5 minute read
Using Social Media
Social media is an established component of many employers’ interactions with graduates, whether from an attraction, engagement or onboarding perspective. This section provides some suggestions for using social media as part of your overall program. The benefits of such include cost reduction in attraction strategies, increasing your employment brand presence online and with passive candidates, providing your organisation a voice where conversations are already happening about you online, and engaging and connecting candidates and graduates to build loyal talent communities.
If you choose to use social media, ensure you monitor your pages regularly, be available, and answer all questions in a reasonable period of time, otherwise you could disengage potential graduates and damage your employer brand.
As an Attraction Strategy
Many employers are no longer concerned about the risk of establishing a Facebook fan page, Twitter account or YouTube Channel to promote their employment brand. The risk now is NOT having a social media presence, and not having a voice or contribution towards what graduates are ALREADY saying about you.
The first step to introducing social media elements to your graduate marketing campaign is to be clear on your overall objective. Are you actively recruiting for a special candidate niche? Are you looking to improve your employment branding? Are you seeking to engage with passive talent for the future? Like any piece of marketing material you don’t produce it ‘just because it’s cool’. Having a clear objective will help you ascertain which platforms to use for what purpose, what content will be required, and whether you can adequately resource this. Contrary to opinion, it is not necessarily time consuming to manage pages on social media platforms if you do this tactically and let the community somewhat manage itself.
Examples of successful graduate strategies can be seen amongst the winners of the AAGE Graduate Recruitment Industry Awards (“the AGRIAs”). You can also research further by talking to other employers and by looking at their social media presence. Initiatives might include:
creating a YouTube video about your program that could ‘go viral’ and attract new candidates to your brand building a Facebook Fan Page to provide insight into your organisational culture by profiling employees on it and having current graduates run the community a LinkedIn group for your current employees to refer potential graduates to you a Twitter handle to share company insights or highlight graduate events.
As an Engagement Tool
There are many benefits to be gained from using social media platforms to engage both candidates and graduates. Social media lends itself to networking, which increases relational bonds within the organisation. For candidates, this might mean establishing a Twitter feed that allows your followers the opportunity to experience a snapshot of the company culture through company insights and events, or keep your applicants updated on overall selection process progress. For employees, establishing a Yammer group might foster sharing, collaboration and connection. Again, having a clear business purpose and strategy for introducing these platforms is essential.
Building a Business Case
Many organisations require a business case to enable access to these platforms in the workplace, or for the brand to be represented online by the graduate project team. This might require liaising with several internal departments for sign off and approval, including Legal, IT and Corporate Marketing.
It is essential when building a business case to cover risk mitigation from a discipline perspective (harassment and bullying, accessing prohibited content) but many of these things are likely covered by existing policies. The business case might include a Social Media Policy to cover these governing practices and some guiding principles on how communications (particularly negative ones posted externally) will be managed and by whom.
The key to success in engaging the business in social media strategies is:
involving your stakeholders early and taking them on the journey with you establishing clear guidelines to manage platforms, and level of engagement with external audiences maintaining security of your platforms having a clear strategic need and vision that is regularly re-visited and updated in accordance with new social media platforms and updated company strategy/direction.
Implementation Tips
Some basic rules of thumb for managing your social media platforms include:
Spread the word about your social channels; building them into your brochures, micro sites, email templates in your ATS etc. and cross-referencing between the channels. Share and re-tweet quality content of others, and thanking those that do the same for you (a basic principle of social media is engaging with others’ content). For example, this might include sharing a Harvard Review blog on your Facebook page for graduates interested in leadership. Follow (on Twitter) and Like (on Facebook) other relevant users and pages. Use applications with viral potential e.g. polls, videos, competitions, blogs etc. Embed a blog or some other form of regularly updated social content on your careers site, which will ensure higher Google search ranking results Post content at times of day when your audience is online. If posting content is onerous, you could use a scheduling tool like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to do this for you. Ensure content is not all informational and focused on the organisation’s wants and needs. Share advice, LISTEN, respect others contributions and entice people in. Social media engagement with students is about creating an opportunity to access information in a way that produces a desire for the audience to visit again and again, rather than just once.
Monitoring Effectiveness
There are several suppliers that provide social media monitoring programs including Buzz Numbers and Meltwater. For a subscription fee, you can monitor what is being said about your brand on many platforms (by you and others), where conversations are most active, and the general sentiment of posts (positive or negative). These tools are useful in providing measurement of your employment brand presence.
For a more targeted measurement of hires made through social media, there are several things you can do. These include ensuring your ATS captures the source of applicant, measuring the source of click-throughs to your careers site through Google Analytics, asking suppliers to provide reporting where they leverage
social media for advertising, confirming with hires where they first heard about you, and making sure you can see and manage your interactions with candidates simply, using a dashboard like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.
Common Platforms
Common platforms used for social media by employers currently include:
Facebook LinkedIn YouTube Twitter Foursquare Whirlpool Yammer Instagram Snapchat
Remember, it is worth investigating not only which platforms you strategically might leverage, but on which ones candidates and graduates are already talking about you!
Find out more
Some useful sites to read about social media include:
Socialmediatoday.com Mashable.com Roi.com.au Socialmedianews.com.au
