The Content Conundrum: How to Convert Social Content into Meaningful Engagement for Social Recruiting Success (HCI Webinar)

Editor's Notes

• #2: The old adage that Content is King hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s more apt now than ever. It’s content everywhere, all the time.   So, that leaves us with a content conundrum – we know content drives social media, and content is the vehicle to reach your audience, for delivering your employer brand message to them, and even for establishing yourself apart from everyone else.   But, if EVERYONE is creating content, and fighting for attention (and I acknowledge that even this webinar falls into that pool), at what point will we have complete and absolute saturation?   And when that happens, how do we reach those audiences, how do we deliver our message? How do we set ourselves apart?
• #3: We might not be that far from that point. There are so many statistics out there to choose from, but take these as an example:   the average person consumes 10 hours of content EVERY day. Think about that. That’s from 8am to 6pm of content. When do we have time for anything else? And when we do break free, we only retweet 1 in every 318 tweets we see. And the average Facebook post only gets shared one half of one percent. And we are not slowing down. In fact, we are speeding up. In the next 5 years, we will see a 500% increase in information on the web. It makes my brain hurt.   The reality is that there is that the supply of content is overwhelming a much smaller demand. After all, we only have so many minutes in the day.      
• #4: So, the obvious question is: how do we ever break through the tedium and onslaught of content to actually be effective, to reach our audience and clearly deliver our information or message?   We certainly don’t claim to have all of the answers, but we can share with you some approaches and best practices that we have learned over the years…  
• #5: I want to share with you a story about one of our clients, who you’d certainly recognize and have likely been a customer of. They hire a HUGE volume of people every year, and need to constantly refresh their talent pool.   We recently had a quarterly business review with them, and their results were interesting. In addition to their social career pages and talent communities, they activated their recruiters to share content with their social networks.
• #6: By doing so, they were able to increase their reach by 70,000 people. In Q2 alone, they grew that number 20% organically. They shared 325 pieces of content 15,783 times, and generated 20,973 clicks on that content.   From a marketing perspective, they generated 8,478,903 impressions, had a .25% click through rate, and had an earned media value of $76,301. In one quarter.   More important, they had 123 Talent Acquisition ‘wins’ – including referrals, candidates and hires.  
• #7: So, of course, the question is, how did they do that?   there are a number of things they put in place: They gave people a compelling reason to interact with them, and had content that was specific and unique enough to resonate with their audience, And then pointed them in the direction to interact more deeply – whether to learn more, to follow on social, to join their talent community or apply for a job. Used a number of channels that were interrelated: social, brand properties, mobile, and ambassadors.
• #8: They put social at the core of their program for very good reasons:   79% of job seekers use social media for their job search 86% of people in their first 10 years of their career use social media They need to be able to hire millenials, and they knew they had to harness social media if they were going to reach, let alone attract and hire them   They also know that mobile is an increasingly important channel to enable people to find them, and more people add to the momentum every day: 45% of job seekers use mobile specifically to search jobs   But astonishingly, 90% of Fortune 500 career sites do not support mobile  
• #9: The ambassadors’ part is really important, because it’s your employees who are connected to the people you want to reach. It’s the birds of a feather analogy. Software engineers are connected to other engineers, etc. Word of mouth has long been a central theme in marketing, and is gaining steam in recruitment marketing, as people increasingly turn to their friends and trusted sources for guidance, and employees for their transparency into the company experience. 92% of people say friends, family and trusted resources shape their perceptions and decisions more than company marketing 70% of Millenials say they hear about companies through friends and job boards 80% of Millenials look for people and culture fit with employers 65% of millenials are more skeptical of claims made by a company than 4 years ago   And yet, only 47% of companies fold WOM into their outreach efforts.  
• #10: While Content is King, it’s also the currency of social media. It’s what drives social media, and it’s what establishes interest, credibility and trust as a resource. Or not.   Great content buys mindshare. It buys attention. It buys thought leadership. Once you have that is something Bryan will talk about in a few minutes. But to get there, if it’s going rise about the droning blah, blah, blah of the other 9 hours and 59 minutes of content we take in every day, it has to be   Relevant, interesting, useful and sharable, and actionable. Give the reader something to do, someplace to go to drive the connection deeper.  
• #11: It’s so important that I am going to reiterate my point from a few slides ago. If you want to reach someone, you’ve got to speak to him or her. Give them content that means something to them.   After all, most software developers can’t cook, so why share content about a fabulous butter cream frosting with them?    
• #12: Think about the content you respond to. Content that leaves an impression, and causes you to take the next step to learn more, or engage more deeply.   Your response is no coincidence. The content that is most successful shares one of these traits:   It Evokes Passion – it shows the soul of the person, the company or the experience.   Inspires purpose – it ties to the fundamental urge we all have to be part of something great, and identifies with some core part of who we are.   Promise of potential – it inspires us to something larger, and satisfies some ambition we have.   Great content goes beyond a transactional read, and taps into something larger about who we are.
• #13: One of the big reasons our client was so successful is that their content wasn’t all about them. In fact, they told their story through 3rd party content, using content that aligned with their core values, their work experiences, and their culture, and then sprinkled in a good smattering of their employer brand content – employees talking about how great their company is, all the great things they are doing, the awesome culture, etc. And only then a very few job postings.   If all you’re doing is sending out job postings, and if that’s what you are providing your recruiters to share, their networks will just tune out.   We recommend a 60 / 30/ 10 ratio –   60% third party 30% brand 10% jobs  
• #14:   One of the most common questions we get about content is, “where do we get it?”   It can be an intimidating, and overwhelming thought. We don’t have enough, we don’t have the resources, etc.   You have way more than you think…   Going back to the 60/30/10 ratio, third party content can be a valuable tool for you. Tools like Feedly and Flipboard allow you to gather content around a specific topic that you can share. Adding your commentary or editorial allows you to co-opt the content and in some way ‘own’ it.   You also have an entire company working to give you content. Look in your news section for something your company has done in the community, or an award or milestone achieved. Anything that would make something think, “that’s a cool company. I can see myself working there…”   If push comes to shove, ask five employees to interview 3 of their peers about the great things going on at your company. You now have weeks and weeks of content to work with.
• #15: We’re not talking content for the sake of content. We have a purpose, and we want specific things from this content we are sharing. Tie it into a call to action – either to Join your talent community, apply for a job or simply to follow your social channels.   We call this FJA – Follow / Join / Apply. Whatever you call it, or wherever you send them, when you are sharing company news, or the employee generated video, add a link to encourage readers to go to deeper. There are tools, like bitly and Google analytics, that enable you to track each piece of content, and where it goes. It takes some planning, but once it it set up, you will have visibility into the impact of each piece of content, which will ten give you a clear picture of how your content strategy is working, and adjust as needed.  
• #20: So, where to start? Be very clear about what you are doing, and what you want to accomplish. Be explicit about aligning with business objectives. And articulate your sharable story – what do you want employees, candidates to say about working at your company? .
• #23: Develop a formal strategy that will guide all actions and activities.   Starting with the target profile. Create an archetype of the person you are trying to reach. Then chart out the course you will take to get to them.   Identify which channels your archetype uses, and adopt them.   Define your content mix and sources based on the archetype, channel and responses.   Activate ambassadors – they are your most powerful – and believable – voices.   Plan and schedule everything out – that way you have had time to work through any questions or hurdles that pop up.   and finally, this can’t be someone’s “night job”. We’ve all had those extra responsibilities that pile up, without anything being off loaded. And we all know how well those went. This is important, and if you don’t have someone on point, who is focused in it, then you’ll probably end up spinning wheels. It doesn’t have to be someone’s full time job, but it does need to have a home. Content strategy Create a target profile Who do you want to reach? (this will guide your content choices, channel selection, frequency, tone and voice Define content mix and sources Identify channels Recruit and train ambassadors to share your content Hint: ask for willing & eager hand raisers Create calendar/schedule Assign someone on point
• #24: Perhaps the most important part of your content strategy is how you measure it. It doesn’t have to be ‘soft’ metrics. In fact, by connecting to a Call to Action, you can tie a direct line between social content and outcomes.   We track more than 350 metrics across all Social Talent Acquisition, but they roughly fall into these categories:   Reach – how many people are you reaching? Where? When? Reach by recruiter. Month to month growth?   Volume of sharing – what’s’ being shared? When? Where? Who? What is driving engagement?   Engagement – what is clicked through? Where? When? What is Liked? Shared? Retweeted?   Call to action conversion – where are you seeing conversion? How far down the funnel do they go? Going back to the call to action, where are you seeing traction? Is your content driving traffic to your Talent Community? Are you growing your employer brand social channels? Are you getting respond to apply? For each piece of content, you can assign a bitly and track the actions that people take with it. Google analytics is also a powerful tool that allows you to track the traffic to your employer brand properties.   ROI – there are so many ways to measure ROI, so I will say this. Measure the return you want track. Sometimes it’s a budget analysis, others it’s a traffic or conversion metric against other programs. But define what it means at the outset, so everyone is clear as to what success means.   And then of course, adjust and recalibrate based on what you learn. This is not a one and done, but rather an ongoing activity.