I hear this question all the time: 

“What should I be doing on social media as a staffing firm?”

My return question is: 

“What kind of marketing are you doing now?”

The reason is simple.  Why try something new that is not going to fit into what you are already doing and won’t be sustainable?  Building social media into a sustainable, integrated marketing plan is going to give you the most return both in the short- and long-term. If you can’t do it on your own, consider hiring someone to do it for you.

What is sustainability?

Sus·tain·a·ble  (adjective) 1. Able to be maintained at a certain rate or level. 2. Able to be upheld or defended.

Just as farmers plan out their crops and rotate the fields to make sure that the nutrients in the soil don’t get used up permanently, a sustainable integrated marketing plan should be immediately useful to your recruiters and internal team as well as producing long-term benefits.

What Are the Benefits of Social Media?

Benefit #1:  Your recruiters have immediate access to thousands of individuals. With simple, paid targeting you can reach a lot of people and showcase your services and jobs. With more refined targeting, you can focus in on candidates and clients that are more likely to convert.

Benefit #2:  Social media can be used as a “fish hook” to pull candidates and clients to your website or job board with the probability that once they are there, some of them will apply for a job, fill out a contact form, or request additional services.

Benefit #3: Social Media adds to your business’s overall branding and presence online. Every time you post something on your social media site, search engines are noticing. If you post something often and with regularity, search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. start to say, “Hey, this business is worth showing up on searches for certain key words.”

What does a sustainable social media marketing plan look like?

Go back to the definition of sustainable. You should be able to maintain a certain level of social media activity and scale up or down purposefully. If you post something every national holiday, not much is going to happen.

•    If you post jobs, post the jobs with descriptions that will make someone interested, every time.

•    If you post custom images with the jobs, keep your branding similar from post to post so it doesn’t appear random.

•    If you are using Facebook’s jobs feature, make sure you have someone that will follow up, every time, with applications from those posts.

•    Dedicate one person to answer inquiries in the messaging feature in a timely fashion so that you don’t lose qualified candidates. (This can also be used as a pre-screening tool.)

•    Share helpful articles, blog posts and infographics that are useful to your audience on a regular basis.

How can sustainability be measured?

The next definition of sustainable mentions being able to defend it. I’m going to twist the meaning a bit and say that you should be able to put a number on your efforts. Consider the following metrics to gauge the sustainability of your social media activities: 

•    How many people did you reach in a certain month through your social media marketing efforts? 

•    How many contacts clicked from your social accounts to your website? 

•    When you paid Facebook to boost one of your jobs, how much did you spend, how many people saw it, shared it, and/or clicked on it?

How should you integrate your social media activity with your current marketing plan?

•    Include social links in your email newsletters to clients and candidates, to give them an easy way to reach out to you.

•    If you are blogging (you should!), share your blogs every single time on social media, and put a few dollars behind each post to get your post seen by more people. This builds on your thought-leadership and also provides a wide-open door for someone to click to your website for more insights.

•    Make sure that one person on your team is a designated social media advocate. You want buy-in from as many people on your internal staff as possible, but this designates one person as the point of contact for social messages, branding, paid efforts, and reporting.

•    If one of your recruiters posts a job to your job board, have them create a Facebook job and set it up so applications go to their email. (You can give them admin rights to the Facebook page so they can do this instead of your social media advocate. It’s all about what works best with your internal recruiting process.)

Here’s the takeaway:

Get commitment from your team to do a certain amount on social media. Explore the options and know how it will benefit your business. Execute consistently. Measure results. Repeat what works, and experiment to see what you could improve.

How can Haley Marketing help?

Whether you’re a staffing firm owner just getting started on social media, or the social media coordinator for a specific firm, we have a team of social media experts in place to help support your initiatives. 

With Social Pro by Haley Marketing, one of our skilled Social Media Marketing Advisors will take responsibility for developing your organization’s voice on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. By posting quality content, top jobs, and other branded shareables every day, your firm will be positioned as a premier resource for job seekers and employers within your target market.

About Haley Marketing Group

Haley Marketing provides website development, email and content marketing, social media marketing and strategy consulting to the staffing industry. We provide services to more than 1,200 staffing and recruiting firms throughout the world, ranging from solo recruiters to larger staffing and recruiting organizations with regional, national and international offices. Our mission is simple: to make great marketing more affordable!

About Aaron Eastlack, Social Media Marketing Advisor

Aaron enjoys helping customers find practical solutions that work for them. When he comes in to work each day, he makes it his goal to provide awesome service to his clients. Aaron enjoys being a part of the Social Media team at Haley Marketing because he gets to collaborate with awesome professionals and gets to work for a company that is leading the charge in the staffing industry.