Historically, when humans began to collaborate and work together, a fundamental shift happened. A shift that prioritized intelligence over forceful competition. Cool huh?

Thank you Discovery Channel!

The importance of intelligence in today’s society is undeniable. We all strive to be more intelligent in all aspects of our lives. We want to work smart, live smart, and even exercise smart!

“Cooperation leads to intelligence.” – Click to Tweet Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

We also want to be smart with our use of social media. So, doesn’t it make sense to apply this idea, that cooperation leads to intelligence, to our social strategy?

Instead of arguing about which social network is the best, pitting Twitter against Facebook, yelling “Google Plus is dead, long live LinkedIn”, or choosing to abandon Pinterest in favour of Instagram, why not just accept that collaboration is the key to a great social strategy?

Besides providing bloggers with attention-grabbing headlines, setting one network against another really doesn’t do anyone a lot of good.

The Case for Collaborative Social Networking

More eyes on your content

If you want to get your content seen by a lot of people, social networks will do the trick: 

At 1.19 billion, Facebook has the most active users of any network – Click to Tweet

Which is great, but quantity isn’t everything!

A greater diversity of eyes on your content

You also need to consider the type of user you are trying to reach. What if, for example, you need to reach a “more mature” demographic?

Google Plus, and rather surprisingly, Twitter, tend to have a high percentage of users over the age of 35:

So, just because one network boasts more overall users than another, doesn’t necessarily mean that it has more of the users that you are trying to connect with.

Different mediums get different results

Then there’s the fact that different types of content serve different purposes.

Job postings that are accompanied by video receive a 36% higher rate of application – Click to Tweet

YouTube is, therefore, a valuable asset for recruiters, as it allows you to upload and share videos that express your employer brand. YouTube also ranks #2 when it comes to active users.

So, YouTube must be every recruiter’s top choice for social recruiting then right?

Wrong!

In fact, according to Jobvite, this couldn’t be further from the truth:  

Why don’t hiring pros simply put a recruiting video up on YouTube, and wait for the applications to come rolling in?

This brings us right back to the beginning…

Getting more eyes on your content

Recruiters want as many potential candidates to see their job posts as possible. YouTube alone won’t make this happen for them.

Unlike LinkedIn, YouTube isn’t geared towards job seekers, nor does it allow for candidate targeting, as Facebook does.

So, in order to get their recruitment videos seen by the most potential hires, it makes sense for them to share the videos they make on LinkedIn and Facebook as well.

Innovations in social tech

Social tech is evolving in a way which proves how the idea we opened with, “Cooperation leads to intelligence,” is true for media as well as humans. 

All of the latest social management Apps, like Buffer, Sprout Social and Swayy, allow us to manage multiple networks. 

Hootsuite, although not as new as the apps mentioned above, is one of the most used apps amongst social media pros, and its primary function is making social sharing across multiple networks easier. 

This is in response to all this evidence that the use of collaborative social media yields better results across the board.

This is especially valid when considering trends that show an increase in the amount of social media users that spread their activity and time across multiple networks:

The only real downside to using multiple networks is that it is more time-consuming than simply focusing your efforts on a single social platform.

This problem, though, is easily resolved for most types of content with the use of the tools mentioned above (Buffer, and Hootsuite.)

These tools make it incredibly easy and efficient to share most types of content across multiple platforms at a time.

Unfortunately for social recruiters, “most types” doesn’t include job posts.

That’s where a tool like the Jobcast social recruiting app comes in handy.

With Jobcast you can automatically share jobs from your Career Site to multiple social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You can even schedule posts so that they are shared multiple times throughout the day, at the most effective times for your user-base, and with the hashtags of your choice.

You can also set up social sharing for multiple team members, to harness the power of their social connections.

Learn more about how Jobcast can help you share your jobs to multiple social networks without have to post more than once…

Or shoot me an email (samara@jobcast.net), I’m always happy to help 😀

Have a collaborative day, and stay social!