. The online program is free to use, and has been designed in such a way as to allow enrollees to access it via their desktop computer, as well as their mobile devices. Anyone employee within an agency – big or small – can attend Flight School as long as they have an agency email address as well as a Twitter handle.

“The hardest part about small businesses is that they feel like they have to have advertising budgets. All you need is a small fraction of time to invest in social media,” said Eiswirth.

Flight School is composed of what the company calls “bite-sized tutorials”, and is divided into four sections that have been created with account heads, planners, media buyers, and senior ranking executives in mind. The sessions focus on both the big picture such as “best practices” and campaign goals, as well as the small picture by touching on ad products like rich-media cards. One of the school’s main goals is to get advertisers to fully utilize and take advantage of new offerings.

Even advertising agencies aren’t too cool for school.