Social media is now an indispensable element of every recruitment agency’s marketing strategy. However, without the right approach, it can often be a time-consuming activity and a difficult channel to measure return on investment.
One of the first steps when devising a social media strategy is to define what outcomes your recruitment agency hopes to achieve. These most often involve:
- Driving traffic to your website.
- Increasing brand awareness.
- Connecting directly with candidates and clients.
Within this blog, we have outlined the top 10 social media tips that can improve your social media strategy and give you the knowledge to get the best ROI for your recruitment agency.
1. Not All Social Media Channels Are Equal
To spend your time as efficiently as possible, you need to understand where your target candidates and clients are most active and devote more time to these social media channels. The first step in understanding your audience is to create personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal candidates and clients. In doing so, you can make calculated assumptions about which channels are the most cost-effective for your agency. For example – if you are an IT Recruiter, after analysing the behaviour of your candidate personas, you may find that your time is much more valuable in creating content for and beginning conversations with candidates on Stack Overflow and Reddit rather than Facebook and LinkedIn.
Don’t know how to create candidate or client personas? Read this blog.
2. Optimise Your Agency Profile Pages
According to LinkedIn, “75% of candidates research your company’s reputation” before applying for a job. That being said, your agency’s social media profile is often one of the first touchpoints a new candidate or client will make with your agency, whether it is on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Ensuring it is up-to-date and represents your agency is as important as the home page of your website.
If you have a presence on social media, make sure:
- The imagery and tone of voice of your agency profile page is consistent with your website.
- You provide a link your website.
- Your “About Us” is concise and summarises your services and value proposition.
By ensuring these fundamentals are upheld, you will encourage rather than discourage any visitors to your agency social media profile pages.
3. Conduct Hashtag Research (Twitter Tip)
Hashtags are not the be-all and end-all of a great tweet but they can help to amplify your message to the right audience. Hashtags are primarily used on Twitter but searches can also be performed on Facebook and LinkedIn. When using hashtags as a beginner to social media, there is a tendency to use as many as possible in the hope that you reach the largest audience. In truth, you need to find the balance between getting your message across in an engaging way and using the right hashtags that will encourage clicks, likes or comments, depending on your social media goal.
A free tool to make sure your hashtags are reaching the widest and most relevant audience is Hashtagify. By inputting a broad term, you can see what hashtags are the most popular, who the top influencers are and many more valuable insights which you can use to optimise your social media posts.
4. Choose Eye-Catching Imagery (For Posts)
“When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.”
HubSpot
The phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words” rings true no more so than on social media. Not only do images take up a lot more “newsfeed real estate”, they also have a much better chance of stopping the scroll, standing out and attracting the click.
Simply, the more relevant and intriguing your images are, the more clicks you will tend to attract.
5. Leverage Social Media Partnerships
Social media is about maximising your outreach with the people who value your content and conversations the most. Identify the companies or people who regularly like, comment and retweet your social media posts and assess whether you can utilise their expertise. By partnering up with these social media connections, you may be able to create some valuable content, leverage their knowledge to write a guest blog or even follow them up as a potential client or candidate prospect.
6. Use The 80/20 Rule
It can be tempting to use social media to only promote your recruitment agency services and live job ads. After all, your over-arching goals are usually to drive traffic to your website or attract high quality candidates to apply for your open vacancies. But, taking a strategic view of social media, your target audience does not want to be bombarded with sales messages 100% of the time – and this is understandable. They primarily use social media to stay informed and to be entertained. So, as an agency, it is essential that take notice of this and apply the 80/20 rule.
Looking at the social media output, you should aim to entertain or inform your audience 80% of the time with relevant articles and content whilst promoting jobs and your agency 20% of the time. This way, you can utilise your social media channels to achieve your business goals and grow an engaged audience simultaneously.
7. Monitor Your Competition
Social media provides an irresistible opportunity to monitor your direct competition and assess your social media output against your competitors. By creating “streams” on Hootsuite, you can quickly get a snapshot of the content that your competitors are posting. This will, no doubt, spark new content ideas and keep you abreast of any new social media and marketing activity that your competitors are investing in, such as an increase in content output or whether they are using social advertising.
8. Sensational Titles Succeed
To cut through the never-ending newsfeeds that exist on every social media channel, your aim with each individual post needs to be, “how can I stop the scroll?” And by this. we mean creating thought-provoking articles and posting something that will grab your audience’s attention. It is no surprise that the most shared articles, videos, images and content on social media gravitate towards the most extreme emotions, whether the posts are hilarious, shocking, adorable or revealing. As a professional recruitment agency, you may wonder – how can we create content that is aligned with our audience that also grabs people’s attention?
It is not easy and will take time to for your agency to find this balance, but to give you a real life example, here’s a title of an article by Jan Tegze that succeeds in grabbing your attention, attracting the click and driving engagement:
Perfect Candidates Don’t Exist: The Myth of Finding The “Perfect” Hire
This rather shocking titles implores Jan Tegze’s target audience, primarily HR professionals and high quality candidates, to find out what he means and how he has come to this conclusion. This method of using more sensational titles has certainly contributed to the success of the article on LinkedIn, where it garnered 318 likes, 40 comments and 141 shares. By aligning the title of your article with an extreme emotion, you are much more likely to achieve better results.
9. Timing Is Everything
Another key tactic for maximising your social media engagement is timing. Posting at the right time can be the difference between your content getting in front of your target audience or it getting lost in the social media abyss.
The first step is finding out who your target audiences are, assessing when they are most likely to be online and adjusting your posting schedule to match your analysis. If you’re aiming at attracting solicitors, for example, you may want to post early in the morning, between 6am – 9am, or early in the evening, between 6pm – 8pm. To get a more data-driven picture of when your audience is online, you can use Rival IQ which allows you to find out, “exactly which posts get the best response,” and at what time your posts receive most engagement.
10. Test, Measure And Improve
The majority of social media channels have their own native analytics which you can use to assess your social media output and performance. By organising monthly or quarterly reviews to analyse both your website (with Google Analytics) and the native analytics on individual social media channels, you will have a much more structured method of measuring how effective your current strategy is and where it needs improvement.
Simply devoting time to strategically assessing your social media output will give you a clearer view of what is working and what isn’t. By implementing data driven improvements, you can make your social media channels a more refined and revenue generating activity.
Social media is an important part of an inbound marketing strategy. To learn how to get started with inbound marketing for your recruitment agency, download your free guide.
