With a thriving web community, your job board might have a built-in audience and a lot of activity. More activity could hardly be a bad thing. If your site is new and traffic is slow, you probably need a jump start to bring in traffic.
Social media has a broader reach in a quicker amount of time than any other marketing tool in your arsenal. In a matter of minutes, one post can reach hundreds of people. With shares, it’s impossible to calculate how many others are brought into the loop.
Here are five tips that help you get the most out of a social media marketing strategy, and drive more employers and job seekers to your job board:
Determine Who Your Audience Is
Both employers and job seekers are your audience for different reasons. You want to reach employers, since that’s where the revenue is. You also want to reach job seekers, since a job board with no action isn’t worth the investment for you or the employers. Job Board Doctor suggests that knowing your audience is the first step in developing a marketing strategy.
If the job board on your site is trade-specific, you’ll have a good idea of who your audience is. You’ll have an idea of where they might live, what they do for entertainment, and certainly what they do for a living. A broader job board means you’ll ultimately cast a wider net.
Hone In On the Best Social Media Platform
With a trade-specific job board, choosing the best social media platform to focus on might be simpler. For example, if you’re trying to reach mid-level graphic design professionals, Facebook and Twitter are a natural fit. Higher-level executives might require stepping into LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn is rarely, if ever, a bad choice, regardless of who you’re trying to reach. Remember that the audience determines where you should focus your efforts. You might need to focus equally on two or more channels, one for employers and another for job seekers.
Don’t Neglect the Rest
If you’ve determined that two social media channels are far and above the best places for you to reach your audience, don’t forget to include at least some efforts in other venues. You never know where you might find more people who want what you’re offering. For example, you might reach more employers and job seekers through LinkedIn and Twitter, but a clever post at Pinterest or an update at Facebook casts that wider net.
Add Links to Everything You Post
Links are critical. That’s the avenue employers and job seekers take from the social media platform to your job board. Add links to everything. When you make a Facebook update, add a link. When sending a shoutout via Twitter alerting job seekers to a new job, add a link to the job board. The easier it is to find and use your job board, the more activity you’re likely to see. The best part is that all social media platforms allow links. This is low-effort marketing with the potential for high-yield results. When posts are shared across platforms, such as when a job seeker shares your Twitter update on Facebook, everyone in that person’s network can use the same link to your site.
Work On Relationships, Just Like a Recruiter
Social media is all about relationships. Recruiters know this, and you should, too. In a way, you are a recruiter, bringing in traffic to your job board. One of the greatest benefits of social media is the potential for spreading the word. When you reach 100 people, each of them has the opportunity to reach many more, and so on. When friends and followers interact with you, even just occasionally, you have the chance to build integrity. When that happens, your audience is much more likely to share posts that you have shared with them.
A job board might be self-sustaining, but why take that chance when promotion takes such a small amount of time? The effort that you put in could be the difference between a job board as a failed experiment, or one that thrives. Social media is one way to spread the word.