Using social media to manage your reputation

Tracey Barrett

Many agencies rely on social media to send out information about new roles and keep in touch with candidates. But by creating some interesting and relevant content and spreading the word, you could also really enhance your brand, says Tracey Barrett. 

 As recruiters, you have undoubtedly all utilised social media tools to help build and engage with your current and potential client and candidate communities. But how many of you have thought of it as a key element of your reputation management?

Let’s take the example of a disgruntled or extremely happy client. If they communicate their experience to others over a coffee then the spread of that message will be quite slow.  But with social media, those messages can be amplified on an exponential level. If you doing nothing else with social media you should at least be using it to listen because as well as being an amplifier, it is also an enabler. If you can hear what those people are saying about you over their coffee – then you can do something about it!

 A salutary tale

The Joey Quits video on YouTube is a great example of social media in action.  The video shows Joey resigning from his job live from a well-known hotel chain in the US because of poor working conditions. As well as racking up over 3 million views, it has also led to a website joeyquits.com which campaigns for hotel workers’ rights.  While this video was going viral, the employer was nowhere to be seen and a quick look at their corporate recruitment website revealed some stock photography and general corporate jargon about what a great employer they were. There was no video content of employees, no authentic case studies – nothing at all that could counter Joey’s video.

Then there is the very well- known recruitment firm which has some good careers content on its YouTube channel but which doesn’t upload fresh content very often.  Which is why, when you search for them there is a clip from a disgruntled candidate who has recorded a voicemail he had been left by a consultant who appears to be giggling as she tells him is contract has ended.  There has been no attempt to engage with the candidate – and the clip has had more than 2,000 views – more than their careers content.

So what can recruiters do to enhance their reputation proactively? Blogs are a great way of engaging with a target audience and by using them in conjunction with other social media tools; you can soon start to build powerful and impactful branding messages.  Good content will drive traffic to your website and if you are blogging about interesting and topical issues affecting your particular sector or area of expertise, then not only will it be good for your search engine optimisation (SEO – or how far up the Google rankings you score in a search), but it will also be great for your potential reach.

Content is king

The key is to have original content – not merely rely on a newsfeed of someone else’s.  Blogs are, put simply, a way of becoming the media yourself. Hosting content such as opinions, case studies, and real people talking about what it is like to work for you via video means that you can bring your brand to life and have more control over your messages both in terms of thought leadership in your sector – and employer branding for yourself.

A word of caution though. There are a lot of misconceptions about SEO and keywords.  Google will reward sites for regular refreshed content but it will also punish sites for keyword stuffing so if your marketing advisers start talking about keyword density then run a mile.  Google changes its algorithms all the time and it is easy to get blinded by science – the only thing you really have to remember is that content is king.

And once you have those blog posts – spread the word. Seed posts into LinkedIn discussion groups if appropriate; post them on your LinkedIn company status updates and on your Facebook page; tweet out the links and ask for comments and reaction to encourage engagement.

Don’t forget the obvious things – if you have managed to get candidates onto your website through all your great content, don’t ruin it by making it hard for them to contact you. This is a genuine quote from a candidate I spoke to: “ I subscribed to their blog and a few months later when I wanted to apply for a job I had to re-register like three times – it was a joke!”

It was Warren Buffet who said: “If you lose dollars for the firm though bad decisions, I will be understanding.  If you lose reputation for the firm I will be ruthless.”  Food for thought?

Tracey Barrett is Managing Director of BlueSky PR, the specialist communications agency for the recruitment and HR sector.