1. Locate your target market and engage them
Many social media platforms offer features where people of similar interests can congregate online. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter all have a groups feature. LinkedIn’s group feature is especially useful for locating highly targeted candidate leads.
Once you have found your target market, you must engage them by participating in existing conversations. Online forum discussions provide invaluable insight into the issues and problems that your target audience cares about. Use these as inspiration for creating future content.
2. Be a beacon of knowledge
Rohit Bhargava, Senior VP of Marketing & Strategy at Ogilvy and creator of the top25-ranked blog Influential Marketing, says it best:
“…most B2B sales are based on demonstrating some type of expertise either in a type of service or in the category of a product that you are providing. Once you realize this fact, the lesson for using social media effectively is clear: if you can demonstrate your expertise through social media, you can have a measurable impact on your sales efforts.”
To gain the trust and business of companies and candidates, recruiters must display their knowledge and expertise in a given field.
Research your target audience’s interests and needs and find ways to contribute intelligently on those subjects. The Evil HR Lady and HRMinion are HR professionals who target other working professionals. To do this, they maintain blogs that offer advice on the job search and workplace etiquette.
Create a blog, go on LinkedIn Answers, do anything to spread knowledge in an area of expertise. Don’t forget that you are not the only one in your office with expertise in a given field. Reach out to other employees to see if they can contribute anything meaningful to your blog or social media campaign. The most important thing is to start producing meaningful and relevant content. Once people figure out that you know what you are talking about, they will start paying attention to you.
3. Focus your efforts on the big four
Hubspot, an internet marketing consulting firm, released a report showing that businesses using social media in 2010 generated the most leads from blogs (46%), Facebook (43%), Twitter (41%) and LinkedIn (41%). As a recruiter, you don’t want candidates to buy something from you. However, what you do want is for candidates to be clicking on your profile page, interacting with you, and remembering you when you contact them with a job offer.
An effective social media campaign requires time and effort, so it is best to focus on the social media platforms which have delivered the most success for businesses.
4. Keep your content short, simple and consistent
Good content is digestible, quick to produce and easy to distribute. You don’t have the time to spend hours writing a 3,000 word blog post, and your target audience doesn’t have the time to read it. Consider Twitter as an example. Twitter users spread information using a max of 140 characters at a time!
Whatever content you create, make sure that you create it on a consistent basis. This chart by Hubspot shows the success rates of different blogs depending on the frequency of posts.
Users of social media are bombarded with new content every hour of the day. Don’t get lost in the mix by failing to keep up.
5. Leverage already existing networks
Make your employees aware of current job postings and make it easy for them to share postings with their professional and personal networks. Employee-only career sites, e-mail blasts or company announcements work here.
Another method is to post jobs to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as your status for easy re-posting by employees. To save time, you can use Twitter’s option to post tweets automatically to your Facebook and LinkedIn.
If possible, configure your company job board to automatically post new jobs to Facebook. You may have to speak to your IT department or software provider to do this.
6. Post a picture of yourself
You are the one putting in the work, so make sure that people remember who you are and have a face to put to your name. Since you are responsible for working directly with people, it is important to convey yourself as a person, not as a username. Feel free to post pictures of your office and events so that others get a better feel for the culture of your company.
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Job descriptions have come in for a lot more criticism lately, and deservedly so. While I’m sympathetic about the legal gobbledygook they contain, what I find amusing are the meaningless ritual incantations that frequently clog up descriptions that are otherwise well-written.
