Do you currently use social media to support your employer brand? Maybe it’s something which you’ve considered recently but you weren’t sure whether it was necessary? If you are looking to attract the best talent amongst a digitally savvy generation, having a social media presence is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it’s a requirement!
Potential employees will spend their time looking into social channels such as: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube to learn about the company’s work and culture. This means that you have to create content which boasts a culture and content rich environment!
Here’s how you can utilise each platform to ensure you do this well:
1. Facebook
Facebook has the largest potential reach of all social platforms and you can bet that one of the first things a potential employee will check is your company’s Facebook page – make sure that your wall is full of content and that you regularly post images and video (where possible)! Based on resources available you can either utilise your existing company page or create a new company page specifically for employer branding purposes.
Facebook is a great platform for showcasing varied content due to the fact that its demographic is very large. Make sure you highlight a mixture of news features and employee stories so you can optimise your audience reach. If you are setting up the page for the first time, notify employees about the company page and urge them to participate in discussions / content sharing, you can even run internal competitions on the page to ensure that the page grows quickly. To support this set up Facebook live sessions and closed groups which allow members to interact directly!
2. LinkedIn
On LinkedIn you can create a company page to showcase your organisation, its products or services and culture. You also have the freedom to customize the company page (to a degree) at no cost. For minimum time spent, make sure you include the company details (address, website, company size etc), add a logo, and customise a banner to your page to make it look professional! From the initial page you can also customize the careers section to ensure that it’s authentic and representative of your company.
You can upload photos, feature executives, employees and include employee-contributed blogs which are great pieces of content for current employees and potential employees alike! Don’t forget – your employees are your brand ambassadors so make sure that they have listed the company as their workplace and that each of their profiles looks professional (unified headshots and company bios). If you have brand collateral make sure to include this on your employee’s LinkedIn pages too!
3. Instagram
The key to ensuring that your Instagram account does well is by posting good quality images, regularly! It’s a great platform to get creative with both culture and open positions. If you are feeling experimental try something like Marriott‘s employer branding video:
https://www.instagram.com/p/5fLHRllPCf/
If being creative isn’t your thing, sit back and grow your employer brand on Instagram by getting employees to post their own content. The best way to do this is to invest into the culture and ethos of the company. Get the employees to do fun things and urge them to upload the content themselves. Make sure you encourage the use of a company specific #, a great example of this is NPR. They created a ‘life at’ # #nprlife and the content has grown organically over time!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRthmH-BAJN/
4. Twitter
Due to the fact that Twitter is an open platform, people can view your content without following you, which means your potential audience reach is uncapped and exponential. This also means that the content you put out is extremely important and merely putting a # in front of keywords isn’t enough to ensure you get results! Make sure to do research on your potential audience, the content which will resonate with them and use #’s to support this. Don’t worry – you can use an array of tools to help you find out which #’s will resonate with your audience such as ‘HashTracking’ which will do all the heavy lifting for you!
If you want to check out some players who have already done this and done it well, try Hootsuite and Twitter themselves (below):
Owly breaking it down at #hootsx breakfast @sxsw #sxsw #hootsuitelife @hootsuite pic.twitter.com/0mIwkeusKq
— Tori Swanson (@toriswansonart) March 12, 2017
https://twitter.com/kms/status/819693320372764673
There are also a number of tools which you can also use such as Google Trends and Hashtags which allow you to identify people who are talking about certain topics. You can search for specific #’s and filter by desired location, from here you can engage with potential candidates who have a genuine interest in the field.
Stay away from just tweeting about open positions – this will only create a disengaged audience as nobody wants to be constantly spammed about new positions which become available.
Be sure to check out how Disney and 5 other top employers use Twitter for this.
5. YouTube
The popularity of video is already huge and ever-growing! It’s also well-known that content is more likely to rank in the first page results of Google than text alone and can play a part in improving SEO. Make sure you are on top of the video trend by creating a company channel on YouTube and invest some time into solid video content.
If you don’t have a big budget for an employer branding campaign, not to worry – you can make your own videos relatively cheaply. You can shoot your own interviews of employees or do some ‘spotlights on’ which can work really well. Potential employees are likely to research what it would be like to work for the organisation which will give them a realistic expectation but are also a great way of highlighting company values.
6. Snapchat
This is a great platform to have fun with and with the evolving use of video it’s an opportunity to engage with a typically younger demographic, experiment with emojis, filters and upload internal company content. With the introduction of Instagram stories and Facebook messenger day, the video can be re-purposed across an array of channels to ensure that you are reaching the biggest possible audience. Here’s how Cisco leverages Snapchat for employer branding.
Conclusion
Different platforms can be used in slightly different ways to engage with a range of demographics so make sure you do research into your audience – who you are trying to reach, where they visit and are most likely to engage. Start with a smaller group of platforms which are most likely to support this and nail them. After you have these mastered, grow across the other channels and have at least one experimental channel which you can have fun with!
