Where, when and how to get job post listings and other information to reach the biggest audience
Global social media use grew by 21 percent in 2016, according to a report published earlier this year — which is good news for employers.
With 2.8 billion social media users worldwide, if you’re not using sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote job openings and your employer brand, you’re missing out on important active and passive recruiting opportunities.
Recruiters, in fact, identified social media as the second best source for quality hires in a survey conducted by Jobvite; only referrals received a better ranking.
However, for social media efforts to be successful, you need to consider a number of elements — such as which site you use — that can have a significant impact on how your posts are received.
To help you get the best results, we’ve compiled the following guide to the most suitable social media outlets for posts that involve various components — including:
Content marketing items
Employers that Universum identified as some of the world’s most attractive used YouTube and Instagram to share original content they’d developed more often than other sites between 2016 and this year. Their YouTube and Instagram use increased by 15 percent, according to Universum’s survey; the amount of employers using their website to convey items they’d developed, on the other hand, increased by just one percent.
Video content
You may want to include a recruiting video when you post job listings; social media updates that contain one, according to research from Jobcast, garner 36 percent more applications.
Eighty-two percent of Twitter users watch videos, and 45 percent of people watch more than an hour of video content on Facebook and YouTube each week. YouTube may seem like a natural fit if you’re a sizeable organization — Society for Human Resource Management research found organizations with 25,000-plus employees are more likely than smaller companies to use YouTube to reach out to potential candidates.
Higher-income job descriptions
A larger number of employees who earn a household income in excess of $75,000 — more than three times the amount who earn less than $50,000, in fact — believe they’ll have luck using social media to find a job that’s fulfilling, according to Jobvite’s 2016 jobseeker study. Forty-five percent of workers who make more than $75,000 a year are LinkedIn social media users, according to Hubspot.
Entry-level position information
Assuming you’ll be targeting workers at or near the start of their career, you might want to post job listings on social media outlets younger workers frequent. Ninety percent of the social media users who are on Instagram are under age 35; Twitter users are predominately 18 to 29, according to Hubspot data.
Posts from your CEO
Seventy-six percent of executives who work at an organization where the CEO communicates via social media say it’s helped make their company a more attractive place to work, according to a Weber Shandwick survey. Facebook was ranked as the top social media outlet for CEOs; Twitter was the second most popular.
In addition to the social media cheat sheet items listed above, a number of other factors can influence how social media users react to your posts..
Timing, for example, can play a part. You’d want to post job listings on Facebook during the site’s busiest period — from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. EST or CST, according to Social Media Week.; Twitter users will most likely retweet information that’s shared at 1 p.m.
To find out what other elements — ranging from the optimal day of the week to share information to when to include images — to incorporate into your schedule to reach specific social media users, download our free white paper on how to improve your employment identity today.