Advertising Archives - Page 28 of 68 - Post Control Marketing

Why social media employer branding? Job seekers rank social and professional networks as the most useful job search resource compared to job boards, job ads, employee referrals, recruiting agencies, and recruiting events. Companies believe that social media marketing will be the most in demand human resource skill by 2020.

An employer brand is a brand’s reputation as a place to work and its employee value proposition. It is related to, but unique from the general brand reputation and customer value proposition. Think of the difference as “great place to work” versus “great place to buy.”

Employer branding is attracting, engaging and retaining talent. This is often done by human resource managers working with marketing and/or applying brand management concepts to recruitment and employee relations. Social media can be a powerful tool for employer branding with many benefits as evidenced in the statistics below.How do you use social media for employer branding? First, understand your employee value proposition (EVP), the set of offerings you provide an employee. EVP is an employee-centered view of the unique set of values that differentiate your company from competitors. A good EVP helps attract and retain talent that is the best fit. Kristina Martic from the recruitment marketing firm TalentLyft explains that EVP includes:

Compensation (salary, bonuses)
Benefits (healthcare, vacation)
Career (stability, development)
Work environment (positive atmosphere, work-life balance)
Company culture (team support, social responsibility)

By defining your EVP you should form an idea of who your ideal job candidate would be. This is more than a standard job description of required education, skills and years of experience. TalentLyft recommends creating a candidate persona combining demographic and psychographic segmentation the way you would in defining a target audience for marketing.

Next, discover where that ideal candidate is spending their time online, where they are looking for job information, and who they want to receive that information from. The average candidate uses 18 different resources to research a company before applying for a job and 79% are using social media in their job search. The top social networks for recruitment are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. These social channels are good places for more formal posts (organic and paid) about specific positions, benefits and corporate values, but other factors are important.

A LinkedIn survey found that the number one obstacle candidates experience is not knowing what it’s like to work at an organization. For more of the behind the scenes or in the trenches view other social channels like Instagram or Snapchat could be powerful. Show don’t tell with images and videos of what the company culture and work environment are like.

Another LinkedIn survey found that candidates trust employees three times more than employers. It is important to include your employees in your employer branding social media. Consider employee takeovers and Instagram and Snapchat stories from live events. Or have employees guest write about their accomplishments on the corporate blog. Pew Research indicates that 77% of workers use social media while on the job. Why not leverage that time for the good of the employer brand?

Be sure to also use social media to communicate to your employees. Remember that it isn’t just candidates that are viewing your social posts. Employees are as well, especially when you start engaging them to communicate company culture. Job Vibe reports that employee turnover can be reduced by 28% by investing in an employer brand.

Another social channel consideration for both employer branding and employee relations is employer review sites. Survey’s indicate that 50% of job seekers read employer reviews on sites like Glassdoor before applying. And 69% are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand by responding to reviews, updating their profile, and sharing updates on the culture and work environment.

With employees sharing updates on brand social channels, writing corporate blogs and leaving reviews on employer review sites employer branding and employee engagement are intricately linked. Employee engagement is actively appreciating employees and their work to motivate more productive and active employees. This is important considering 89% of employees say performance recognition impacts their drive and determination.

Driven and determined employees are excited to be recognized for their work in social media and happy to share their enthusiasm for their work and company in social. This enthusiasm is observed by job candidates who become new employees and continue the cycle. Thus, good employer branding becomes good employee engagement.

Who is doing this well? The international IT company CISCO has a great employer branding and employee engagement program based on #WeAreCisco. Explore their Life At Cisco Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat for inspiration. They have even been enter into the Shorty awards for employee generated content for for employer branding.

If you haven’t thought about the importance of employer branding, employee engagement and social media, now may be a good time. It could be a nice edition to your overall social media strategy. If you are an employee looking for a job consider this Social Media Career Guide and developing A Social Media Plan For Your Personal Brand.

The first edition of my book Social Media Strategy was published in 2015. When I went back to update the second edition I learned that many things have changed in social media, but some things have not changed. How should your approach to social media adjust based on new developments? What is the same that you may still be missing? Below is a summary of what I discovered in analyzing social media updates over the last three years.

What has changed in social media — Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

New tools, tactics and features have emerged.

One major development has been the rise of live video. Interestingly live streaming video has been around on the Internet since 2007 with services like Livestream and Ustream.

Live video came into real prominence with the launch of live streaming video mobile apps. In 2015 live video took the stage at SXSW with the launch of Meerkat. Periscope was only a couple of weeks behind. Then Blab and Facebook Live were launched. In less than two years Meerkat and Blab were gone. Periscope was bought by and integrated into Twitter. In 2016 Facebook launched Instagram Live. YouTube now has live streaming video and Twitch is the Amazon owned live streaming video app for gamers.

If you have not added live video to your social media activities start looking into it now. Brands today need to seriously consider live video for its reach, engagement and creative possibilities.

Influencer marketing has taken off.

Three years ago we talked about influencers in the context of brand evangelism. Loyal fans and employees where recruited and equipped to become brand ambassadors. Businesses developed relationships with customers and trained employees who voluntarily advocated for the brand. Marketers built their own communities of influencers with programs such as the Lego Ambassadors where super fans were rewarded with exclusives, perks, free products and trips.

Today this process has been formalized. Influencer marketing focuses more on finding people with a high level of influence and pays them for specific campaigns. Now influencer marketing agencies, networks and software like TapInfluence automates influencer discovery, payment and content creation. Micro-influencer marketing has also become a popular strategy where brands partner with people who have smaller followings but have a highly engaged audience in a relevant niche. Are you leveraging social media influencers? Influencer marketing is the fastest growing part of social media strategies.

Paid social media has gone from an experiment to a necessity.

Three years ago paid social media was called native advertising and it was a small way to support organic social media efforts and a way to reach new audiences. It was also available on only a couple social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Today paid social media is a required part of most social media strategies to reach new audiences, but also your own fans on the most crowded social networks. The need for paid social advertising has increased as organic reach, or the percentage of followers or fans that see brand posts, has decreased significantly. Most top social networks now offer paid social media options including Snapchat, Pinterest, Yelp and even Reddit.

No matter how much paid social media grows, it is important to note that paying for reach does not replace the need for creating valuable content. Paid social media may buy exposure but it does not buy engagement and action that still requires quality content. The kind of content you create for organic social media posts.

Some social platforms faded away. Others became more important.

In the update of the book I removed significant sections on social media channels such as Google+, Flickr, and Citisearch. Other social media platforms and categories have been added. Snapchat has grown up to become an important part of many social media strategies.

Other niche social channels have become important for businesses in certain categories such as TripAdvisor for travel related business and Amazon Reviews for brands with e-commerce products. The entire category of Messaging Apps have grown in use and brands are now adding a presence on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Viber and Line.

If you haven’t reviewed your brand social media accounts in a while it may be a good time to conduct a social media audit to ensure you are on the right platforms for your objectives and target market.

What has not changed is the need for a social media strategy.

You can’t succeed by chasing the latest platforms, tactics and features or simply increasing content on existing social accounts. Brands need a solid social media strategy that works for today and three years from now. This is a mistake brands make even after being in social media for years and why nearly half of marketers are unable to show the impact of their social media investments.

For marketers, advertisers and public relations professionals to succeed at social media, they must first start in a place rooted in their distinct situation and drive a strategy of choosing social platforms and creating content based on their business objectives and target audience. Integrating social with other business functions and adding the right tools and metrics will connect your social media actions to broader business goals from the beginning. Then social media will not be an end unto itself and real ROI can be found.

Because of this gap in business knowledge spending in social media has failed to meet previous expectations. The initial hype over social media is dying down and management will eventually stop paying for engagement that doesn’t lead to bottom line action. Another possible explanation is according to Buffer Social’s 2018 State of Social Report only 50% of companies have a documented social media strategy.

Social media knowledge is becoming an expectation in most marketing communication professionals jobs and social media professionals will need to expand their business knowledge to see the big picture and talk the language of management. As social media will inevitably change more tomorrow the need for a solid social media strategy will not change. What are the biggest adjustments you have made in the last couple of years?

For the latest changes consider Asking These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Social Media Strategy and its a good idea to Perform A Social Media Audit at least once a year.