Building your social media presence as a recruiter is essential for attracting the best clients and candidates and ensuring your long-term success. Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter — with so many choices it can be difficult to know where to start. Our recommendation is LinkedIn, the recruiter’s favorite.
Here are our top four tips to help recruiters new to the branding side of LinkedIn to get started:
1. Join relevant groups and ENGAGE with your audience.
The key word here is “engage.” It’s easy to instantly join many open LinkedIn groups. To use them effectively, you need to follow a few ground rules for yourself. First of all, know who your target audience is and join groups within your niche.
Before you begin to promote your own brand, take part in group discussions and conversation; in other words, engage with your audience. Building credibility is more important than simply selling your brand – and other group members will appreciate you much more for sharing your expertise. Offer your opinion, share your experiences, provide potential candidates and clients with relevant tips. Once you are active in your groups, it makes it easier to connect with people in your niche.
2. Be relevant
Keep the information you post relevant and useful to the group. Most LinkedIn groups carry some sort of caveat allowing the manager to move posts out of the discussion section and into promotions. In the worst case, managers and moderators have the power to delete them entirely. For maximum effect, post your own blog updates with other articles relevant to the group and your audience. We suggest a 50/50 split. Sign up for weekly updates from the blogs and websites you find the most helpful — the chances are that your target audience will too.
3. Launch your own blog
We launched our blog last year and have seen a significant increase in visitors to our website as a result of the articles we post. The key is to offer useful and relevant information, not simply to promote yourself as the only recruitment solution. Use it to separate yourself from your competition, and post on a weekly basis. If you’re not sure what to write, look at current trends, examine the biggest challenges facing your clients and candidates and the ideas will soon flow.
4. Set up a company page
Setting up your own company page gives potential clients and candidates a focal point to keep up with vacancies, blog posts and other useful updates. The illustration with this post shows our company’s LinkedIn page.
A company page also gives you the opportunity to list your specialties, contact details and more information on your brand. When it comes to status updates, opinions differ on the best time to post. Our advice is try out different times of the day, especially outside standard working hours and see what works for you.
Once you have the hang of LinkedIn you can turn your attention to other social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Be patient – establishing a presence on social media doesn’t produce overnight results. Keep in mind your goal of becoming a credible brand name and ultimately the instant go-to for your future candidates and clients.