Today’s guest contribution is from Amanda Davies, a marketing consultant and business coach with Green Umbrella Marketing – a recognized brand known within the recruitment industry for providing social media management services, coaching, design and online marketing strategies.
We are suddenly sprinting towards the end of 2019. As usual it seems, we’re commenting ‘where has this year gone.’ Well, in the blink of an eye it will be 2020. A new year and a new decade. Where will this take your recruitment business?
Hopefully you are ahead of the game and are tuning into your marketing strategy for the next 12 months. What has worked for your recruitment business this year and, as a result, where are you going to show up next year? What’s your focus, which events should you attend, how do you leverage any big brand developments to get candidates flocking to you, and clients knocking on your door with placements?
Measuring recruitment return on investment (ROI) is often a sticking point with marketers. It is incredibly difficult to measure definitive ROI when it comes to marketing. Candidates or clients will rarely choose you as a result of one singular piece of marketing activity. It takes multiple touch points before there is any signing on the dotted line. It’s often better to focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) rather than a direct ROI.
As a result of those multiple touch points you need to ensure your recruitment marketing strategy keeps your business visible in the right places over the coming year. Looking at social media in particular, what have we learned about recruitment marketing over the last 12 months that we should be keeping in mind for our 2020 strategy?
- Facebook is still the biggest social media platform by far (both in the UK and globally). It has 2.41 billion active users and is the world’s third most visited website after Google and YouTube. (source Hootsuite)
- Research shows that 74% of Facebook users log in daily, and they spend an average of 38 minutes per day on the platform.
- In the UK 70% of UK adults have at least one social media account, and 1 in every 5 minutes is spent on social sites. (source Ofcom: Online Nation)
- Use of Facebook owned platforms WhatsApp and Instagram has grown over the last 12 months with 1.3 billion and 800m users respectively.
- Over 200 million people visit a least one Instagram business page per day. However, demographics of Instagram users in the UK are heavily in the under 34 age-bracket, with 66% of users falling in this range. (source Statista)
- It is still one of the most popular and growing social media channels, both in the UK and globally. Use of ‘stories’ is also increasing. This is the 24 ephemeral content that appears at the top of the feed. Use of stories hit over 500 million users daily this year.
- In fact, behind Facebook, YouTube and messaging platforms – it is the platform accounting for the largest market share. (source Smart Insights)
- The top 3 reasons people engage with businesses and brands on social media is to ask a question, discuss an issue or to praise the product or service (via Sprout Social)
- Twitter has 134 million daily active users and is mid-level in terms of its popularity as a social media platform
- Good for sharing content and up-to-the-minute news, it satisfies our thirst as curious, demanding consumers
- Twitter has (arguably!) a more mature user demographic with 63% of users between 35-65 years old, with more men than women on the platform. (source Oberlo)
- Your tweets have short life span so don’t be afraid to repeat yourself or share links to the same content but with different support commentary
- For larger recruiters it is still a fantastic platform for controlling your brand narrative, responding to comments good or bad and, for any size recruiter, for sharing content and engaging with your audience.
- LinkedIn is still viewed as the professional social network and is popular with recruiters and job seekers globally. It’s also a valuable place for showcasing skills and sharing content
- Think of LinkedIn as a search engine, every post and piece of content on it is indexed and is searchable – great for your SEO juice!
- This year Linked added new features enabling you to post downloadable documents, as well as videos and images to support your posts, make use of this
- They also added a feature that alerts employees when new company content goes live to drive engagement on these posts
- LinkedIn has over 610 million users with just under half of these active users. As a platform it is responsible for 80% of B2B leads from social media (source 99firms)
WhatsApp, Messenger and TikTok
- TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform. If you have teenagers in your life, you will know it’s hard to extract them from it. It is particularly popular with under 25’s so unless you are marketing to that age demographic, just be aware of TikTok but put it to one side for now. It may become more mainstream in the next 12 months. We have had these conversations before about Facebook and Instagram so keep TikTok on your radar.
- WhatsApp and Messenger are increasingly popular and acceptable ways of communicating for businesses. Remember you can use desktop platforms for both.
- You can automate replies and engagement on WhatsApp and Messenger, and both are aiming to increase their B2C footprint.
- This year WhatsApp enabled businesses to showcase products and services, almost as a catalogue to potential consumers – or in recruitment terms, for candidates.
YouTube
- Video is not going anywhere as a means of creating, sharing and digesting content. YouTube is the second largest social media platform behind Facebook
- In terms of recruitment, video adverts and interviews have shown a 47% increase female applicants
- Video adverts are shared 5 x more than text-based job ads (both stats via Video My Job)
- A staggering 9 in 10 internet users visit YouTube every month, spending an average of 27 minutes a day there (source OfCom)
- Video content does not need to be high-end, or Hollywood budget productions but think about how you can introduce video content to your strategy.
We could write a blog for how to leverage each of the above platforms for your recruitment marketing strategy. There are certainly enough statistic out there to explore. Remember though, that not all platforms will be relevant for your recruitment business so don’t try and manage them all! For example, Pinterest doesn’t feature above but if you were a consumer retail business it might be the perfect platform for you.
Give some serious thought to and document your candidate and client persona. Where do they hang out online? That and keeping in mind the statistics above should form the basis of your recruitment marketing strategy for 2020.