Social media strategy training that ends with a written strategy, not a certificate
A private workshop for in-house marketing and communications teams. Your team spends the day building your actual strategy, and leaves with the document, the ninety day plan and the measurement framework already written.
Delivered at your offices anywhere in the UK, at our Leeds studio, or live online. Half day from £1,200, full day £1,800, up to six people, excluding VAT.
What your team actually leaves with
Most social media strategy courses sell you a day. You get slides, a certificate and a set of good intentions that survive about a fortnight. We think that is the wrong thing to buy, so this workshop is built backwards from the artefacts your team needs on the Monday morning after.
A written strategy document
Objectives, audiences, channel roles, content pillars and governance, drafted in the room on your own brand. It is written to be taken to a board or a leadership team without translation.
A ninety day action plan
Every action has a named owner and a date. This is the part that decides whether the training was worth the money, and it is the part almost nobody else does.
A measurement framework
Three to five metrics tied to business objectives rather than platform vanity. We also write the reporting view, so the first monthly report is already designed.
If your team cannot email the strategy to somebody the next morning, the day has not worked.
Who this workshop is for
- In-house marketing teams that post consistently but cannot explain why.
- Communications and PR teams whose social output has drifted from the corporate narrative.
- Teams inheriting channels from an agency, a leaver or a well meaning intern.
- Organisations preparing a business case for more social media resource.
- Marketing managers asked by a board to justify social media spend.
- Teams of four to twenty people, in one room or across several offices.
Who it is not for
- Complete beginners who need the platforms explained first. Our beginners course covers that ground properly.
- Sole traders and freelancers, who are better served by an open course elsewhere.
- Anyone wanting a recognised qualification. We issue no certificate and we make no claim to accreditation.
- Teams looking purely for paid social media buying skills rather than strategy.
We would rather tell you the day is wrong for your team than sell it. Two or three times a year we send an enquiry to somebody else.
The curriculum, module by module
Eight modules across a full day, or the first five and the measurement module across a half day. Every module ends with your team writing a section of your own strategy, so the document builds through the day rather than arriving as homework.
The honest audit
We go through your existing channels together, on screen, with your own analytics open. Reach, engagement, audience composition, posting cadence, tone and the gap between what you publish and what performs. Teams routinely discover that a third of their output is being made for nobody. It is uncomfortable and it is the most useful hour of the day.
Audience, competitors and channel intelligence
Building segments from evidence rather than assumption, using free listening tools your team can keep using afterwards. Competitor benchmarking against a defined set, not a vague sense of who is doing well. We also map where your buyers genuinely spend attention, which is often not the channel you have invested most in.
Strategy against tactics
The distinction that most social media plans miss entirely. Strategic options, the role each channel plays, and your social media value proposition written as a single sentence. If the team cannot say what the brand is for on each platform, the content calendar has nothing to hang on.
Objectives that survive a board meeting
Translating business objectives into social objectives, then into measurable goals with numbers and dates against them. We write these in the room and we stress test them. A goal nobody would defend in front of a finance director is not a goal.
Content pillars, formats and the calendar
Three to five pillars built from your audit and your objectives. Format decisions by channel, an editorial calendar structure your team can maintain with the resource it actually has, and a realistic view of what a two person team can produce weekly.
Artificial intelligence in social media strategy
Where generative tools genuinely save time in research, drafting, repurposing and listening, and where they quietly damage a brand voice. We cover disclosure, approval workflow and the governance line your organisation should draw. Very few strategy courses treat this as a strategy question rather than a tools demonstration.
Measurement, attribution and proving return
Metrics that map to objectives, the difference between reporting and measurement, and building the monthly view. We cover attribution honestly, including what social media cannot be proven to have caused.
Governance, policy, risk and law
Approval chains, crisis escalation, employee advocacy boundaries, disclosure rules and the legal guidelines that catch teams out. Prohibition handles live crisis work, so these examples come from cases we have run rather than textbooks.
The closing exercise
The last ninety minutes are spent assembling everything into your strategy document and your ninety day plan, with owners and dates assigned before anybody leaves the room.
Half day, full day, or a modular programme
Half day, three and a half hours
The audit, audience work, strategic framework, objectives and a compressed measurement session. Your team leaves with a strategy skeleton and a plan, though the content and governance work is lighter. This suits smaller teams and organisations testing whether the fuller programme is worth committing to.
Full day, nine thirty until four thirty
All eight modules with time for the closing exercise. This is the version we recommend, and it is what most teams book once they have seen the outline.
Modular, across several weeks
Two or three shorter sessions spaced a fortnight apart, with work between them. Distributed teams and organisations that cannot release everybody for a full day often prefer this shape, and retention is measurably better when there is practice in between.
Where we deliver
At your offices anywhere in the UK, at our studio in Leeds, or live online for teams spread across sites. Hybrid delivery works, though we cap the remote group at eight so the exercises still function.
What private social media strategy training costs
We publish our rates because hiding them wastes everybody’s time. These are private team prices, not per person prices, and they exclude VAT.
| Format | Duration | Price, ex VAT | Group size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Half day workshop | Three and a half hours | £1,200 | Up to six people |
| Full day workshop | Nine thirty until four thirty | £1,800 | Up to six people |
| Additional attendee | Either format | £250 per person | Beyond the first six |
| Modular programme | Two or three sessions | Quoted on scope | Discussed at the scoping call |
What the price includes
- A scoping call and an agenda written for your team, not a stock deck.
- Delivery by a practitioner who runs live campaigns, with your own channels used as the examples.
- The slides, a workbook, your strategy document and your ninety day plan.
- A month of email support afterwards for questions as the plan meets reality.
What it does not include
Travel outside Yorkshire is charged at cost and agreed before booking. Venue hire, if you would rather not use your own offices, is arranged separately. There are no other charges and no per delegate materials fee.
Who runs the workshop
I am Chris Norton and I run most of these sessions myself. I founded Prohibition, the PR, social and content agency behind this site, I have worked in public relations for more than twenty years, and I have been running training since 2009. I co-authored Share This Too, the social media handbook published by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and I have been a CIPR member since I was a student.
I also co-host the Embracing Marketing Mistakes podcast with my co-director Will Ockenden, which is a long run of conversations with marketers about the things that did not work.
The reason this matters is simple enough. We build social media strategies for paying clients every week, so the frameworks in the room are the ones we use ourselves, and the failures we talk through are ours. Most training providers cannot tell you who will be standing at the front.
Strategy work we have done, with the numbers
We are a working agency first, so the examples used in the room are our own campaigns rather than case studies borrowed from a textbook.
Martin House Children’s Hospice. The Build, an integrated social and PR programme, produced 219 placements and a reach of 161.4 million. It won the Charity and Not for Profit Award at the PRCA DARE Awards 2026.
Black Sheep Brewery. A social led campaign delivered 60 placements and 11 million reach, and took the Grand Prix in the Digital and Social Media category at the PRCA DARE Awards 2023.
Astonish. A content and social programme generated 115 pieces of coverage in six months, 90 per cent of which carried backlinks.
Freeths. A LinkedIn Live programme for the law firm drew 1,100 attendees and around 950 leads from a single sequence.
ENGIE and Huthwaite International. Both trained on strategic social media management and thought leadership for senior stakeholders. Read the ENGIE case study or the Huthwaite case study.
Teams we have trained
We have delivered training and campaigns for the NHS, Yorkshire Water, Transport for the North, Savills, Skipton Building Society, Interflora, Watches of Switzerland, Sealy, Emerald Publishing, Huthwaite International, ENGIE, CEWE Photoworld, Lloyds Pharmacy, WWF, Alzheimer’s Society and Terrence Higgins Trust, alongside universities, local authorities and B2B manufacturers.
Prohibition has won more than 45 industry awards, and we are part of the Worldcom Public Relations Group, which gives clients access to 110 offices across 45 countries.
What our clients say
We hold an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 from 18 verified client reviews on Clutch.
“We were impressed by their depth of knowledge in a rapidly changing environment.”
Kian Scott-Loach, Head of Digital, Terrence Higgins Trust, February 2026
“They’re a bunch of friendly people who feel like a natural extension of the marketing team.”
David Sharples, Communications Manager, Black Sheep Brewery, January 2025
“When Prohibition says they’ll do something by a certain date, they get it done.”
Marketing Manager, Feather Down Farms, May 2025
How booking works
One. Scoping call
Half an hour on the phone. We ask what your channels are doing now, who is in the room and what has to be true afterwards for the day to count.
Two. Tailored agenda
You get a written agenda for your team before you commit, along with the fixed price. If the shape is wrong we change it.
Three. Delivery
The workshop runs at your offices, in Leeds or online. Lead time is usually three to four weeks, and we have turned sessions round faster.
After the session you receive the strategy document, the ninety day plan, the slides and the workbook, plus a month of email support. We check back at ninety days to ask what actually happened.
Frequently asked questions
Do you run public social media strategy courses?
No, and that is deliberate. A public course must be pitched at the average person in the room, so part of your team is bored and another part is lost. Every session we run is private to one organisation and built on your own channels.
What is the minimum and maximum group size?
The price covers up to six people, and additional attendees are £250 each. There is no minimum. Above about sixteen the exercises stop working properly, so we would suggest two sessions instead.
Will you travel to our offices?
Yes, anywhere in the UK. Travel outside Yorkshire is charged at cost and agreed in writing before you book, so there is no surprise on the invoice.
Can you sign our NDA?
Yes, and we usually do. The workshop involves looking at your analytics, your plans and sometimes commercially sensitive material, so a mutual confidentiality agreement suits both sides.
How does this work with our procurement process?
We invoice on purchase order, we can complete supplier onboarding forms, and we hold the insurance and policy documents most public sector and enterprise frameworks ask for. Tell us what you need at the scoping call.
Can you tailor the day to our sector?
That is the point of a private session. We have run this for charities, universities, local authorities, housing, law, manufacturing, food and drink and retail. The examples and the regulatory content change accordingly.
Can you train a team split across several offices?
Yes. We deliver live online, or hybrid with some people in a room and others remote. For hybrid we cap the remote group at eight so the exercises still function for everybody.
What do we receive in writing afterwards?
Your strategy document, your ninety day plan with owners and dates, the slide deck and the workbook. These are yours to circulate internally with no restriction.
Is there a certificate or a CPD accreditation?
No. We are not an accredited body and we will not pretend otherwise. If a formal qualification is what you need, the CIM and the DMA both offer accredited routes and we would point you there.
How far ahead do we need to book?
Three to four weeks is typical, mainly to allow for the scoping call and the agenda. We have delivered inside a week when a team needed it urgently.
What is your cancellation policy?
Rescheduling more than fourteen days out costs nothing. Inside fourteen days we ask for fifty per cent, and inside seventy two hours the full fee applies because the day is gone. We are reasonable about genuine emergencies.
How is this different from an online strategy course?
An online course teaches a generic framework and leaves you to apply it. Almost nobody does. This session applies the framework to your brand while an experienced practitioner is in the room to argue with, and you leave with the finished document.
What is a social media strategy workshop, exactly?
It is a facilitated working session rather than a lecture. Roughly a third is taught content and the rest is your team working on your own strategy with guidance. Teams that want facilitation rather than teaching usually use the word workshop, and that is what this is.
What happens between the workshop and implementation?
You have the ninety day plan, and a month of email support for the questions that surface once real work starts. We also check in at ninety days. If you want ongoing help, Prohibition can take on the retained work, but there is no obligation and we do not use the training as a sales pitch.
Brands we have trained and worked with
Training and campaigns delivered for the NHS, universities, local authorities, charities and B2B manufacturers, alongside the brands below.
PRCA DARE Awards 2026 winners. The Charity and Not for Profit Award for The Build, our campaign for Martin House Children’s Hospice, which produced 219 placements and a reach of 161.4 million. Prohibition has won more than 45 industry awards.
Where does AI fit in a social media strategy?
Most strategies now have an AI question inside them, usually unanswered. Who is allowed to use it, on what, and who checks the output before it publishes. We cover the production side in AI for social media content training and the governance side in the AI policy workshop, and either can be bolted onto a strategy day.
Get your team a strategy they will actually use
Half day £1,200, full day £1,800, up to six people, excluding VAT. Delivered UK wide.
Last reviewed August 2026. Curriculum updated for 2026 to cover generative AI governance in social media strategy.
