LinkedIn is one of the world’s most popular social media sites. What makes it so valuable isn’t the number of people on there, which isn’t as high as, say, Facebook. No, it’s rather the ethos of the site. LinkedIn sees itself primarily as a networking forum. It’s somewhere workers and employers can hang out, get to know each other, and possibly work together. For this reason, recruiters now often include LinkedIn searches as part of their offering. It makes a massive difference.
LinkedIn, however, isn’t famous for marketing. While other social media outlets like Twitter and Instagram are top choices for companies, a lot of firms forget about LinkedIn. It’s not seen as a consumer-facing platform, so many doubt its usefulness as a marketing tool.
Using LinkedIn To Recruit and Attract Top Talent
If you speak with LinkedIn marketing experts, however, they have a different opinion. They see the job-focused social media site as the perfect place to market the employee-facing side of your company and attract the best talent.
When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Your company isn’t just marketing to customers in an attempt to win their business. It also needs to appeal to prospective employees who are considering whether they should work for your firm. The sensible thing for your company to do is to present itself in the best light possible and market to these people, grabbing them before a competitor does.
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Attract the Best People
The success of an enterprise almost always comes down to the quality of the people it hires. If you can get the best people from the available talent pool, you put your enterprise at a significant advantage over your rivals. Marketing to them, therefore, is just as important as your customers. It’s another way to strengthen the appeal of your firm.
LinkedIn marketing is a very different animal from regular social media marketing. You’re not attempting to make content go viral or anything like that. You’re just trying to build a reputation for your brand so that talented people see it as a desirable place to work.
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Showcase A Great Place To Work
How you do this depends primarily on the values of your company. Some firms, for instance, try to present themselves as being prestigious and offering a springboard to employees who want to get going on the career ladder. Professional services firm Deloitte takes this tack. Others want to show people that they are a fun place to work, offering exciting assignments and funky offices.
How you appeal to employees depends very much on the industry you inhabit and depends very much on the personality types a company like yours would expect to employ. In a sense, you need to create an employee persona, just as you might a customer persona for your customer-focused branding.
At the center of all your efforts should be the idea that your company offers people plenty of opportunities for career advancement. Data suggest that this is the thing that people want the most. Talking about your ongoing training and professional education is a great way to ensure that you win in the race to grab talent.
Ciao,
Miss Kemya
