Google Plus

4 easy tips to help graduate recruiters find their online audiences

Last week we told you about the story of Jon and Charlie, two regular guys with different approaches to making conversation. Jon got all the friends because he knew that everyone has a different point of view, a different set of preferences, motivators and behaviours and rather than talking about himself in the same way to everyone at the party (we’ve all met people who do that, right?), he listened to the conversation first and adapted what he wanted to say to match the people he was talking to at that particular moment.

The ability to do this is one of the characteristics that sets humans apart from other species. Empathy and understanding are basic principles of psychology. Jon knows that everyone is different and uses that to his advantage.

So why as employment marketers do so many organisations ignore this? Grouping people together into neat little boxes? Assuming that we all consume information in the same manner, hanging out in the same places, doing the same things – the things that marketers manipulate us to want to do.

Like sheep acting and thinking in the same way. It’s actually quite insulting when you stop and think about it.

Create a message. Identify an audience. Build a media plan. Penetrate that audience. Hope your message sticks. That just doesn’t work as a model any longer because in a world where we are bombarded with information all the time, content that’s not directly relevant becomes background noise.

Back to Jon’s point of view. We’re all motivated differently. We have unique interests and ambitions. As a result we hang out in different communities and consume information in different ways, having different conversations in different ways with different people.

And therein is the future of marketing (and especially employment marketing). People building real relationships with other people as a means of selling a product, service or career. Having conversations (dialogue rather than monologue), about mutually interesting topics, helping each other where possible, adding value all the time.

Where do those conversations happen? Wherever the people you need to speak with are hanging out. That could be at events, across the meeting room, on social media platforms – it’s a fragmented environment.

Where do you start? Well, there are two options here.

The first is to go to where they are. The second is to pull them to you and build your own community.

So where are they?

Here are four easy tips you can use right now to find where the right people for you are hanging out so you can start talking with them:

Twitter chats, Linkedin and Facebook groups and Google+ communities

These might seem obvious, but it’s quite rare to see employers make best use of these simple and effective options. Whatever your interest is – no matter how specific or oddball, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be an existing community that you can join, add value to and build your reputation. Google+ Communities are particularly useful for this, and we’ve talked about these before.

Facebook Graph Search

Graph search really allows you to effectively wade through the exabytes of data that Facebook has collected on people since launch. So for example, you can search for ‘Groups of people who like TOPIC and like PAGE NAME’ or ‘Favourite interests of people who like PAGE NAME’ to get a great understanding of where they spend their time online.

This can be particularly handy when researching the hobbies and interests of those who like your competitor’s pages, for example.

For a full list of the search possibilities and examples, it’s worth having a look here: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-graph-search-marketing/

Forums

Forums are an incredibly useful place when it comes to listening and contributing. Job boards like Indeed already post jobs on specialist forums – but why pay when you can do this for free? Taking the time to respond to questions and just generally being helpful will have a far greater impact on your reputation than just posting ads.

Take a look at all these students asking for help on Moneysavingexpert.com – they have a dedicated student money saving forum with plenty of questions waiting for you to answer: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=25

Boolean searching

This is more of a manual technique than a tool, and won’t work for everyone…but chances are you’ll find be able to find positive or negative conversations about you, and join in right away.

Try Google searching the below:

  • “like” + [your brand name]
  • “love” + [your brand name]
  • “I wish” + [your brand name]
  • “sucks” + [you or a competitors brand name]
  • “hate” + [you or a competitors brand name]

Some of the results might surprise you…

We hope these little tips help you find out where you should be spending your time online.

Next week we’ll be talking about the laws of attraction and how you can bring the party to you, so don’t forget to follow our blog using the follow button at the top right and you’ll get notified when we publish new content.

In the meantime, if you want to talk to us about how we can help you find and talk with the right talent, then give us a call on 020 7183 2556 or drop an email over to tam.salih@tonic-agency.com to set up a coffee.

http://www.tonic-agency.com

How can Google+ help employers get found by people that matter?

Being found online

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!

http://www.tonic-agency.com

How can Google Communities help position employers as a source of value?

Image

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 can you use Google Circles to be more personal?

ImageIn 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.