I hear this question all the time: “What should I be doing on social media as a business?”
My return question is, “what kind of marketing are you doing now?”
The reason is simple. Why try something new that is not going to fit into what you are already doing and won’t be sustainable? Building social media into a sustainable integrated marketing plan is going to give you the most return both in the short and long term. If you can’t do it on your own, consider hiring someone to do it for you.
(HMG plug: Our Social Pro Program is awesome!)
What is sustainability?
Sus·tain·a·ble (adjective) 1. Able to be maintained at a certain rate or level. 2. Able to be upheld or defended.
Just as farmers plan out their crops and rotate the fields to make sure that the nutrients in the soil don’t get used up permanently, a sustainable integrated marketing plan should be immediately useful to your recruiters and internal team as well as producing long term benefits.
What Are the Benefits of Social Media?
Benefit #1: Your recruiters have immediate access to thousands of individuals. With simple, paid targeting you can reach a lot of people and showcase your services and jobs. With more refined targeting, you can focus in on candidates and clients that are more likely to convert.
Benefit #2: Social Media can be used as a “fish hook” to pull candidates and clients to your website or job board with the probability that once they are there, some of them will apply for a job, fill out a contact form, or request additional services.
Benefit #3: Social Media adds to your business’s overall branding and presence online. Every time you post something on your social media site, search engines are noticing. If you post something often and with regularity, search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. start to say, “Hey, this business is worth showing up on searches for certain key words.”
What does a sustainable social media marketing plan look like?
Go back to the definition of Sustainable. You should be able to maintain a certain level of social media activity and scale up or down purposefully. If you post something every national holiday, not much is going to happen.
- If you post jobs, post the jobs with descriptions that will make someone interested, every time.
- If you post custom images with the jobs, keep your branding similar from post to post so it doesn’t appear random.
- If you are using Facebook’s new jobs feature, make sure you have someone that will follow up, every time, with applications from those posts.
- Dedicate once person to answer inquiries in the messaging feature in a timely fashion so that you don’t lose qualified candidates. (This can also be used as a pre-screening tool.)
- Share helpful articles, blog posts, infographics that are useful to your audience on a regular basis.
How Can it Be Measured?
The next definition of sustainable mentions being able to defend it. I’m going to twist the meaning a bit and say that you should be able to put a number on your efforts. How many people did you reach in a certain month through your social media marketing efforts? How many contacts clicked from your social accounts to your website? When you paid Facebook to boost one of your jobs, how much did you spend, how many people saw it, shared it, and/or clicked on it.
How Should I Integrate My Social Media Activity with my Current Marketing Plan?
- Include social links in your email newsletters to clients and candidates to give them an easy way to reach out to you.
- If you are blogging (you should!) Share your blogs every single time on social media, and put a few dollars behind each post to get your post seen by more people. This builds on your thought-leadership and also provides a wide-open door for someone to click to your website for more insights.
- Make sure that one person on your team is a designated social media advocate. You want buy-in from as many people on your internal staff as possible, but this designates one person as the point of contact for social messages, branding, paid efforts, and reporting.
- If one of your recruiters posts a job to your job board, have them create a Facebook job and set it up so applications go to their email. (You can give them admin rights to the Facebook page so they can do this instead of your social media advocate. It’s all about what works best with your internal recruiting process.)
Here’s the takeaway:
Get buy-in from your team to do a certain amount on social media. Explore the options and know how it will benefit your business. Execute consistently. Measure results. Repeat what works, experiment to see what could work.
How Can Haley Marketing Help?
Whether you’re a staffing firm owner just getting started on social media, or the social media coordinator for a specific firm, Haley Marketing Group has the team in place to help support your initiatives. With Social Pro by Haley Marketing, one of our skilled Social Media Marketing Advisors will take responsibility for developing your organization’s voice on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. By posting quality content, top jobs, and other branded shareables every day, your firm will be positioned as a premier resource for job seekers and employers within your target market.
Your advisor is also available to answer specific questions about other leading social platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. We understand the social space and want to help you make the most out of your time spent on every platform.
Did I mention Social Pro assisted in clients winning two ASA Genius Awards in 2016…including a Grand Award in the Firms With Less Than $7.5 Million in Annual Sales Class?
Not sure you need a full social media advisor to execute your strategy? Just need a little coaching along the way?
That’s fine too!
We’d love to consult with your team on a monthly basis, giving your social media coordinator or internal team member tasked with social responsibilities additional tips and best practices to help them crush social media in 2017!