Social Media Tips for Recruitment Agencies in London

At eSocialMedia we are always asked for tips and advice from recruitment agencies. So here are just a few that will help you to get started.

• Clearly define your business objectives. How many clients, candidates, staff and partners/suppliers do you need? What are your revenue and cost goals for the next 12 months?
• Identify your target audience related to your goals. Who do you want to engage in conversations with? What are their job titles? What kinds of companies and sectors do they work in? What do your existing contacts in these areas talk about and care about?
• Listen. Through free social media monitoring like Google Alerts or Netvibes or Social Mention etc identify what your target audience is talking about online? What are they interested in? Where are they online? Who are the influencers? What business language do they use?
• Create a content strategy to plan how you can source content related to what they are interested in. This will give you the ammunition to talk about the things that they are interested in that relates to your business expertise. Once you have identified the right content to source online or to produce yourselves then create a content plan of who in your business is going to create different types of content and when.
• Start collecting or sourcing content – blog posts, videos, SlideShare presentations, Podcasts, Infographics, market data, images etc
• Infrastructure – make sure you have the relevant technology infrastructure to hold and distribute your content and facilitate your connections online – blogs, YouTube Channels, Linkedin Groups, Twitter, Tribepad, Crowdworks etc Most companies use their WordPress blog as a content hub and connect to the other channels through ‘plugins’. If you work in different niche areas consider the feasibility of creating a non branded online community for talent pooling.
• Put your policies, procedures and processes in place, create the materials to communicate them to the users and educate each department leader on how this will work and why it is important.
• Training – train your staff on how to listen online and have relevant online conversations when they engage your target audience online. Make sure they know why they are doing it and how to collect and store the business intelligence they collect from online conversations in your CRM. Examples of business intelligence include potential clients, unhappy clients, competitor analysis, product development information etc
• Get involved! This is the fun bit – get involved in relevant conversations and seed links in the conversational spaces, back to your content on your blog. Always add value and have conversations like you would do face to face. Basically just be a good human being and a good recruitment consultant through your interactions online. Ideally you will become a specialist in your area and add value to those you interact with.
• Integrate your social media activity with other marketing initiatives like events and offline PR and advertising. Let people know where to contact you and talk to you online.
• Regularly review and improve your processes to get the best operational efficiency from your team. You can create internal online communities where different groups of employees can share examples of best practice and can help each other to improve or avoid mistakes.

There are hundreds of other ways that enterprise social media can be applied in recruitment both internally and externally and we are always happy to help.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this discussion. If you have a specific question, opinion or comment that you would like to share or discuss then just us ask @ColmHannon or Colm.Hannon@esocialmedia.co.uk – we are listening.