In today’s digitally amplified world of recruitment, you cannot afford to not include SEO and social media strategies in your recruitment marketing activity – it’s too indispensable. Ok, but how? Let us give you a few tips on how to include SEO and social media effectively into your recruitment businesses marketing strategy.

Social Media

The whole point of social media marketing strategy is focus – start by defining how social platforms serve your business. Branding, awareness and traffic (that may lead to conversions) are what you’re aiming for with your social media strategy. With so many different social platforms to choose from don’t fall into the trap of wanting to be everywhere. Pick a few platforms that actually help you achieve your goals and plan on focusing your energy on only these. As a recruitment agency, LinkedIn is your obvious number one social network and it will need a lot of your attention and energy. Twitter is usually a must as well for recruiters – make sure you follow your industry’s candidates, companies, and influencers. Facebook is arguably more personal, but also has a huge audience and many SMEs perform just as well as the multinationals in terms of relative ROI. As with any strategy, focus your efforts on where you audience eats, sleeps and breathes, otherwise you will just be wasting precious time.

Treat each channel individually – each social platform aims at different audiences and targets. That means that you should approach your goals and strategy differently for each of them.

Take on branding on your social networks seriously – your social platforms should clearly showcase who your agency is, its values and its tone of voice (which should be the same throughout all your content, internal and external to your website).

Check your competition – now, we didn’t say copy, we said check! Meaning, monitor and get inspiration from the campaigns that work the best. Also, always keep an eye on what is happening in your sector by monitoring the “noise” throughout the web with tools like Hootsuite or BrandMentions to stay on top of your game.

Create a content plan and editorial calendar – be organised and draft a 4 or 6-week communication plan in order to be consistent in you promotional messages. You’ll be saving time by writing them all in one go and schedule them with tools like Hootsuite or Buffer. Remember, however, that social media lives in the present, so make sure the messages you are scheduling are not going to be out of date when they go live, and if something comes up in your business (new job openings, you were featured in a magazine, etc.) you need to share the information now, not in 2 weeks.

Track and measure – your efforts are vain if you don’t add tracking and measurements to your strategy.
Your targets should include:

  • People and businesses to follow/connect with.
  • People following/connecting with you.
  • Number of posts/tweets you publish per week.
  • Number of retweets/likes you make per day.
  • Percentage of engagement from your audience (likes, shares, retweets, comments).
  • Traffic on your website from each social platform.

Use SMART goals:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

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SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

What is SEO? – If you are not familiar with the term, SEO is about optimising your content in order for your website to have achieve high rankings on a search engine for a specific search.

Quality content is the key – the key strategy to implement in your business plan regarding SEO is to create quality content – that goes through a link-building strategy (linking pages of your website between them, linking any external content to your website and linking your content to appropriate external content) and a keywords strategy (figure out which words your audience use the most while searching for your services or for similar services and make sure you use these keywords repeatedly throughout your website content). The best tool to understand which keywords you should use is Google Adword Keyword Planner.

SEO and social media – there’s a reason we’ve gathered social and SEO in the same article: they are interlinked and should be approached as a whole within your business plan. Social posts play a massive role in the overall content discoverability, so make sure you use your keywords in your promotion messages as well and always link your posts back to your website. Also, add social media follow and share buttons on your websites and articles to help your business establish a strong online presence.

Paid ads – after having written great SEO-friendly content, you need to make sure that it is seen by the people that matters to your business. Promoting your content with Google AdWords, LinkedIn Sponsored Updates or Promoted Tweets should be included in your strategy in order to boost your brand’s visibility and grow your business.