It's critical to start out on your social media adventure with a clear strategy in place. Here's why: once you get started on social media, things will snowball and you'll soon find your time being drained by activities that you wouldn't have prioritised if you had fully considered these issues from the outset and were disciplining yourself with a tightly defined social media strategy! So what do you need to do? Here's the checklist of one social media agency founder:
1. Define Your Target market
Who do you want to reach with your social presence? Potential candidates? Potential recruiting clients? What sectors are you targeting, in what geographies and at what levels of seniority? Do you hire from or sell into niche markets … and if so can they really all be served by one set of social profiles? Before you do anything, these are the questions you should ask yourself.
2. What Action Would You Like Your Target market To Take?
Looking ahead, what would constitute success for your team's social media presence? The response to this question will influence the tone of your social profiles, the content you share, and the calls to action you introduce in your updates.
The bottom line: decide what you wish to accomplish with your social media presence and then guide your target market toward taking actions that will help you get there.
3. How Will Your Social Profiles Be Valuable To Your Target market?
Consider how following your social profiles will benefit a member of your target market. What information, insights, data, interviews, humour, content would a typical member value receiving each day? Define this very clearly. Then, make your social profiles focus on delivering this value, from the bio that appears on your profile page to the content that you deliver.
4. Brainstorm and Research Who Already Reaches Your Target market
Chances are, you don't have as big an audience or following as you would like to have for your company. You can grow your audience by building relationships with non-competing businesses, organisations and individuals who reach the very audiences that you would like to reach. Figure out who they are– focusing particularly on those who have a history of regularly re-sharing other people's social posts– by brainstorming with colleagues and researching your demographics' interests.
5. Devise Tactics To Ensure Your Profiles Noticed on Each Social Media Site
Typically, only 20 percent of a social site's user base is active enough to see your updates and engage with your brand. It's therefore essential that you devise tactics for every social site to ensure that you've isolated those users who are both relevant for your business and active on the site. Otherwise you risk 80%+ of your efforts being entirely in vain as you attempt to engage with accounts whose owners are simply never going to be aware of your attempts at engagement or see your posts.
6. Listen, Test, and Learn. Then, Repeat
Pay attention to what people in your target market are saying on social media and the feedback you receive. Look out for mentions, comments, shares of your website content by others, etc. In addition to direct feedback like comments, also keep an eye on indirect feedback like click data on your updates and resulting website traffic behavior when prospective candidates find themselves on your company site.
Additionally, track whether the desired actions you wanted your followers to take are actually being achieved and continually make adjustments to refine your presence. A company can have easily the most popular Facebook page by posting comics, memes and videos, but that would likely cause job seekers to see the profile as a source of entertainment instead of a resource to help them land a new job.
7. Set Aside Time To Engage
How and when will you engage with your followers and potential followers? Have you ringfenced the necessary resources/ hours to ensure you don't compromise on engaging with your audience?
The reason this is so important is because the single biggest wins from your social strategy will stem from the time you invest in engaging with your current and potential followers. These interactions spark conversations with potential clients or candidates, and these conversations will result in you having a sales meeting or representing a candidate.
Related Video: Social Recruiting Briefing – Social Media for Recruiters