google+

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.