How to make your recruitment business succeed on social media
Social media plays an important role in a businesses recruitment strategy, with over 84% of businesses using social media for recruiting, compared to 56% in 2011.
It’s important your recruitment business sets out a long-term social media strategy that supports your business objectives.
In this article we’ll help you to answer these questions:
- How do I define what I want to achieve from social media?
- How do I measure success?
- How do I interpret and improve my results?
Step one: define your goals and metrics you will use to measure (what you want to achieve from social media)
Social media strategy for a recruitment business is no different to any other business. You want to engage an audience and measure the performance in two ways:
- Lifetime metrics; ongoing monitoring that tracks activity over time
Messages: product, services, employer branding, values, vision
Metrics: reach, followers, traffic, comments, likes, mentions and shares – you want these to be trending upward.
- Campaign metrics; measured over a specific period of time
Individual campaigns that run alongside your brand messaging and measured independently.
Example: Vonqs campaign to hire a complete tech team is a great example of how to run an integrated marketing campaign. The results (all measurable!!) – 1,4 million online impressions, 5862 video views, 4930 clicks, 95 event registrations, 55 attendees, 20 candidates added to the pipeline, 15 candidates, interviewed, 5 hires including a lead developer.
Metrics: campaign metrics are measured against specific objective for that campaign. E.g. to increase followers – you measure % increase in followers. For applicants, you measure % of applicants originating from your campaign.
Step two: measure, report and improve your results (interpreting and improving your results)
Once you have your goals set in stone, the next step in the process is to track them. Make sure your social media channels have specific UTMs setup – this will make reporting on campaign success easy.
Depending on the social media platform you’re using, the majority of them usually have an analytics/insights function inbuilt.
However, one of the clearest methods to track is via google analytics as it gives you a complete overview.
We wrote an article about how and why recruitment agencies should use Google Analytics – view it here.
Use the right tools
Managing your social media can take up a lot of resources. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools on the market to help assist with your social media marketing.
- Scheduling: Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout, Sprinklr, Agora
- Analytics & reporting: Bitly, Google Analytics
- Listening: Brandwatch, Mention, Keyhole
- Content curation/generation: Buzzsumo, Feedly, Quuu, Scoop.it
Review your campaigns
When you have the results, you need to review the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
Evaluate what worked well, what didn’t work well then make a decision on whether or not to continue that campaign or make some changes and try again. It’s not about trial and error but more about finding the right combination and always developing your campaigns.
Summary
Social media offers recruitment businesses a lot of opportunities. Optimising performance is a continual process of strategy, planning and reporting. To achieve maximum success, make sure you:
- Focus on where your target audience is.
- Hire a marketer (in-house or freelance) To achieve results from social media, you need to have a rich repository of content.
- Marketing should always be a data-driven approach. Follow the numbers, they don’t lie!
Key takeaways:
- Define the purpose of social media for your business
- Align goals with business objectives
- Choose the right platforms
- Publish content when your audience is active/online
- Make sure you’re targeting the right audience
- A/B test messages
- Use social proof, stats and quotes to validate your campaigns
- Track your campaigns
- Report findings
- Review results and reset goals