For teams who have stopped improving
Advanced social media training for teams doing everything correctly and seeing flat numbers. Experimentation, creative strategy, attribution and the honest conversation about what is actually reachable in your category. Half day £1,200, full day £1,800 for up to six people, excluding VAT.
What does advanced social media training actually mean?
Not more platform features. That is what most courses labelled advanced deliver, and it is why experienced teams come out of them disappointed. If your team already knows the tools, learning three more settings changes nothing.
Advanced means working on the things that are genuinely hard. Designing an experiment that produces a usable answer. Knowing whether your results are actually attributable to you. Being honest about what growth is available in your category rather than benchmarking against a brand with forty times your budget. And having enough influence internally to act on any of it.
Why has your team plateaued?
In experienced teams it is usually one of four things. You are optimising a format that has stopped working and the decline is slow enough that nobody has called it. You are testing constantly but changing several variables at once, so nothing is learned. Your measurement flatters you, most often by counting activity that would have happened anyway. Or the ceiling is real and the honest answer is that the next gain comes from budget or from a different channel entirely.
Establishing which of those you are in takes most of the morning and is the single most valuable part of the day. Teams frequently arrive expecting tactics and leave having reset what they are aiming at.
What does the day cover?
1. Interrogating your own data
Your exports open on the screen. What has genuinely changed, what is seasonal, and what is noise being reported as insight.
2. Designing real experiments
One variable, a sample worth trusting and a decision rule set before you start. Most social testing is not testing.
3. Creative strategy, not creative tasks
Building a creative approach with enough variation to learn from, rather than making more of what worked in March.
4. Attribution and incrementality
What you can and cannot claim, and the difference between activity that caused something and activity that was merely present.
5. Advanced paid
Structure at scale, audience saturation and creative fatigue. See paid social media training.
6. Organic reality
What organic reach is actually worth in your category now, and where it still genuinely compounds.
7. AI at depth
Beyond drafting. Analysis, clustering, research and where it produces confident nonsense. See AI training.
8. Getting decisions made
Turning a finding into a change when the organisation would rather carry on. Usually the real blocker.
What does the day look like?
| Time | Block | What comes out of it |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | Your data, interrogated | An agreed diagnosis of why the numbers are flat |
| 10:45 | Experiment design | Three experiments specified properly, with decision rules |
| 13:00 | Creative strategy | A creative approach with deliberate variation built in |
| 14:15 | Attribution and what you can claim | A defensible position on what your work is producing |
| 15:30 | The internal argument | How the findings get turned into a decision somebody makes |
This day works better as a full day than a half. The diagnosis alone usually takes the morning, and cutting it short tends to produce tactics without the reason behind them.
Will you tell us things we already know?
Some of it, yes, and that is worth something on its own. Experienced teams often already suspect the diagnosis and have not been able to get it accepted internally. Hearing it from outside, with your own data on the screen, changes what happens next.
What we will not do is spend the day on platform features you already use. If the scoping call suggests your team is not actually at this level, we will say so and point you at the manager day instead. It is a better outcome than a room of experienced people being politely bored.
Who runs the day?
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.
For advanced days a specialist usually comes with me, a paid buyer or an analyst depending on where the plateau sits. An experienced room will find the limits of a generalist quickly, and it is better to bring the right person than to bluff.
Advanced training questions
What is advanced social media training?
Training for teams already competent on the platforms, focused on experiment design, creative strategy, attribution and the internal argument for change. It is not a tour of advanced platform features, which is what most courses with this label deliver.
How much does it cost?
Half day £1,200 and full day £1,800 for up to six people, excluding VAT. This day works considerably better as a full day, and we will say so rather than sell you the shorter one.
How do we know if our team is advanced enough?
The scoping call settles it. Broadly, if the team can already explain why they chose their channels and what their numbers mean, this is the right day. If those questions produce hesitation, the manager day is a better fit.
Do you need access to our data?
Yes, ideally before the day. Exports from your channels and any paid accounts. The diagnosis block is the core of the session and it does not work on generalities.
Will this fix our declining reach?
It will tell you honestly whether the decline is fixable, which is not the same thing. Sometimes the answer is that the format is finished and the effort belongs elsewhere. That is a more useful outcome than optimising something that has stopped working.
Do you cover attribution properly?
As far as is honest. Anybody promising clean attribution for social media is selling something. We cover what you can defensibly claim, how to build incrementality thinking into your tests, and how to talk about it without overstating.
Can we focus the day on one discipline?
Yes, and experienced teams often should. Paid, video, measurement or AI, taken deep, frequently beats a broad advanced day.
Is there anything after this?
Not another course. Teams at this level are better served by ongoing advisory sessions than by more training, and we will tell you if that is what you actually need.
Related
Managers
Strategy, budget and reporting. See social media manager training.
Measurement
Depth on the numbers. See measurement training.
Paid social
Depth on the buying. See paid social media training.
Bring us your exports and your flattest quarter
Half day £1,200, full day £1,800, up to six people, excluding VAT. Full day recommended.
One of the training levels we run, alongside every social media course. Last reviewed August 2026.
