With most job-seekers seeking as much information about potential companies and positions as possible, word gets around fast about employers. With websites such as Glassdoor, prospective employees and new-hires have more access than ever before directly to your reputation as an employer.
Employees can compare salaries, weigh offers from multiple companies, and make more informed decisions about where they want to work. A low unemployment rate in most areas in the US gives new employees more options, too, as employers fight each other for talent.
And indeed in most sectors, recruiting and retention has become a fight. This makes branding and content for employers more important. Social media has become a key tool in company’s branding and content efforts for employees, and the tools exist now for most companies to use social media to build a better employer brand.
Storytelling and Social Media
Part of building any brand for any purpose is storytelling. With so many powerful stories out there about brands and fictional characters, finding your audience can be difficult. Social media tools can help you segment your audience so that you’re sending your story and your messages to the right people at the right time.
Social media platforms are constantly adapting and changing to accommodate business needs. In a flooded job market, reaching the right social media users is crucial. But social media platforms like LinkedIn offer other advantages as well, such as access to a huge database of potential employees, all using the platform to find jobs—a.k.a., you.
According to a recent LinkedIn survey, half of all professionals follow companies on social media to track potentially available jobs. Getting your brand voice and the story behind your company established and top-of-mind for social media users has become a key part of any recruiting effort these days.
Four Essentials to Using Social Media to Enhance Your Branding and Content
Social media is a great tool for any branding and content strategy, and some platforms can be used to enhance your employee communications initiatives and strategies overall, but companies that get the most out of their employer brand follow these four simple rules:
- Create and Establish a Brand Voice: You need your brand voice to be consistent and resonant with your customers and potential employees. Usually, your social media voice will need to be friendly and approachable, genuine, and unique. How do you want your company to appear to potential employees?
- Share Visual Content: The written word isn’t dead yet, but on social media, videos and pictures engage users much more easily than strictly text-only posts. Share pictures of your current employees laughing, show your awesome corporate office, take videos of employees working and playing hard, etc. You’ll draw more eyeballs to these posts and they can help support your brand story.
- Respond to Your Audience: It’s shocking how long it sometimes takes for employers to respond not only to interested candidates, but to simple questions and comments on social media. Not every social media interaction will lead directly to recruitment, but if you establish your reputation as a responsive, active company, more candidates will start seeking you out.
- Choose Your Social Media Platforms Carefully: Building a consistent employer brand that can be used to recruit employees on social media takes time and effort—daily work to engage with followers and establish your voice. If you’re putting all your effort into the wrong platform for your audience, however, you’re wasting it. Sometimes different audiences use different social media outlets, but the four most popular outlets for professional candidates are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Social Media and Employee Communications
Social media can be a useful tool for recruiters and HR communicators, or it can be a hindrance. More companies than ever are hiring professionals for the sole purpose of managing their social media outlets, and internal social media platforms are connecting large swaths of workers. The sky’s the limit for what social media can do. If you’re not using it to find talent, you’re missing out on social media’s potential to help your organization.
