Month: November 2010

Black Friday and Your Recruitment Drive

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

There’s such a thing as a “hot new deal!” when it comes to hiring initiatives. Though it doesn’t involve catalogues and bright red callouts, it’s your job as an HR representative to fill important positions. From your perspective, you want the best and the brightest pool of applicants to make the most intelligent decision and hire an outstanding employee. As a potential hire, what this opening means to them is this: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Like Black Friday deals, it’s your job to communicate to employees-to-be these great career opportunities. The good news is that there’s a lot of new mediums open these days. Radio and newspaper advertising is still effective, but adding to the mix is also special Twitter announcements and Facebook wall messages. These social media avenues are often more effective in that job openings extend beyond your fans’ listings because of the way people share information—privately, publically, through messages behind the scenes.

Consider also landing pages on websites, press releases, and paid advertising on sites your target demographics frequent. With some planning and hiring initiative, you could find yourself with stampedes of qualified applicants—without having to wake up at 4 in the morning.

Buyer Advertising
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The Logistics of Going Social

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

You’d love to get in on this social media thing, but you just don’t have the time. With the amount of material to read and digest, and a laundry list of “to-do’s”, it’s easy to keep putting off the bits and parts that make a successful online strategy. Here’s an approach to get you started.

Companies need to take a different route than individuals when establishing themselves on Twitter and Facebook. Not only do you have different setup routes (such as Facebook, where you need to list your company as a business instead of as a person), but you’ll need to include more information. One tip is to collect this data ahead of time. Choose an associate to manage the account. List their email address as the primary holder. Collect the following snippets: your organization’s contact information, your physical address, your telephone number, your blog address (if you have one), hours of business, and a brand image to display. You’ll need this when setting up a Facebook account, and you can even elect to use some of this in your Twitter account, too. Launching a complete social media profile helps to avoid being mis-categorized for a few days by popular search engines, and allows you to begin producing meaningful content immediately.

Once you’re set up, decide on an updating strategy. And you do want to update. Not only is social media a great way to maintain SEO and draw in customers, it’s an opportunity to promote content and change your voice, even stepping away from the traditional brand of your own product. Social media provides a chance to re-invent yourself with a fresh voice, and that’s a project few organizations can afford to pass up.

Signing off for now,

Buyer Advertising
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Twitter Tips for Turkey Time

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

As a growing business (or a company yearning to get bigger), you’re actively invested in social media. It’s a great, untapped resource for potential hires and customers-to-be. Unless traditional mediums, however, it’s a finicky realm. Attention spans are at a minimum, and the Internet represents a land where advertising of any sort is chastised. Here are a few tips as you ease into the holidays that can get you more followers on Twitter—and in the process, more business
potential.

1. Post at least once a week. Activity keeps you relevant in the mighty eyes of Google.

2. List ways to connect with other parts of your business. For example, a link where your fans can sign up for your newsletter.

3. Share useful articles, videos, and links to resources that can directly benefit your customer.

4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or for fresh ideas—it keeps your fan base interested and interactive.

5. Post recent work or ongoing collaborations. Even if you’re a resource for your fans, they still don’t mind hearing (occasionally) about what’s going on in that office of yours.

6. Actively network. Find similar companies and message them. Identify client bases, and do what you can to tap into them.

7. Offer discounts. Better yet, offer discounts only available to your Facebook fans.

Till next time,
Buyer Advertising
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Measuring Your Online Hiring Campaign

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

It’s a bit of a challenge even using traditional media: gauging the success of a hiring campaign. Throw in the relative new-ness of social media and the oft-lacking tracking tools from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and you can rapidly find yourself launching hiring campaigns in the dark. Without reliable methods of tracking you investment, it’s hard to say if your social media hiring efforts are paying off. There are ways to assess what you invest, however.

The most important thing to remember is that an online hiring campaign isn’t strictly a game of numbers. You’ve furthering your employer brand. You’re increasing engagement. You’re disseminating information about your place of business. To evaluate effectiveness, you need to look at traditional online metrics including page views, landing page visits (if you’ve set up your system that way), and fan/follower counts. Actual conversions or hires remains a solid method to determine whether your campaign is working or not.

New, Web 2.0-savvy ways of tracking your hiring efforts include counting the frequency of re-tweets and searching out mentions of your campaign in other “new media” sources such as blogs and on personal posts. Using traditional and emerging metrics, evaluating your campaign makes a shift from quantitative to qualitative, but is still a very real and obtainable goal.

Signing off for now,

Buyer Advertising
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