Did you know that 79% of job seekers use social media in their job search?

The list of social media networks just seems to keep growing, and with a growing emphasis being placed on creating a strong employer brand, it might be tempting to jump on all of them. Before you do this, it’s important to consider that each of these networks will reach a different type of person and will require different types of content. To find success, you’ll need to identify which social media platform aligns with your brand and culture and also lets you connect with your target candidates?

It can be hard to decide which platforms your employer brand should have a presence on, and maybe even harder to figure out what kind of content you should be sharing on each of these social media networks.

In order to help give you a clearer idea of the social media landscape, we’re dishing out some posts and having a look at some of the biggest social media networks, including ways you can build them into your social recruiting strategy and elevate your employer brand.

In our first post, we took a closer look at Facebook and LinkedIn. This post will focus on the two of the easiest platforms to connect with candidates on: Twitter and Instagram. 

Twitter

Twitter users send out an average of 500 millions tweets each day. Due to Twitter’s format of serving out bite-sized pieces of information (140 characters per Tweet), it’s a great channel to constantly be sharing and taking part in conversations, both with your customers and job seekers.

Start talking to others and growing your employer brand by engaging with accounts that mention you, joining regularly-occurring Twitter chats, and even hosting Twitter Q&A sessions! As Twitter runs in realtime, it may seem fast-paced at first, but this quality gives you the flexibility to share content again and again. Since information can flow so quickly on Twitter, be sure to take advantage of its media options – use images that will catch people’s eyes (Tweets with photos can get up to 313% more engagement!) and test out videos.

One of Twitter’s biggest impacts on social media was bringing the #hashtag mainstream. Develop a hashtag for your employer brand (check out Hootsuite’s #HootsuiteLife and Starbucks’ #ToBeAPartner) to use when you share out employer branding content, and encourage your employees to use it as well! This allows job seekers to search through the hashtag to see real examples of how your employees are talking about your company.

Instagram

Instagram recently hit a milestone, reaching 500 million monthly active users. These users are very active, posting an average of 70 million photos every day. If you are looking to hire young millennial talent or are thinking about long-term hiring, Instagram is where you should be. It’s considered the most important social network among young people (the same young people who will be entering the workforce soon).

Did you know that 90% of the information that comes to the brain is visual? It’s really true, a picture is worth a thousand words. Using Instagram, you don’t have to stick to words – you can easily show off what a day behind the scenes of your company is like. Take it one step further and mix in a few videos! Instagram recently extended their maximum video length to 60 seconds, which you can use to do quick office tours or lightning profiles of employees.

Engage your current employees by taking the same branded hashtag that you’ve introduced on Twitter and bringing it to Instagram. Get your employees to share their unique, real, and candid perspectives, and engage them when they do! When you like, comment, and even repost photos using the hashtag, this will encourage them to share more and more (which means all of their followers will keep seeing how great it is to work for you!).

Want to hear more?

Stay tuned for future posts, where we’ll have a closer look at Pinterest and Snapchat. For now, click here to get working on your employer brand with Jobcast today!