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7 Social Media Sparks for 2014
Originally posted by Future Index. Thanks guys!
Belated Happy New Year to you all! We thought we’d open our 2014 account with 7 social media sparks to inspire your planning for the year ahead.
One: Zombie Talk
If you can get a famous alumnus of your university to give up a few hours to chat to your current and potential students then why not host it all in Facebook. Yes, Snapchat and Instagram might be flavour of the month, but Facebook still retains some of the very best functionality and the 100% target audience penetration to make a real success of an online chat. Full Sail University certainly got it right when they benefited from the wisdom of Hunter M.Via, an editor on the Walking Dead TV series (highly acclaimed zombie drama), who shared his experiences as a student at Full Sail and how he then went on to get a career in television. 2,000 ‘likes’ for…
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First impressions count. Not just at uni, but for years afterwards.
We’re big fans of the focus that employers place on hiring future talent. And why wouldn’t we be? We work with some of the world’s best-known employers to build their employer reputations. Graduate recruitment marketing – especially in the UK – is amongst the most competitive, most innovative, most dynamic and fun areas of employer marketing to be involved with.
Good news then that research released this week by HighFliers points to a resurgent graduate employment market in 2014. Hundreds if not thousands more roles will be open to those coming out of UK universities looking to start work in the autumn.
More good news. This time for those new graduates who just invested in paying tuition fees and living costs for the past few years and need to begin paying off that debt.
Some interesting changes have happened over the last few years however, suggesting that all may not be returning to the status quo as the economy improves.
The same research suggested that more than one in three of those vacancies will be filled by candidates who’ve already completed a placement of some sorts with their future employer. Good news again for the proactive, career minded student. Not so good if you’re less inclined toward planning your career and more inclined towards studying for your degree.
Just think. One third of all vacancies that are not open to application. What does that mean for graduate recruitment? And, what does it mean for those of us tasked with recruiting graduates? It’s clear that the future leaders we’re aiming to hire and develop (that’s why we hire graduates rather than those from earlier in education right?), are as keen as we are as employers to try out the working relationship before making a commitment.
So it seems that graduate recruitment through the milkround is not as tied to the concept of finding the next generation of leaders as it once was. And, if the annual autumn milkround circus is less important in finding the people that end up getting hired, what is all that marketing for? Come to think of it, if the decision to hire is made way before degrees are awarded, what is the purpose of recruiting graduates? Why not just hire earlier?
As one of our clients said to us recently it’s a bit more complicated than that. Graduate recruitment (and the associated marketing effort), serves many purposes.
It is partly about filling actual vacancies of course. Those people hired may or may not choose to stay with that employer for the whole of their career, if they do it’s a good investment to pay more in attracting, training, paying a higher salary and associated benefits. Unfortunately, statistically they’re more likely to move in a few years time. In which case it’s not. The investment simply serves to get people ready for their next job – perhaps in a competitor organisation.
However, as a means of providing early insight into the reasons to join a business, the process of the marketing of graduate vacancies is difficult to beat. If we are seen as a great place to work in those formative years then this memory of our offer will stay with the people we need for the whole of their career- irrespective of whether they join us or not immediately.
The future leaders we hire are influenced by their first impressions and do remember the good and the bad. I’m certain that we all can recall from our own experience who we’d work for if we had the chance. How would you respond if that company approached you now? Do you feel any more positive or negative about them?
Graduate recruitment is changing. We have to think both ahead of the curve and for the long- term if we are to maximise our ROI. Very little of our energy should be focused on being part of the final year application fest that happens each autumn. We won’t hire the best people that way.
We’re going to start exploring the traditional and contemporary models of graduate recruitment over the next few weeks – which is better and why. We hope you’ll enjoy the blog series over the next few weeks and hearing what you have to say.
Don’t forget to follow our blog to keep up to date with the latest thinking and pop over to http://www.tonic-agency.com to get in touch.
Sponsoring the RAD Awards
When we were approached to see if we’d like to sponsor a category at this years RAD Awards it didn’t take too much thinking about. Tonic, a little brand consultancy, sponsoring a category at the Oscars of the Recruitment industry? Yes, absolutely!
But, it had to be the right category. It had to align with our values and the work that we do. And that’s why we’ve chosen Employee Engagement. You see the bottom line for us is that the work that we do in building brand, articulating the things that make our clients special and executing the best candidate experiences we can, must continue into the experiences of the people hired, once they’re hired. It can’t just be about attraction.
If we can get the hiring bit right, and then make sure that those promises are fulfilled on we’ll be hiring advocates. People who will be positive about us, people who will deliver growth and profitability, people who will make the attraction of more new people easier in the future. Employee engagement is critical to the way that recruitment happens now and in the future. Can you tell that we’re passionate about it?
We can’t wait for the night. Not only are we short-listed for four awards in our own right, but we also get to celebrate with the winner when they’re announced. Exciting times.
Good luck then to Accenture and 106, HCA and Pink Squid, Manpower and Carve, Ovo and Aesop, and finally Sony Music and Blackbridge.
See one of you on the 30th January.
How can Google+ help employers get found by people that matter?
Hello, and welcome to our final thoughts on Google Plus. Thanks to those who’ve been keeping up to date with this series, we hope you’ve enjoyed the content and found it insightful. For those of you who’ve just joined us, each week we’ve been sharing thoughts on the social network, around how employers can make best use of this largely overlooked channel, to become more social, personal, human and ultimately more valuable to the people they hope to begin a conversation with.
Let’s start off with a quick re-cap.
Google Plus has a big user base. Surprisingly big, in fact. It’s now the second largest of the lot and is growing faster than its competitors. It’s predicted to outgrow Facebook in 2016.
It’s not too hard to understand why – it has some really useful and unique features that may just be the difference when it comes to building your employer reputation in the social space.
We’ve already talked about how Circles help you be more personal, how Hangouts help you be more human and how Communities can help you become more valuable. So what else is it keeping up its sleeve?
Well, there is one last hidden gem that Google Plus offers. It’s not as obvious as the ones we’ve mentioned, and you probably have no idea it exists unless you’re a bit of a techie.
It’s visibility.
If you want your website to appear on page one of someone’s search, Google Plus can help. And here’s how…
Google Plus content is treated exactly the same as a regular page on the web. Meaning it will appear in any Google search. And as Google is keen to give priority to content that has validation, it can also gain in page rank. How does that happen? Well, social networks are populated by real people who share, re-tweet, +1 and Like. These are called social signals and Google’s search engine watches these signals like a hawk, which help dictate popularity of content and thus search rankings. So if you share something with your community, and it receives plenty of +1’s, Google will automatically give that priority in any Google search.
Let’s put this into context. You’re a law firm that’s looking to engage talent earlier. You’ve created your own community for law students in their first year and you’re regularly sharing content, writing blogs and delivering thought leadership on all things legal. There’s a high level of interaction because you’re using Circles and Hangouts to deliver personalised content to the community and, as a result, you’re having meaningful, two-way conversations. Naturally, people +1 your content, share and then re-share (which you can monitor with Google Ripples… remember?) with their own Circles and Communities.
Now, let’s take Sarah, an 18-year-old who’s just finished her A Levels and is interested in a career in law. She wants to join a graduate scheme but is unsure which firms would be right for her. She decides to do a Google search: “Undergraduate law firm internships”.
Google begins to send out the crawlers and the usual suspects come back – such as ratemyplacement.co.uk, summerinternships.co.uk – but then your page appears three spots down.
You’ve not done anything extraordinary in terms of SEOing your site; you’ve not paid for sponsored Ads or Pay Per Click campaigns. Quite simply, Google has given you priority because of your effective use of Google Plus.
And why wouldn’t it? It’s a Google product!
Naturally, Sarah sees that this must be directly related to her search and decides to check out your page. Of course, she finds a wealth of information there to help her along her journey, and people in the same position as her from all over the world. Naturally, she decides to take part in the conversation and turn to your firm as a source of advice, comfort and thought leadership.
In today’s crowded marketplace, being visible is half the battle won. In a world where employers are trying to shout louder and harder to get their message heard, surely it makes sense to make best use of the tools available and begin to build conversations that count, in a more effective (and cost effective!) way.
Please do let us know what you think and of course, feel free to share thoughts on whether you think Google Plus offers businesses a new dynamic – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Don’t forget to like and follow us for more content. We’ll be back next week to share more tonicthinking around employer reputation.
Thanks for reading!
How can Google Communities help position employers as a source of value?
Welcome to the penultimate part of our 5-part blog on how employers can make best use of Google Plus. We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading and viewing our content as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it.
Last week we shared a video blog that talked about Google Hangouts and how employers can use them to be more personal. If you missed that, take a look at the video here.
This week we’ll be discussing Google Communities, and how they can be used to help position employers as thought leaders and a source of value amongst their audience.
For those who are unsure, a Google+ Community is something that resembles a traditional message board that focuses around a central theme. This could be “I love my cat” or “Manchester United fans” – literally anything. In these communities, followers can interact with other like-minded individuals while allowing the community moderator to share personalised content with that specific community.
Google+ already has a large variety of communities to choose from, whether they focus on engineering, computer science or quantum mechanics. If there’s nothing that suits your needs already, you’re able to begin building your own community and driving the conversation yourself. This can be open to the public or invitation only – whichever suits your purposes.
Communities on Google are fairly young, but as interest in G+ grows, so does the number of communities. And when you consider the rate at which the network is growing, you’d expect the current figure (100,000+) to grow extremely rapidly, largely due to the Google Eco-system, but also due to the way communities differ compared to groups on other social networks.
So what does this mean for employers?
Let’s take John, an Engineering graduate in his second year at Kingston University. What exactly makes an employer valuable to John? Is it the fact that they’ll be making him plenty of job offers in the future and filling his Facebook page and Twitter feeds with current vacancies? Or will helping John with careers advice and guidance be more helpful? How about giving John the latest thinking around an interesting Electrical Engineering project? Or perhaps sharing useful resources for him to visit online? The bottom line is that people will talk to you if they perceive value in it for them. By helping people, you automatically gain the status of a good source of value and naturally, you’re front of mind.
If you missed our thinking about how HelpMarketing can tie into your attraction and reputation strategy, then have a look here.
G+ communities allow you to develop or participate in a community conversation around a specific shared interest. This not only raises awareness around your brand, but allows you to develop authority as an industry expert, share advice and latest thinking and furthermore, allows you to engage directly with potential talent and begin following them or adding them to your circles to continue the conversation you’ve begun.
A few other nifty features of G+ communities that similar platforms such as LinkedIn groups don’t offer are:
- Using #hashtags to tie posts to specific searches on the platform and to a broader audience outside of G+
- Creating categories within communities to allow you to group and allocate content as you see fit
- With Google Ripples you can create an interactive graphic to see how a particular post has been shared and re-shared over a period of time, useful to assess the reach your content has
- Posts within a community are indexed by Google and will be found easily via anyone searching for that topic on a Google Search
- As with most of the G+ platform, the ‘plus one’ gives an indication of the popularity of the content you share – a good indicator to see if your content is resonating with your community
All of the above go a long way when it comes to helping employer’s position themselves as a source of value amongst the people they hope to begin a conversation with. And ensuring you remain font of mind means half the battle is won.
Next week will be the final of our 5-part blog, and we’ll be talking about the beneficial impact of G+ on your SEO and search visibility and tying together all the features we’ve discussed so far.
If you’d like to talk to us about any aspect of G+, or simply find out how you can be more valuable to talent, then pop over to http://www.tonic-thinking.com and get in touch.
How employers can make use of G+ hangouts to be more personal and human
The 3rd installment of our 5 part blog on G+. This week we look at how employers can make best use of G+ Hangouts to be more human and more personal with talent.
How can you use Google Circles to be more personal?
In the first edition of our five part blog focusing on G+ we asked if employers could afford to ignore what’s set to become the most used social media. In this, the second part, we’re going to talk about Google Circles and why they’re a really useful feature when it comes to delivering truly personalised content to your audience.
Quite simply a Circle is a group of friends, followers or contacts. Much like Facebook or Twitter, but with a difference. Unlike Facebook or Twitter there is no limit to the number of circles you can operate – each receiving a unique content feed. This offers endless opportunity to segment and personalise your messages and conversation to each of the communities you’ve built.
This allows you to be much more specific about what you share with each group. Facebook offers a single stream of content as does Twitter – G+ however, allows you to share engineering content with your Engineering circle, Marketing content with your circle of marketeers and information about what you’re planning to do at St Andrew’s University with your St Andrew’s University circle. You get the idea?
In context everyone wins. Your community get more relevant content – relevant posts that mean your message will be heard. And that’s a good thing – in a world where our attention spans are getting shorter and we’re demanding tailored content delivered faster, the ability to deliver information that is interesting, relevant and insightful is key to building brand advocacy.
So what’s our recommendation? Here are some ideas:
- Treat your Public circle in the way it’s intended – give broad-brush information that is designed to engage and attract. You need to attract followers too.
- Sub-divide the people that follow you into circles based on your target communities and develop content plans for each group
- Use the opportunity to add value – see our blog on HelpMarketing for more about this
- Think for the long-term. The objective here is to build engagement and then hire. Don’t simply broadcast a long list of vacancy announcements. This serves no-one and is a sure fire way of turning the people that you want to hire off.
- Content is king, and delivering the right information, in the right way at the right time is something many employers find difficult. G+ Circles make that easier.
If you want to have a quick look at Circles being used intelligently, then I’d recommend looking at what Cadbury achieved with their ‘Tasters Circle.’ It’s a great example of a community that was quickly built and united by the same passion.
Cadbury went on to further engage this community using another of Google’s handy features – the Hangout. We’ll be looking into those in more detail next week.
If you’ve got any questions about G+ in the meantime, or simply want to keep up to date with our latest thinking then why not add us to one of your circles at +Tonic Agency Ltd? Alternatively you can visit http://www.tonic-agency.com for further contact details.
How useful is Google + when it comes to building talent communities around your business, and can you afford to overlook it?
When Google+ launched in 2011 it turned out to be a damp squib. It was described by many as the party that nobody came to and came in for a lot of criticism. However, 2 years on and perhaps it’s fairer to say that G+ wasn’t a failure at all. It was just a little slow off the blocks.
Now that there’s a party that we can all join, how can employers take advantage of the functionality to build brand and community? How can we use the rather nifty functionality to take advantage of what could be the most powerful tool in your armoury for having conversations with the people you need.
The answer’s quite complex and certainly more than we could cover in a single blog. So, we’re tackling this in a five parts. Each week we’ll cover some of the individual features that G+ offers its members and look at how others have successfully used the site to their advantage.
But is it really a party that we want to be at? Is the kitchen full of interesting people or should we come back a bit later when more people have arrived? After all, a social network isn’t very social if nobody’s using it, is it? We’ll, something that might surprise most of you is that G+ is actually the second largest social network, behind only Facebook.
In May 2013 it had 343 million active users. This means that people were regularly sharing content with the public, their circles and updating their profiles. That’s a 33% increase from the same point last year meaning that it’s outpaced Twitter for growth.
What’s even more interesting is the fact that this growth only looks set to increase. As this research from searchmetrics shows, by 2016 G+ could well take its place as the most popular social network.
It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. It’s free, clean and streamlined. Not to mention the unique features it offers its users and the fact that one password gives you access to all of Google.
If you have never been on G+, I’d suggest taking a few minutes to activate your profile. You don’t need to set up loads of new information – if you use YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs or any of the Google suite, then you simply need to enter the same username and password.
We’re not saying G+ is the be-all and end-all. There’ll always be a time and a place for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But G+ sits in nicely in it’s own niche:
G+ is where you speak with people that you’d like to know.
Next week we’ll talk to you about Google Circles. We’ll explore what they are, how they’re used and what you can be doing to build individual talent communities that are united by the same passions and interests.
If you’ve got any questions about G+ in the meantime then why not get in touch with us at +Tonic Agency Ltd or visit http://www.tonic-agency.com.
The experiences and opinions of those within our communities has a far greater impact than anything you could possibly tell them
So what is Social proof?
Well, it’s widely been studied in the field of social psychology, and is tied to the human condition that results in the Fundamental Attribution Error. Yes, I know what you’re thinking!
In laymen’s terms it simply means that given limited time and motivation, people will often evaluate people, products, companies, jobs (and most other things) based on how those around behave toward them. It’s caused by a ‘fear of missing out’. Ask yourself this. If you were walking past a coffee shop, and you saw that there was a queue stretching right down the street, naturally you’d begin to wonder what’s so special that it’s got all these people waiting to get a slice of the action? How intrigued would you be? Would you let yourself miss out? I guess in this case it largely depends whether you like coffee, but you get my point.
The way we all make buying decisions had changed drastically. We’re all far better equipped at seeing through traditional marketing hyperbole. Instead, the views and opinions of those around us play a much bigger role in influencing how we feel about a particular ‘thing’. Those people could be your friends, family, colleagues or peers. Perhaps those we’ve never met before. And here’s the tenuous link to TripAdvisor – it’s essentially the Glassdoor equivalent of recruitment, but for holidays. But the principals are what matter here. It’s a thriving community full of those who are looking, and those looking to be influenced.
Social Proof has been used for a long time in selling us all products and services – celebrity endorsement is a simple example of this, as is the current KIA ad which majors on the opinions of ‘people like you’ rather than what the company thinks you need to know (obviously the good things have been picked out here). But rarely is it a topic that’s talked about in the world of recruitment. And it’s an interesting one.
We all know that we we live in a more social, mobile and connected world (I think!), as we see many employers ramping up their activity on various social platforms. Some do it well, others not so well. Heineken have a great example of crowd-sourced recruitment, which I thoroughly recommend watching here. We’ve also created a twitter activated vending machine for Mars which toured UK campuses to help recruit graduates. You can see a video for that here.
Yet when the large majority or employers and recruiters talk about social recruitment the focus tends to be on the same things. Channels and self-promotion. Let’s push out yet more messages and job posts to people through different channels. That’s bound to get us some applications.
This is largely missing the point and replacing like for like. What you should be asking is what value could we add to the talent communities we want to be invited into? How are we going to tell them what they need to know, where they want it and how they want it? And, how are we going to get people talking about us, become advocates of us and encourage more of the right people to join?
If we go back to thinking about the way we make buying decisions the use of advocates to do your selling for you is the most powerful tool in your armoury. Yet it seems many organisations have an inherent fear of letting their staff actively talk abut their company and their work with their own communities. But why is that?
By having a point of difference and engaging with talent communities (internal and external) in an authentic and human way and by ensuring that you live up to the promises you make, social proof should be nothing more than ratification of your efforts. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy all of the time. But, by acknowledging that these conversations are taking place and more importantly, being present when they happen, will give you a much better hope of influencing them as opposed to sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending they didn’t happen.
Visit tonic-agency.com for more insights and get in touch!
“Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.”
Napoleon Hill
Tonic thinking 