Jasmine Tiang

Your Facebook Page is your secret weapon. You can quickly communicate your brand on a channel that most of your target audience is already on. You can recruit passive candidates and convert your employees into brand ambassadors! It’s also a great marketing platform. For smaller businesses with a less-developed website, Facebook has most of the required functionality you need!

1. Make sure your images stand out!

Are your images bold, engaging, and effective? If not, they risk being scrolled past and buried in the graveyard of uninteresting status updates. It only takes a second to catch someone’s eye, but less than that to scroll right on by. Check out this quick guide on what makes images pop! Need more reasons? Here’s a list that explains how visuals improve your social media results.

2. Pin a Facebook Post!

A pinned post to your Facebook page is the first piece of content that most visitors will see. Yet, many people do not even know this functionality exists! There are many different uses for a pinned post – read the article.

3. Update your Cover Image!

Like the pinned Facebook Post, make sure you’re using your Cover Image to the fullest potential! Many pages tend to create a single cover image and never change it: this is wasted potential! This article shares 12 creative ways you can use your cover image. Inspire a purchase with delicious visuals! Promote a specific product. Feature some fans, or celebrate moments – the possibilities are endless.

4. Add a Call To Action button!

Most third party applications don’t work on Facebook Mobile. There’s also a set number of tabs you can have visible on your home page that don’t get buried under the More tab. The Call to Action is a quick fix that lets you present the very best of your digital assets up front and centre, on both desktop and mobile devices. Here’s how!

5. Accumulate Reviews!

Honest reviews left by third parties (your clients!) on a neutral website where you cannot edit your own reviews, are the most valuable digital artifact your business can have. Reviews increase conversions, improve SEO rankings, and provide a significant boost to your brand reputation. Reading reviews is the preferred method of researching a business. Ask your customers to leave you one! Looking for more tips and tricks? Check out these helpful links:

• Social Media Image Size Guide, June 2016 edition

• 53 Graphic Design Terms Explained For Marketers

Does your company have a Twitter page? It’s 2016 and you’ve probably heard of Twitter. Did you know that there are 310 million people that use Twitter, and that 100 million of those are monthly active users? If you’re looking to hire great talent without spending a fortune to access it, try social recruiting on Twitter. Companies typically use Twitter to establish a brand presence. It’s a great way to engage your followers and customers, market upcoming promotions and product releases, and also serves as a platform for providing customer service. What many companies also take advantage of, is the fact that many companies find successful hires through Twitter. By using location-specific hashtags in combination with branding hashtags and hiring hashtags, you can easily tweet out your job openings to the right audience. It’s the ideal location, because without leaving the website, jobseekers can learn about your company culture. In turn, you can learn a lot about your potential newhire by looking at their Twitter page. What are they tweeting? Who are they following? Will they be a good fit, and is it worthwhile to contact them for an interview? Twitter is free to use, easy to manage, and provides a wealth of knowledge on a large platform in bite sized pieces.  Why not use Twitter for your social recruiting? Did you know that Jobcast’s autosharing feature supports Twitter? With minimal setup, automate all of your job postings to be broadcasted onto this goldmine of a network and take your social recruiting to the next step. Here’s a video of how it works! Not on Jobcast yet? Try us for free.

It can be difficult to involve your employees in your social media endeavors. Employees may not feel comfortable with social media, or may be reluctant to connect their personal social profiles to their work. Both are completely understandable reasons and you should always be respectful of your employee's comfort. However, there is no better brand ambassador than your employees. Nobody knows your company better than those who have worked there every day. Nobody can better represent your company culture than those who contribute to its very identity. For these reasons, you need to persuade and inspire your employees to participate in your company's social channels. Here are five ways you can empower your employees on social media!

1. Lead by example

You can't expect your employees to hop onto social media and integrate their personal brand with your culture if you aren't doing it yourself. Demonstrate to them how you share fun materials through your personal network. Show your future brand ambassadors examples of the posts you share that promote your brand vision, and the positive response that comes from it.

1. Provide adequate training support

It's very possible that your employee may not use social media in their personal lives, and come out not understanding the system at all. Throw away your assumptions and ensure that every employee has access to training when asking them to represent your brand on social media. Let's be honest, Twitter to a first-time user can be quite daunting. Most social platforms were designed to be fairly intuitive in their use, so most employees should be able to flourish after a small amount of guidance.

1. Promote discussion

Social media should not be a daily obligation to post x posts about y subject between the hours of 9am to 12pm, at which point another employee will take over. Social, as the word implies, should be an ongoing conversation. Emphasize to employees that they are free to voice their own opinions to promote the business - in fact, it will sound more organic if they do so! Organize something like weekly meetings or a private online network for your social media ambassadors to gather and discuss together on, generating valuable new ideas for your brand.

1. Show how social media can be fulfilling

One great thing about social media is that your followers can leave direct, immediate, and honest feedback about your company at any time. It can be very inspirational and provide a sense of achievement to share company news or accomplishments and see the feedback right away. Being a brand ambassador can be self rewarding.

1. Reward your employees for sharing

Take a moment to notice and congratulate your employees if they are doing a good job. Recognizing employees for effective social sharing is no different from recognizing them for a job well done elsewhere in the company. This will inspire excitement and motivation within your company about your social media ventures, as well as interest others in joining your social team.

Enter: the perfect job candidate. Responds promptly to your freshly minted job posting. Skills, qualifications and work experience all seem relevant and perfectly tailored to the job description. Personality meshes perfectly with your precise company culture. Presentation is immaculate. Motivated and eager to do whatever is needed of them. Let us give this candidate the benefit of the doubt, and for a moment, imagine that they are actually a real person (haha). Out of the stack of people who applied for your awesome position, only this candidate shone like a priceless gem. This candidate made the conscious effort to seek you out. This candidate, for whatever motivation, wants to work for you. Hiring this candidate, however, disregards the other brilliant candidates who are not looking for you. Does this mean you should ignore them? Does this mean that because another company has already staked a claim to their talent, they are out of the picture forever? Should you really limit your hiring to only those who are currently unemployed and actively job hunting? Are these the best candidates for your job? Is this the best you can do? Undercover Recruiter states that 79% of potential candidates aren’t actually engaged in the job hunt. Usually, this is because they are already working, but may be for personal reasons of their own. The fact that they’re currently employed already speaks volumes about their ability. From that proportion, Jobvite indicates that 61% would be open to a change of employer. Will you be that employer? Our economic upturn has created a talent war, which means it’s time to get competitive with your recruitment. Passive candidates may be difficult to find and even harder to convince, but worth it in the end.

Does it also help that passive candidates that get hired are more driven and 17% less likely to require skills development? LinkedIn certainly thinks so. Thankfully, technologies today are making it easier to target your ideal passive candidates. Tools and networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram allow you to research your candidates and reach out to their networks. The internet allows you to be where your candidates are, rather than forcing them to come to you. Recruit passive candidates. Don’t limit yourself to what falls in your lap. Like many other motivational speeches, no matter how low or high you sit in the branding battlefield, you should always actively reach out for the best result. Enjoyed this article and would like to learn more about passive candidate recruitment with Facebook?

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Active listening is a communication technique in which the listener demonstrates to the speaker that they have been heard. Though it is often considered a more traditional concept of business communication, the technique is equally effective when applied to communication on social media channels. Here’s a quick summary of the four key components of ‘traditional’ active listening:

(Source)

1. Acknowledgement: using verbal and nonverbal gestures that demonstrate the listener’s attentiveness. Perception from the customer is heavily influenced by the attentiveness of the listener – make them feel valued!

2. Clarification: summarizing and paraphrasing what the speaker has said. It is important for there to be a correct mutual understanding, particularly when assisting a customer.

3. Self-disclosure: communicating one’s personal thoughts and feelings. Doing so can build and enhance a customer relationship.

4. Congruency: maintaining a consistent message through all channels of communication. An example of this is using acknowledgement without clarification, which negatively impacts the user experience.

Businesses who have implemented this technique into their customer service training have observed three noticeable results (Source). When company representatives listened effectively, customers overall:

• had a higher level of trust

• had a higher level of satisfaction

• perceived a higher quality of service

How can we translate and incorporate this technique of active listening into our social media strategy?

• Always respond to all feedback and mentions on social media, whether it is positive or negative. Providing customers with an immediate offer of service will do wonders for your brand image and customer retention, even if they approached you with a complaint.

• Ensure both you and your customers are on the same wavelength. Particularly when communicating electronically, many things may be lost in translation. Don’t be afraid to paraphrase their question, but in a way that isn’t condescending.

• Get personal! Customers hate receiving canned responses on social media as much as they hate pre-recorded responses when trying to place a phone call. Social media representatives should respond as they naturally would.

• Create and enforce guidelines and standards for your social media team to follow. Customers are especially more attuned to the treatment of other customers on the internet. Ensure every customer query is followed through appropriately.

Incorporate active listening as a part of your social strategy today. It’s worked for traditional business models, particularly in front-end service with Canadian banks. Is active listening more difficult to achieve face to face than it is on social? Tell me your thoughts!