Content Marketing for Recruiters on Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

As a recruiter, what type of content should you be putting out online? And what is your company doing to create interesting content for your target audience? Great content leads to a stronger brand online, both your personal brand as a recruiter and your company’s brand as an agency/employer. As our friends at CopyBlogger write:

“Branding isn’t your company name. It’s not a tag line. It’s not a logo. Branding is just another name for creating a perception. When marketers ask, “How do we want to brand this product?” what they’re really asking is how they want their audience to think about that product once it comes to market. A brand is a promise. It’s an expectation of an experience.”

The easy pieces of content to create include:

  • Updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook
  • Press releases (short news pieces)
  • Blog posts
  • White papers (typically a compilation of blog posts)
  • Images (Instagram is a great place for this)
  • Infographics (see below)
  • Slideshows (try SlideShare for this)
  • Video (try YouTube or Viddy)

The more advanced content will get more interest but also requires more effort:

  • Podcasts (try AudioBoo)
  • Podcastfeed (iTunes)
  • Music (not sure if applicable to recruitment)
  • Animation (typically when you have s product or service to explain)
  • Webinars (great for gathering emails, try GoToMeeting)
  • Apps (if you have the resources)
  • Games (mainly for large employers)

What content marketing do you use? Please let us know in the comments!

why branding is good for recruitment

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Branding, Recruitment Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The Best LinkedIn Apps for Blogging and Presenting

LinkedIn, the most widely-used social recruitment site, provides a directory of applications available for users to add to their profiles.  Applications cover a variety of subjects – from creative portfolios, to travel, to blogs – and today I will be testing and studying the blogging and presentation applications, seeing what works best for me.

When adding an application, the user is given two options – to display it on their profile, or to display it on a console on their LinkedIn homepage. By adding an application to their profile, a user can highly increase their chances of catching the eye of a future recruiter.

There are two main blogging applications available for LinkedIn profiles- Blog Link and WordPress – and together, they support all types of blogs.

WordPress

The WordPress application syncs a WordPress blog’s posts with a LinkedIn profile – which may be handy for a professional blog, or someone who documents their working life in a more casual manner.

When you add the WordPress application, you are asked for your WordPress URL and to choose one of two options – to show all blog posts, or those with a special tag.

The special feature they offer – simply use a special “LinkedIn tag” on certain posts – allows for only certain posts to be shown on the LinkedIn profile. Updates are automatic to allow for instant comments and likes and the window is simple, with posts portrayed in an eye catching fashion.

BlogLink

Bloglink LinkedIn appThe Blog Link application, powered by Type Pad and created by Six Apart, does exactly the same for non-Wordpress blogs AND WordPress blogs but does not offer the special filter. It gives the user a portal to read all their own blog posts (which can also be added to their profile) and those of their contacts.

Of course, this application supports all blog types, so is more useful to LinkedIn users, however the WordPress special feature tag is extremely useful, and can help the user portray their blog in the way they want it to be seen. However, with almost 55 million WordPress sites worldwide, it may be more professional to use the WordPress application and integrate with a well-built blog.

For presenting documents on a LinkedIn profile, there are two options – Google Presentations and Slideshare – which are both very similar, but aim for different user sets. There is also the Behance Creative Portfolio Display application for the more creative LinkedIn user.

Google Presentations

Google Presentations is described as a “professional way to introduce yourself and your work”, with the ability for a user to display a recent talk or presentation, a visual portfolio of their “professional accomplishments” or can be used as a profile ‘introduction’ to recruiters and professional contacts.

The application accepts Powerpoint files or presentations can be created using Google’s free online software. Presentations cannot be edited by other users – it is a simple way to show the rest of LinkedIn what you create.

SlideShare Presentations

SlideShare Presentations is extremely similar, and, again, is more of a presentation app than a sharing or collaborative app. You must have a SlideShare account to use this app, however, which can be a nuisance if you only want to upload one presentation, for example.

Unlike the Google software integration, you can only upload presentations onto SlideShare and not create through additional software. Therefore, it seems that Google Presentations is the better application for presenting yourself on LinkedIn.

There are features – such as the no-need for an account (however most people own a Google account to integrate with YouTube etc) and the ability to create presentations using built in software – that SlideShare lacks and maybe knocks it down. It could also be seen that Google Presentations is a more ‘professional’ version of SlideShare – due to it’s slick and simple colour scheme and design, and easy to use system.

Behance Creative Portfolio Display

Behance LinkedIn appFinally, LinkedIn offer the Behance Creative Portfolio Display application for creative people who want to show off their work. Powered by portfolio website Behance, the app is free, “easy to manage” and supports an unlimited amount of multimedia content, with an optional filter to only display certain projects, if necessary.

Alongside the ‘Project Manager’ section – the app offers a gallery showcasing a wide variety of projects from other users. A very useful app if you are working in photography or an artistic/creative field.

Conclusions:

After experimenting with all these applications on my own LinkedIn profile, I found that the WordPress application, and the Google Presentations app were the best from their respective categories, with my favourite being the WordPress application. It is easy to use, updates automatically, and can hold text, photo, video and more – whereas the Google app needs updating manually.

What do you think is the best LinkedIn application? Have you tried any of these out and what were your results?

Related: How Recruiters Can Use SlideShare for Branding [10 Tips].

Laurence Hebberd

Laurence Hebberd is Community Manager for Link Humans in London. He also runs the Link Humans Twitter feed - @LinkHumans.

Filed Under: LinkedIn, Personal Branding Tagged With: , , , , , ,

What Social Recruiting Apps Actually Work for Candidates?

tools for career management

You’ve read all the blog posts, articles and ebooks. You’ve heard pundits on TV, radio and down your local pub swearing by the power of social media. It’s the solution to everyone’s customer service gripes, online dating, general time waste and of course your job search.

We’re told recruiters and employers spend all day trawling through random social networks to find their next hire. So what are you doing even reading this, you should be busy branding yourself on social media surely?

Which ones should you use?

How do you know which social tools are actually useful for jobs and which ones are a giant waste of time and effort? Well that’s not easy to tell. They all look equally shiny and typically have a decent content marketer pushing out good stories on a blog.

Is BranchOut going to get you a job? Maybe BrandYourself? No wait, try VisualCV or why not DoYouBuzz. BeKnown is definitely the one. Wait, there’s another one…

If you’re a jobseeker (or an employer) you will have noticed that almost every week there is a new shiny tool, app, plugin, add-on, extension or platform launched in the career space. They all have ‘unique’ features and promise to automate your job search (or candidate search for employers).

You might find yourself signing up to new tools every week and going through the motions of filling in your bio, uploading that photo and connecting with the same people again. By doing this it’s easy to achieve a false sense of achievement, just like spraying out 50 CVs to random companies.

Low barriers to entry

The trouble with online technology is that the barriers to entry are very low, meaning anyone can set up the ‘next big thing’ from their garage. This is of course a great leveller and you would hope the invisible hand of business would sift out the inferior products. Not so I’m afraid. Just as it’s easy to set something up, it’s easy to keep it ticking over as well whilst you decide what to do with it (that’s what they call BETA testing). This situation is not something the end-user will benefit from.

Big companies always succeed surely

And just because a large company launches a new application doesn’t mean it’s going to take off; Monster.com launched BeKnown last year. It was billed the professional network hosted on Facebook and was going to be a game changer. A year later you barely hear about it anymore – those guinea pigs that signed up and did up their profiles, connected with others and started ‘engaging’ must be regretting their early adoption.

What are some of the good ones?

There are a few tools that are genuinely useful and they have either been acquired by the bigger players, such as Rapportive or SlideShare which were both snapped up by LinkedIn. The best way to find out which ones are worth bothering with is to take a step back and let others do the testing for you. Instead of jumping on every new plug-in, wait for reviews to come in and ask your network if they get any use out of ‘Super Cool Plug-in 3.0′.

Bottom line

Social media is about people and a hiring process is about people (I would hope). Use social to identify and contact the right people within an organisation, don’t sign up for another tool that somehow automagically would contact people on your behalf.

If you think a tool looks useful, take a step back and breathe. Read the reviews, ask your peers and do your due diligence. Then you’re ready to invest your time and effort.

What social recruiting tools work for your career management? Please let me know in the comments!

photo by: futileboy

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Job Search, Social Recruiting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How Recruiters Can Use SlideShare for Branding [10 Tips]

slideshare social media

Ever heard of SlideShare? It’s a site that hosts your slide decks from Powerpoint or Keynote. It’s one of those great content marketing platforms most people have never heard of, let alone recruiters.

Some impressive stats first of all: SlideShare is one of the top 150 sites on the web, they get 60 million visitors per month and have 3 billion slide views a month (that’s 1,140 slides viewed per second). So the traffic is good but it’s also the right type of traffic for most content marketers – it’s highly professional. According to ComScore, SlideShare has five times more traffic from business owners than other popular websites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

And the most impressive of all: LinkedIn just acquired SlideShare for the princely sum of $119 million. This of course bodes very well for further integration of the two products.

I won’t delve further into why it’s a useful tool, instead I’d like to give you ten ways to use it successfully:

1. Use existing content

Chances are that you will have a number of Powerpoint presentations kicking about on your hard drive. What company doesn’t have a sales presentation? Your recruitment process outlined? A few slides about your technology practice? As long as they don’t contain any confidential information, go ahead and upload these to SlideShare and you immediately have content. You can of course change them before you upload, you might want to change images, update figures or cut out a few slides in the deck.

2. Keep it simple

When I upload a presentation to SlideShare, I’ll typically take out about half the slides. I leave the visually interesting and self-explanatory ones, as the viewer won’t hear me talk about the content. Nobody wants to sit through a 70-slide deck in an auditorium and nobody wants to see even half than that online so keep it simple instead and get your message across in a brief manner. Some of the best presentations I’ve seen are only about 10 slides long and contain very few words.

3. Be sure to add clickable links

I only realised that you can add hyperlinks to a SlideShare deck a few months ago. This means that you can add a link to your website or Twitter on the front page and last page, in case anyone loves your presentation you want to make it easy for them to contact you of course. When I put slides up about LinkedIn for instance, I of course link that to our LinkedIn training workshops in London.

4. Use the right keywords for SEO

SlideShare has an internal search engine where visitors pull searches every day, most of these will be researchers out on a fact-finding mission. On top of that the content also ranks really well in external searche engines like Google and Bing, use this to your advantage. Just like a YouTube video, it’s important to use the right title, description and tags in order for it to be found online. Instead of calling your presentation “Annual Salary Survey”, try “London Technology Salary Facts and Figures by Profession and Seniority” – the latter one is full of keywords that people will use to searches.

5. Embed here and there

A great feature with SlideShare is the fact that you can embed your presentations on websites, blog posts or anywhere else you can think of. This mean anyone can host your presentation on their blog but with a link back to your SlideShare account. This can work really well when writing a blog post about a topic, you add more weight to your argument with a presentation embedded.

In fact, I write a quick blog post around every most public presentations I give, an example is How To Build Your Personal Brand on Social Media [Slides].

6. Link up to LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers its users very few cool applications but thankfully the SlideShare integration is one of them. By adding the SlideShare app on LinkedIn, you can automatically display your most recent presentation on your LinkedIn profile. Or you can set it to whichever presentation you feel represents you the best, you can even show two decks on your profile. Everytime you upload a new presentation to SlideShare, it updates your profile and it sends out a notification to your network’s homefeed indicating there’s new content to have a look at on your profile.

7. SlideShare surprise

My party trick when speaking at a conference is to upload my deck to SlideShare early in the morning. I then schedule a tweet linking to the presentation to go out when I should be up on the podium speaking (using the event hashtag of course). When I do speak I mention something like “right about now a tweet is going out linking to this presentation by the way”. This has generated thousands of views of my presentations from all around the world.

8. Check the stats of your presentations

By having a look at how many views, comments and shares your presentations get you’ll get an idea for what people out there are interested in. And perhaps what they aren’t interested in. Just like with any content marketing strategy, it’s about monitoring what works and try to do more of just that. You’ll get even more interesting stats if you upgrade…

9. Go pro if you want leads

OK if you are really serious about your presentations and feel that they will lead to solid business, you can upgrade your account. This will then give you analytics of who’s viewing your decks and SlideShare will present you with up to 30 leads per month. You can get your own branding on your account and you can do private uploads as well. My rule of thumb is as with all freemium models, only go pro when you’ve mastered the basics.

10. Check out other people’s decks for inspiration

Finally, you’ll probably get into the whole presentation thing now after realising what SlideShare can do for you. This raises the bar and you now want to make even greater decks for yor audience. If you find yourself stuck for what to put on your next slide, fear not. Have a look at similar presentations on SlideShare to get ideas from your peers. Or check out the ‘Most Popular Today‘ section on the site, this is where some of the best presentations in the world are featured. Pick and mix your ideas and transform it into your content.

Any more ideas around SlideShare? Please let me know in the comments!

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Branding, Recruitment, Slides Tagged With:
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