Whether you‚Äôre aware of it or not, if your organisation is on social media, you will have an employer brand. Discover why it‚Äôs important, how to take control of it and how it can help you reach your organisation objectives from our webinar with Alissa Burn from spottydog communications! ü§ì
Related Content:
- [Webinar] Using Social Media for Employer Brand: Reassuring, Engaging & Recruiting
- [Lesson] Getting Front-Line Staff and Leadership Teams to be Awesome Social Media Producers
What Is an Employer Brand?
Your organisation’s employer brand is how you present yourself as an employer to potential candidates and existing employees. It defines who you are, demonstrates what your culture is about and shows why potential candidates would want to work for you.
Part of your employer brand will involve your employee value proposition. This is made up of what value your organisation offers to employees in exchange for their hard work and commitment. ü§ù
Your employer brand will also be influenced by your employee brand. In such a connected world, employees will act as ambassadors that represent your organisation, so it’s crucial that employees are happy and act as positive advocates online.
How Can Social Media Help With Employer Branding?
Whether you spend time working on it or not, any organisation with an online presence will have an employer brand. This is especially important during recruitment, as job seekers tend to show shopper behaviour when looking for new opportunities.
75% of candidates look at a company‚Äôs online presence before applying for a job, with 55% abandoning applications if they see negative reviews online about the organisation. Taking control of your online presence and building a strong employer brand on social media ensures you‚Äôre sending the right message to the right audiences. LinkedIn has even reported that organisations with a strong employer brand reduce their recruitment costs by 43%! üìâ
How COVID-19 Is Changing Employer Branding
The Coronavirus pandemic means that many organisations are having to stop and reassess how they’re using social media for their employer brand.
If you have currently frozen recruiting, that doesn’t mean that you have to stop posting to social media. You may decide that it’s best to post content that is not recruitment-specific, but still adds value to your audience:
- Interviews and Articles: Sharing interviews from your management team and news from your industry that highlights your organisation’s thought-leadership in your sector.
- Educational Content: With people working at home, furloughed or redundant, many are using the time to reflect and develop new skills. Posting content that can help them learn and further their experience is priceless to audiences stuck at home.
- Throwback Content: As long as you‚Äôre sensitive to the current situation, sharing nostalgic content can resonate well with your audience at the moment. üì∑
Be honest with yourself and set realistic expectations — if you can’t continue to post at the moment, it’s perfectly fine to press pause and use this time to refresh and re-energise. It’s also an excellent opportunity to gather good news stories about your organisation to post onto social once you’re able to again.
Creating a Social Media Strategy For Employer Brand
Like your corporate social strategy, building an employer brand social media strategy involves three main points: setting objectives, choosing where to post, and planning your content. üí°
Step 1: Setting Goals
By setting out your goals for your employer brand strategy, you lay the foundation for what actions to take to achieve your objectives. You should consider:
- Business Objectives: How are you going to help the organisation achieve its overall goals? This is influenced by the broader company strategy, and will likely relate back to profits. How will an employer brand strategy on social media reduce recruitment costs?
- Communication Objectives: What do you want your message on social media to achieve? Do you want to reach a wider audience, generate higher engagement or create content that resonates both internally and externally? It‚Äôs a good idea to check out your competitors and other similar organisations to set realistic expectations. üëÄ
- Budget: How much money can you put behind advertising your employer brand on social media, and what do you expect to achieve with this?
- Stakeholders: It’s important to consider how all internal and external stakeholders will be impacted by this, whether that’s employees, clients or potential candidates.
Step 2: Choosing Channels
The social media channels you choose will be influenced by your audience, your sector, and what type of content is readily available for you to post. As a quick guide, here is a summary of the leading social media channels. üëá
- LinkedIn: Mainly a corporate audience, featuring long-form content and job pages.
- Twitter: Suited to regular publishing of humorous and light-hearted content, with a good potential for high engagement.
- YouTube: Perfect for long videos, explainers and how-to‚Äôs. üé•
- Facebook: Showcases frontline roles, ideal for image and video content that increases engagement.
- Instagram: An image-heavy, creative channel that is great for visual storytelling.
- Tik Tok: Targeted at a younger audience, using short videos that highlight personality. ü§™
- Snapchat: Great for events and live coverages, with filters adding a playful dimension to the channel.
Don’t be afraid to have more than one account on a channel. If you are targeting different audiences, you wouldn’t want your message to get diluted by using just one central account.
Depending on how many accounts you create, you may need to hire an agency or bring in a social media management tool to streamline your processes.
Step 3: Creating Content
Once you’ve pinned down your goals and decided on your channels, it’s time to look at what content you can create. Using key organisation themes may help to tailor your content:
- Key Messages: Linking back to your goals, how do you want to position your organisation? If you wish to showcase your team, you’ll publish different content to an organisation showing their thought leadership and industry innovation. ⚡️
- Available Content: If you’re struggling to gather content, don’t make it harder than it needs to be. Plan a mechanism for hunting out the stories you need, by using employee advocates, or internal communications systems like an intranet or shared drive.
- Organisation Calendars: If your organisation has significant dates each year, it can be a great source of content inspiration. For example, a university may need to recruit more people around clearing or enrolment days.
Hospitality company Mitchells & Butlers are a great example of targeted employer brand content, sharing direct employee quotes and team recognition on their social channels.
Building an Authentic Voice
The secret to authenticity is consistency. Your employer brand needs to be the same for internal as well as external stakeholders. This includes throughout a candidates recruitment journey, showing the need for consistency across marketing, HR, recruitment and communications teams. üó£
A candidate that stays for the first six months is much more likely to remain at the organisation long-term. If they find that your employer brand throughout the recruitment process isn’t authentic, they are more likely to leave. This wastes your training and recruiting costs as well as meaning you have to repeat the recruitment process again.
Avoiding Common Content Pitfalls
While different content will work for various organisations, some types of content may miss the mark altogether:
- Avoid Humblebrags: It’s great to celebrate the achievements of your team and highlight exceptional colleagues, just don’t turn it into a post about how great your organisation is.
- Engage, Don‚Äôt Broadcast: Social media is all about being social and engaging with your audience. Encourage employee advocates to share your posts, mention relevant accounts to start conversations, or check out related hashtags to join in with other discussions. üí¨
- Emotionally Proof-read: Before you hit publish, think about how it may appear to employees, candidates, clients or any other stakeholder. Is it sensitive to people’s viewpoints?
- Check Hashtags: If you want to create a unique hashtag for your organisation, get a third party to check it to ensure it is appropriate.
Measuring Your Success
The cornerstone of any successful strategy is continually measuring, adapting and evolving. While the success of your social media employer brand strategy will come down to your performance on social, you can break this down even further:
- Reporting the Impact of Communications: How has your strategy influenced your reach, engagement and web traffic?
- Cost of Advertising: When you advertise on social media, the better your ad performs, the lower the cost per view. With this in mind, if social media fits into your employer branding, it is a much cheaper channel to use for promoting your employer brand and reaching potential candidates.
- Sentiment: How well is your message landing on social media, and what can you learn from that? Does this tie into how your organisation is seen in general, and are your key messages getting through to internal and external stakeholders?
- Overall Organisation Impact: These include more quantitative objectives, such as the cost per hire, the cost of social media advertising compared to other mediums, and the number of employee referrals. Employee referrals can be super valuable to an organisation as referred candidates tend to be the best talent, and are more likely to pass probation. ‚úÖ
Despite many organisations freezing recruitment during COVID-19, employer branding is just as relevant now than ever. It influences your overall reputation and can help you build the best teams possible for your organisation. Want more insights and best practices? Check out the full recording of the webinar and let us know what you think @SoCrowd! üì£
