Tag: Facebook

Black Friday and Your Recruitment Drive

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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
www.buyerads.com

The Logistics of Going Social

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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
www.buyerads.com

Measuring Your Online Hiring Campaign

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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
www.buyerads.com

Stay in Control of Your Online Assets

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These days, there’s an awful lot of you out there.

Your message has grown beyond the website, beyond the content you approve and produce. Your company name now lives on new media such as Facebook, Twitter, and your blog. But it doesn’t end there—there are vehicles in place to spread the reach and awareness of you through a variety of new vectors, such as discussions of your services on forums, postings on customer review sites, YouTube videos, and the list goes on. This is a good thing because your brand can grow along with your business without overwhelming effort on your part. This is a bad thing because once the message gets out of your control, it could damage your reputation.

The first step to controlling your content is to get to these sites first. The more presence you have in specific Internet locales, the easier it is to monitor and produce content of your own. For instance, by starting a YouTube site of your own, your company can produce and release videos that promote your brand—instead of the only entry on that site being an unmoderated opinion of your organization. Likewise, produce dynamic content, such as the aforementioned blog, so customers have a forum of their own to ask questions and correspond with you. Otherwise, your proactive customers could take things into their own hands—a detriment to companies wishing to delete or modify objectionable material.

As in all things online, it isn’t a matter of large investment, it’s a matter of time and resource investment. By starting out with a proactive approach, you’re securing room to grow and take advantage of the online world, while keeping your brand neat and orderly. Smart move.

Signing off for now,

Buyer Advertising

www.buyerads.com

3 No-No’s for Social Media

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Establishing a foothold in social media represents a big investment for your company—not because doing so is overly complicated or expensive, but because it takes a lot of time to maintain your presence. In terms of man-hours, you’ll need to set up appropriately-branded Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, and organize a schedule for regular updates. Before you get started, here are a few common items of misuse and abuse. Avoid the following at all cost!

Letting things languish. You can’t count the number of corporate Facebook sites that lie fallow, unproductive for the company that created it. You’ll want to update regularly to reap the benefits: increased exposure for SEO and a dialog between you and your customers. On the flip-side, you don’t want to be posting every few hours, either—nothing sends fans running away faster than spamming their news feeds with clutter. Aim for updating a few times a week.

Being predictable. When you’re updating your new media sites, remember that you’re talking to people, not to consumers. Speak in a language that a real person would enjoy reading, and entertain rather than preach. Come off too advertise-y, and people are sure to click away.

Not posting job opportunities. Facebook and Twitter is personal, and there aren’t a lot of things more personal than your career. Posting your openings is a great way to draw on a pool of non-conventional applicants. Of course, there’s a big reason you may not be posting career openings in the first place: you have a dedicated Facebook site specifically for that purpose.

No matter how you go about using new media, getting yourself out there puts you ahead of the competition, and pushes you in the right direction to more customers and greater interest from the population at large. Good luck!
Signing off for now,
Buyer Advertising
www.buyerads.com

Earning “Likes” on Facebook Is About Knowing Your Audience.

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Not too long ago, CNN posted an article describing the effect of Facebook followers and businesses. You can read it here, if that’s what you’re after: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/09/30/like.button.web.traffic.mashable/index.html?hpt=C2. But the long and short of it is that “liking a page” (the new “become a fan” of organizations) is big business. Over a billion “likes” have gone out since April of 2010. What’s more, the gurus behind Facebook also offer some interesting insight into the types of people that follow interests, groups, and yes, companies.

The key for the any-size business looking to build an online following is to target the appropriate demographic. Most interestingly, per the Facebook developers, the typical person who “likes” organizations has over twice the number of friends than the average Facebook user. These are the folks who utilize Facebook as a hobby, and not simply as a networking tool. They willingly spend their free time on Facebook, which means that to earn their interest, you need to pay out in terms of entertainment value. Provide links and talk about your business, but do so in a way that’s interesting, engaging, and for goodness sakes, write about things people want to actually read! There’s no captive audience when it comes to social media.

Another key demographic you’ll want to court is the to 25-39 age range. Why? The average Facebook “liker” is aged 34. That means no matter what your typical customer base is comprised of, spend some time preparing content that’s of value people who fit in this range. Above all else, be proactive about your social media strategy, and entertain while illustrating your services.

Until next time,
www.buyeradvertising.com

Striking Back Against Facebook Spam

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Once a ripe garden of opportunity, Facebook has become a haven for spammers who would cloud your walls with offers of weight loss products, cheap online colleges, and, ahem, various pills and medicines for those of the male persuasion. And with some clever solicitors enjoying social media conversion rates as high as 47%, it’s no wonder they’re camping your site and peddling their electronic wares. Don’t let it happen! Here are a couple of tips to keep your messages clear and you boards spam free.

Should you encounter an advertisement on your company’s Facebook wall, the important thing is to take immediate action. You could simply delete the message from your wall, but many spammers will test a site’s responsiveness with a single message before unleashing a wave of spam that could clutter things up. Even a few hours exposure can be effective for a spammer—not to mention the possibility of “friending” your fan base for some one-on-one spamming at a later date. Block the user. Facebook makes it simple under your company’s account preferences.

A distant, much more virulent relative to Facebook spam, solicitations using your blog as a platform have become rampant. Typically, a poster will address a theme in your article before listing a service with associated website, but many don’t even take the time to include that level of detail. On an unmoderated blog, this can get out of hand—fast. One sure-fire solution is to turn on moderation, and only allow comments that an administer approves his or herself. If you’re on WordPress, spend some time learning about plug-ins that allow you to block commentors by IP, shrugging off habitual spammers and sending them back to the untamed, unnoticed wilds of the Internet where they belong.

Thanks for reading,
Buyer Advertising
www.buyerads.com

Entertainment Meets Advertising: A Love Story

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Fusions give rise to terrific innovation and success: just look at peanut M&M’s, cockerpoos, and the smoothie. Today, the latest combination that’s stirring things up in the social media world is mixing games and advertising venues. Mobile media is making it all possible.

MyTown, a game for your iPhone, lets you scan barcodes of stuff you having lying around your house in order to to build up your player score and obtain titles such as “The King of Rum” (for owning the most rum-related paraphernalia, of course). You share your rankings with friends for fame and bragging rights. The marketer’s swing on this, of course, is integrating special offers into the application itself. The guts of the software tracks the amount and types of the items you own, shares that information with participating companies. From there, based off of your own profile, companies craft marketing plans targeted for individual players. Today, 3.1 million users are already scanning to their hearts’ content.

It’s important to keep up with these trends. As younger consumers grow up hard-wired into social media and applications such as these, ignoring new media means opportunity lost. Instead, take stock of what mobile marketing, games, and new applications can do for your business, and play the game to win.

Until next time,

www.buyeradvertising.com

Beyond the Job Board

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It was the 20th century, and job boards were all the rage. Sites like www.monster.com sprung into being, linking beleaguered career-seekers with more opportunities than the classified section of their Sunday newspaper could provide. Since then, aggregators and site scrappers have snagged and deposited job listings and descriptions in centralized locations site for complete ease of access.

Of course, times change. What seemed like the pinnacle of online recruitment is changing as employees-to-be spend less time on traditional websites, and more time on social networking webpages.

Facebook remains the go-to source for social networking, and combined with the raw mass of human beings logging in every day, and excellent way to talk about jobs. And that’s the trick with social media: it isn’t simply listing positions your company needs to fill—it’s just as important to start a dialog with people. Friends recommending friends for open positions. Answering questions about your work environment. Sites like Twitter offer quick, popcorn glimpses into your workplace, while LinkedIn perfects the art of connecting people with positions in a way that’s more personal than “click-n-apply”.

The switch to social media is exciting, but it can also be confusing. Sometimes it takes months to plan the right strategy. Agencies like Buyer Advertising help.

www.buyeradvertising.com

Networking, Farming, and You

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Not too long ago, we posted this quote on our Facebook page: “Networking is not about hunting. It is about farming. It’s about cultivating relationships.” Quote courtesy of Ivan Misner. Hunter/gatherer tropes aside, farming is an excellent metaphor about networking the right way. It’s about a mindset—and not just the actions a company needs to take to succeed at networking. A hunter is primal, focused, and infuriated every time his spear misses the wild boar—meaning, of course, no tasty dinner for his family tonight. On the flip-side, the farmer is patient. He plant his seeds months in advance, cultivates the seedlings as they arise, and harvests on the plants’ own schedule.

As any good farmer will tell you, it’s important to choose your fields wisely. You’ve going to want to plant on fertile grounds where your business potential is maximized. In the online world, this translates into sites like Facebook, Twitter, and your own company blog. But the modern farmer can’t neglect his tool shed. Sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon bolster your efforts and catalyze the growth of a customer and fan base. Seek out forums and exchange links to stay relevant and visible.

A good farmer also knows when to weed the garden. In social networking circles, weeds translate into spam messages and negative feedback. Whether you pull out the green invaders by hand (managing content on a per-post basis) or use a pesticide (IP filtering, content management tools for your blog) every garden needs to some attention paid to upkeep in order to thrive. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on your networking investment. Be genuine. Be real. Offer value. The customers will come.