Social Media Content Strategy for Your Career Site
The recruitment market is flooded with jobs as we emerge from the lockdown slumber of COVID-19. What is it that will determine you stand out from the crowd? It is a well-written job description or one that is keyword optimized? Perhaps so, but if you want to attract the right talent and increase traffic to your career site, you’ll need to prove that your organization is worth their time and effort applying for a role perfectly suited to them. The best way to get in front of the audience you wish to reach, namely recruiters, is to regularly publish high-quality, targeted content on your website and social channels.
The number of social media users has been consistently increasing, with recent statistics portraying approximately 3.5 billion active users worldwide. LinkedIn, which is the largest and most popular professional social media site, has depicted that almost 50 percent of professionals use the site to keep in touch with market trends and search for potential, relevant jobs. Social media content marketing is a key tool in determining the success of a company’s recruitment efforts. Building unique and relevant content for your career site involves planning, dedication and a lot of investment in terms of time, but the outcome is definitely worth all the effort.
Benefits of a successful social media content strategy in recruitment
Increases user traffic to your social media handles: Job seekers are constantly on the lookout for relevant, easy-to-read content which is interesting and informative. If they can find all of this in one place regularly, it is highly likely that they will be faithful to this source. Providing these can secure your position as their one-stop shop for industry trends, daily news updates and the potential job of their dreams.
Increases time spent by potential job candidates on your social media networks: All social media users spend time on sites that offer them interesting content which they believe can solve their problems and fill a professional need. Providing relatable SEO content can ensure the loyalty of potential job candidates to your social media handles. Once they’re familiar with your content layout, it will be easier for them to navigate your social media networks which will further strengthen your position as their go-to information source for industry news and job prospects.
Enhances your brand image online: Offering relevant and regular industry content is shown to be more effective in recent times than traditional marketing efforts. With shareable features on various social media channels, it is easy for your loyal readers to forward your content on their social networks, allowing you passive access to a much wider audience and potential candidates for your job postings.
6 Tips to create apt and engaging social media content
1. Create easy-to-read job descriptions
A job description should be concise and wholesome. It should provide the reader with all the information they need in an engaging manner that encourages them to scroll further. It should summarize the nuances of the role, the accountability and responsibilities it entails, and the qualifications and job skills essential to the role. All this information should be presented in a way that makes the reader eager to hop on board your company, with relevant job titles. It is pertinent to maintain consistency in the job profiles advertised across your social media networks to ensure your industry trustworthiness.
2. Gather feedback from your current workforce
No one understands the job profile and what it entails better than your current employees working the ropes and holding the fort for you. It’s a good idea to get feedback from teams in each department in order to build appropriate, job-related content.
3. Describe your work culture and ethos
Through your content strategy, you can use your social media accounts to demonstrate the benefits of working as an employee of your company. Right from fun team-building activities and get-togethers to benefits afforded to working parents with young children. Recently, so many companies worldwide have shifted their working patterns to work from home, and many have given their employees various tools to help ease this transition. Including these perks can afford your potential employees an inside look at what they will benefit from joining your company.
4. Create the right balance between sharing relevant industry news and job postings
It’s very important to draw the right balance in the content you post on your social media handles. Spamming virtual media with your job roles may not be the best idea for a large organization that has hundreds of job posts being offered in a day. You can intersperse your job content with content that informs your targeted audience of where the industry is headed and how your company best fulfills the current need of the sector. A small company can help instill confidence in their readers that they are growing when they regularly add job postings to their social media accounts.
5. Build engaging, relevant and highly interactive content for optimum results
Portraying your company’s industry experience can help your readers get a glimpse into your work culture and values. This can include your various charitable initiatives, company news and other recent activities which can be displayed via presentation, videos or podcasts. Adding a page of FAQs can help potential job candidates get a feel of how your company responds to and deals with various issues at hand. Visuals can help increase your viewership multifold, whereas hosting interactive content can even further cement your popularity amongst your targeted audience. Types of content can include interactive quizzes and video tours of the workplace where current employees give a fun insight of what their typical workdays include. Potential job candidates can select what they need to view, giving them a feeling of control and allowing them a direct insight into your working principles.
6. Vary your social media content
The key to getting higher views from your targeted job-seeking audience is to add content in varying forms, including shorter news posts, longer blog posts, informative infographics and interactive videos and images. For optimum results, ensure your content tone is confident, fact-based, informative, engaging and relevant.
How to build a good social media content strategy
Research strategies of your industry competitors: Research and identify the content created by your industry competitors and what are the social media channels they use to promote their content. It can help guide your strategy as well as identify untapped resources which you can use to your benefit.
Set up the ideal candidate personality criteria: Before you set out to target potential candidates for your job postings, you need to have a good idea of the type of employee you are seeking. Draw up a rough idea of an ideal employee’s personality traits, sector experience, talents, skills and qualifications.
Benchmark against goals: Set measurable goals you can track over time that are related to your company’s social media recruiting strategy. These will help you determine if you can achieve your goals as planned and help you find and overcome the roadblocks you faced with your traditional marketing practices.
Track and measure recruitment metrics tracked to your goals: Tracking recruitment metrics linked to your unique goals can help identify which platforms bring in top-quality job candidates within record time. KPIs which can be used to track this include cost of hire, time, referral rate and acceptance-of-offer rate.
Select the social media platforms apt for your business: The top five social media platforms for the recruitment industry are LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. However, there are many more niche platforms you can target depending on your unique business offerings and needs. Many recruiters use various social media management tools in order to get themselves organized and to help with analysis.
Engage your workforce in your content strategy: Your employee teams make up your company and what it stands for. It is an excellent idea to include their feedback into your social media content strategy. They can act as your brand ambassadors and help engage potential job candidates.
Regularly review your strategy for relevance and optimization: Even once your social media strategy is in place and you are active on all your channels, it is imperative to review your established key metrics against your goals regularly. This will help identify how successful your strategy has been and how best you can tweak your efforts and combined resources in order to maximize gains from minimum efforts.
Marketing platforms for your social media content strategy
The success of your company’s social media content marketing strategy lies in choosing the correct platforms to connect with your target audience and build your brand. All channels do not necessarily fit the goals and strategies of all companies. Identifying which of these platforms is best suited to your needs can ensure you target your efforts in the right direction to optimize your investment.
LinkedIn is the oldest and largest professional socializing site, and it accounts for much of the global population’s claim to securing the right job at the right time. Its advanced filtering options have helped a million companies the world over to secure the right talent. It offers an in-depth view of a potential candidate’s job history and an overview of their hobbies, interests, referrals and endorsements. It allows you to send personalized messages and begin friendly yet professional conversations with potential employees. You get to introduce yourself and share relevant industry information in order to get the right attention. With LinkedIn, you can follow other professionals and companies, endorse their goals and add recommendations for individuals.
While it is not a dedicated professional social media site like LinkedIn, Facebook has a massive global presence which can work wonders for a recruiter’s needs. It offers myriad ways for recruiters to connect with potential job candidates and can offer an insight into their non-professional skills and personalities. You can create networking events and groups, share and promote relevant content and build your brand via company pages. It allows you to post job openings on the job board and you can begin conversations using the Messenger feature on Facebook.
Instagram has leveraged its visual layout to become highly popular with the younger crowd which makes up a large part of the current workforce. This social media site has vast potential because it is highly underutilized. A mere 10 percent of recruiters effectively tap into it as a recruitment tool. Instagram allows you to like, share, follow and comment on various content that is posted on the site. Use hashtags to engage in trending topics.
Many celebrities and conglomerates use Twitter to post regular events and news feeds. You can search for hashtags and join in interesting and relevant conversations. This allows you to attract the targeted attention. You can comment, like, follow and tweet content. It also allows you to live-stream relevant content and pin various tweets which you want to be seen on your profile.
YouTube
Almost two-thirds of global internet users prefer video content over text-based data. It plays better on the senses. YouTube is the premier social media platform to offer this feature. This platform, much like Instagram, is under-utilized as a recruitment tool and offers great potential to recruiters.
To learn more about content strategy for the human resources industry check out our HR Industry page here.
Published by Jubilee Heutmaker on Thursday, November 4, 2021 in Career, Social Media Marketing, Career, Social Media Marketing.