Insightful Ways to Use Social Media

I don’t know about you, but I find myself scrolling through social media every day. That might be the millennial in me talking, but it’s the truth. Social media marketing is so valuable and beneficial to your company and overall business growth. If your business isn’t on social media, bookmark this blog and create some accounts.

Done? Great, keep reading.

We get a lot of questions asking about the various ways to utilize social media platforms. For starters, what is staffing firm social media marketing? Staffing firm social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your target audience(s), build your brand, promote your business, increase sales, and drive website traffic. Currently, the major social media platforms businesses use are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In this article, you will find insightful ways to use each of these platforms to drive your business.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn isn’t just a platform for people to grow their network and careers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic platform to do that; however, it’s used to grow your business as well. LinkedIn is a great platform to make connections, generate leads, and create brand awareness. It also offers advertising campaign features to promote your business. For example, we recently had a client who wanted to create an ad campaign on LinkedIn as a promotion tool. In the process of creating the ad campaign, they were able to select their target audience based on location, career level, and more. It’s a simple set-up that is guaranteed to get you the results you want and need.

Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn allows you to post content. Your social media marketing strategy should include an editorial calendar of what should be posted and how often. Daily LinkedIn posts establishes you on this platform by offering your followers real value. Your daily posts should include promoting your blog, podcast, webinars, newsletters, etc. You should also utilize the platform to post updates on your company or future events. Something we recommend posting daily is what we call repurposed articles, which are recently published articles that are related to your business and target audience. This is a great tactic to reach readers and improve your visibility within your follower’s feeds.

LinkedIn also gives the opportunity to join or create groups. Joining or creating groups that are relevant to your business is a great way to interact with your audience. It’s an opportunity to create relationships with possible connections or potential new clients.

Your company’s page on LinkedIn says it all, so make sure all information on your profile is relevant and updated. The summary section on your LinkedIn page is the most important, as it’s one of the first elements users see besides your profile picture. Your summary should speak to your target audience directly, introducing your business and proving accurate contact information.

Facebook
Facebook has billions of daily active users, so it’s a good platform to utilize when getting your business out in the cyber world. Professional Facebook pages are similar to a personal profile page, but it allows your audience to “like” your page, as opposed to becoming “friends”, so they receive updates. The most important thing to remember when putting your business on Facebook is to create a page, not a personal profile. Creating a page grants you specific functions that are applicable to businesses.

Like LinkedIn, Facebook is used to grow your business by creating brand awareness, generating leads, reaching a target audience, and making connections. This is done by regularly posting and updating your followers with information about your company or other relevant topics. A clear marketing strategy for your Facebook use is vital. Create an editorial calendar to keep track of daily posts. This strategy gives you a clear direction when it comes to marketing as well as helping to measure your social media success. A function Facebook offers that every company should utilize is Audience Insights. Insights allows you to obtain data about your audience such as post engagement and the increase or decrease in likes and followers. It’s a great tool to determine the type of content your audience is looking for from content and discussions.

When it comes to your regularly scheduled Facebook posts, we recommend posting daily, include pictures and maybe even videos in your posts, and engage with your audience. Pictures and videos that are posted keep your followers entertained and adds that extra appeal to your feed. When it comes to engaging with your audience, continuously comment and like other posts as well as reply to comments that are made on your company’s posts. Engaging with your audience shows that you are interested and increases your chances of making new connections.

Twitter
Twitter is different from other social media platforms because you are given a limited amount of characters per post. Currently, Twitter posts only contain 280 characters, which frankly, is not a lot. This is your opportunity to make short and sweet posts that get to the point and grab your audience’s attention. Something that you should always make room for in your short Twitter posts are hashtags. Hashtags are used to classify a group of posts so a user can easily search it and find a range of posts using that hashtag. For example, if you search #staffingfirmsocialmedia, chances are you will find this blog among those posts. The truth is, hashtags are used on almost every social media platform and have the same effect, but Twitter invented the hashtag. Each hashtag should be relevant to the topic of your post, your business, and your audience.

Like other social media platforms, Twitter gives the opportunity to like, share (known as retweeting), and comment on other page’s posts. It’s important to stay active in the Twitter community among your target audience. It’s great to follow your editorial calendar by posting daily, but it is equally important to engage with other pages and your followers in order to show your interest in your business and spreading your brand. People like people that show that they care and are interested. If you come across a tweet and find that your business can assist them, comment or shoot them a direct message. Twitter gives you easy access to contact people, so take advantage of that.

Instagram
Instagram is a different world of social media compared to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. This is due to it being photocentric. According to Hootsuite, Instagram has a billion active monthly users, and an advertising audience of more than 849 million users. It’s easy create a business account on Instagram, but remember, this platform is primarily used within the app, so you must have that in order to proceed with your postings. With your business accounts, like the other social platforms, you are given access to features including Instagram Insights, ads, shopping, and a call-to-action button on your profile. These features allow you to easily increase brand awareness, generate new leads, increase website traffic, and potentially make sales through the app.

It is important to remember that the active audience on Instagram are mostly Millennials and Generation Z , between ages 18 and 29. This is a great platform to use if you are targeting an audience of that age group, however, if you are targeting an older audience, consider using the platforms listed above more heavily, especially LinkedIn and Facebook. When building a following on this app, follow people and pages that are relevant to your business. By following other pages of equal relevance, you are attracting more users that share that common interest, therefore extending your brand even further.

As previously mentioned, Instagram is photocentric. You want your content to be visually compelling, so it draws in your audience. Your photos don’t need to be taken with a professional camera, but they should be clear and well-composed. Expand your photo gallery with pictures of products, behind-the-scenes posts of your office, reposts (known as “regrams”), and even short videos. This also a great place to use hashtags to draw in more users that are interested in those topics.

Once your editorial calendar is created for this app and you know what content you are posting, it’s time to decide what your brand’s “look” will be. This is all done through pictures, and it is incredibly important to have a visually pleasing aesthetic. As well as being visually pleasing and eye catching, your posts should be consistent across your page. That way, your followers, and potential new followers, recognize your content easily in their feeds and throw you that “like”.

Overall, staffing firm social media is so important and should be included in your marketing strategy. It allows you to build your brand as a company, increase your following, promote business, and increase sales. If you have any questions about your staffing firm social media strategy, please feel free to contact us. Good luck and happy posting!

About S.J.Hemley Marketing
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations.