While none of us know what 2021 will look like in terms of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on our lives and the recruitment industry, now is the time to plan ahead and make sure your business’s social media is ready for what the New Year brings.
In this guest article, I will outline three outdated tactics recruitment marketers are still using and need to move away from if they are to have a successful 2021.
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Stop posting job ad after job ad and think about your content mix
Many recruitment firms still use their social media channels as automated job feeds and wonder why their posts receive little engagement. Instead of using this outdated approach, ensure that your social media content mix is balanced and adds real value to your target audience. At BlueSky PR, utilise the ‘Rule of Thirds’ model to ensure that client content attracts and maintains an engaged following.
This is where your social media content is split into three distinct categories:
One-third of your content promotes your recruitment business and converts your audience
A large percentage of your social media followers are likely to be those with an interest in your services, such as a potential candidate searching for a new role or a prospective client looking for recruitment experts to help secure a new hire. Therefore some of your posts should be promoting your offerings. However, instead of just posting vacancy after vacancy you should highlight specific roles, for example, those in most need of filling by creating a ‘job of the day’ or ‘job of the week’.
One-third shares curated content
By taking the time to develop candidate and client personas you can gain a deep insight into your audiences’ interests and motivations and can curate articles from third-parties that add real value to their professional lives. This also helps demonstrate your firm’s knowledge of the sectors it works in which can be a major differentiator for both potential candidates and clients.
One-third is branded content
This is all about showcasing your agency’s brand and the value you can add to clients, candidates and new recruits. This should include owned content, such as blog posts and careers advice which is hosted on your website, ‘behind the scenes’ updates such as promotions birthdays that provide an insight into your firm’s culture, as well as earned content like testimonials and press coverage.
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Stop overusing hashtags and start using them strategically
Hashtags are a simple way to make your content easily discoverable across all of the major social media platforms. However, because of this, some businesses have the misguided belief that the more hashtags they use, the more impressions and engagement their posts will receive. However, using too many hashtags in your social media posts often has the reverse effect and makes your firm appear spammy or desperate.
Best practice guidelines recommend using no more than four hashtags per tweet, four per Facebook post, three per LinkedIn post and up to 30 hashtags per Instagram post. These should be relevant to both the subject matter of the content you’re sharing and its target audience to help ensure that your post reaches a large pool of people who have an active interest in it.
You should also type your hashtags in CamelCase — this is where the first letter of each word in your hashtag is capitalised. This improves accessibility as it enables assistive technology, such as screen readers, to be able to decipher the words used and also improves readability for users when they’re skim reading your post’s text in their feed. You should also place hashtags at the very end of a post rather than scattering them throughout the copy.
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Stop ignoring the benefits of paid social and start investing in it
Paid social has fast become a ‘must have’ rather than a ‘nice to have’ as ever-changing algorithms drastically reduce the amount of organic content from brands that appear in users’ feeds.
However, many recruitment firms have been slow to recognise the benefits of paid social and have failed to use it to ensure that their content is reaching new and existing audiences — therefore missing out on the huge opportunity to generate new leads and business.
A combination of more brands than ever before utilising social media advertising, and an increase in people spending more time on social platforms because of the ongoing pandemic means that the cost of ads is rising. For recruitment marketers with little experience in this area, any mistakes made due to its steep learning curve will prove far costlier than they would have just a few years ago.
