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Is it Time for Staffing Firms to Break Up with Twitter?

Twitter for Staffing Firms | Haley Marketing Group
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The following transcript was taken from InSights, a staffing and recruiting podcast from Haley Marketing Group dedicated to providing quick-hitting takeaways on Social Recruiting, Content Marketing, and Employer Branding. To listen to the episode, click play on the player above or visit the episode page [InSights] Is It Time to Break Up with Twitter?

 

Brad Bialy: I want to preface this segment by saying I personally love Twitter. Matt, I know you do too.

Matt Lozar: Yeah, don’t check my screen time.

Brad Bialy: That said, I think I finally saw the data I need to put Twitter on notice. Earlier this week I looked into collective job board data for all Haley Marketing Group job boards, so any client that has the Hailey Marketing job board has a universal UA code through Google analytics, so we can look at data across the industry.

Understanding the Data

Brad Bialy: I was looking at this data to really understand the difference between the mobile experience and desktop experience. As I was in there and I figured that out, I then wanted to look at, okay, from a social media standpoint, how many individuals in 2019 have come back to any client job board throughout the year from social media? So I broke this down into three social platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Brad Bialy: Again, as we looked at data from throughout 2019, all the traffic coming back from these three platforms is the following. From Facebook, just over 42,000 sessions, from LinkedIn, just under 18,000 sessions, from Twitter, 317 sessions, back to anybody’s job board throughout 2019. Is it time to put Twitter on notice? Is it time to pull the plug on Twitter? Should we invest more time somewhere else? Matt, get us 

Matt Lozar: Let’s take the step back. We’ve said numerous times on InSights, you have to show your content where your audience is.

Brad Bialy: Correct.

Matt Lozar: That’s where Brad is moving towards with this data. So for jobs on Twitter, the data shows it’s not a great place to share content right now. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re looking at just job board traffic, we’re not looking at any of the other content from your website, which would be a different discussion.

Matt Lozar: So for sharing jobs on there, that to me would say, don’t put a lot of time into that. I mean, is it even worth setting up an automated feed? Yes and no, because it does get your content out there without you spending any resources. But from a user experience standpoint, it might not be great. So to looking at the data, if you’re spending a lot of time posting jobs on social media, I mean, on Twitter, excuse me, specifically, that’s ROI negative. It’s not bringing back applications and not even getting people back to that contact form we talked about here in segment one.

Brad Bialy: It’s scary. I know for six and a half years at Haley Marketing Group now I have really tried to lead the charge for Twitter being effective for staffing and recruiting. To Matt’s point, this isn’t data from collective Haley Marketing Group websites, this is just back to job-specific data, the job board themselves.

Developing a Strategy for Twitter

Brad Bialy: As we continue this segment, we want to stress that when you’re deploying a social media strategy, we need to think about your goals. So what is the goal of Twitter? What is the goal of your social strategy on Twitter? For us at Haley Marketing Group and we think about smart goals, we really want to define them by, either applications or job orders. We want to get so far down the line that it’s not just, “Oh, we had three likes on Twitter,” because that doesn’t matter, right? What matters is the fact that somebody applied to a job or somebody requested a conversation with you about your services.

Brad Bialy: So, when I looked at this job board data and I saw that, astonishingly, we had 42,000 plus sessions back to collective job boards from Facebook and only 317 from Twitter. I mean, I’m ready to say that this isn’t worth it. It’s at least not worth it, in the sense of using Twitter to drive applications.

Matt Lozar: Right.

Brad Bialy: We can think through, okay, what is Twitter? Well, Twitter is a conversation. We’ve said for years that Twitter is one-to-one dialogue, reaching out with candidates, having that conversation, being very personal on Twitter. Twitter is a glorified chat message. Using Twitter to set up an auto feed of all your jobs to just post jobs isn’t effective. I mean, the data proves that it’s not effective. It’s difficult for me to admit it, because how much I love Twitter and how much I can see Twitter working, from the stance of having that conversation and growing personal brands or even organizational brands. But in terms of just driving applications, I would double down on Facebook because of this data.

Matt Lozar: For that goal, yes. I think Brad’s, the segment title here of “Should you break up with Twitter?” For posting jobs, yes. For other tactics, I’d say no, because it can work well. I mean, our CEO, David Searns, if he’s at a conference, will use Twitter to meet with other vendors or even potential prospects or current clients or speakers or anyone at the conference, because they’re engaged with it, through the conference, through a hashtag. That’s where that engagement comes back and forth.

Should We Break Up With Twitter?

Matt Lozar: Should you still post your news on there? That’s more different data that … dig into your analytics to look to see where the sources for your blog posts, your other pages on your site are coming from. So would I break up with it? No. Would I break up with it for jobs? Yeah. If a gun to my head, yes. You have to say yes or no.

Brad Bialy: You have to think about user experience, right? If you hold your candidate database and said, “Where do you look for available job opportunities?” I can’t think of anyone that says, “Oh, I get my job information from Twitter.” It’s just not where people go, they’re going to go to somewhere like Monster, maybe they’ll go to ZipRecruiter. Maybe, hopefully, they go to a specific staffing firm’s website and say, “Oh, I get my jobs from company X.”

Brad Bialy: We have said for so long that we want Twitter to work, and as we look at the social media landscape, and I’m so thrilled that we capture this data, because we can bring it to the industry. If you’re sharing jobs, really think through the ROI from every single post. We’ve said multiple times, every post has a purpose. Before you click publish, what is the purpose of that social media post? If it’s to drive applications, consider allocating that time into another opportunity. Because right now in this stage of the game, looking at this data, Twitter’s not it.

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