Your association is an essential source of information, tools and resources for your industry. Your career center can be one of the top resources you make available to your members and the employers looking to hire them, and should be a source of engagement, revenue, and pride for your organization. Social media can help make that happen.
The key to running a successful career center is to drive passive job seekers to your job board. Passive job seekers are your members and potential members that are currently employed, who may only look at a job opportunity that is presented to them (as compared to those members actively seeking a new job). The passive job-seeking members are often the most valued potential candidates by employers and recruiters, as they are difficult to reach via channels other than your membership.
Using social media to engage your members and potential members with job postings has become increasingly popular through networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, which make it much easier to reach passive candidates. According to a recent study, 93% of recruiters are already using or plan to use social media to support their recruiting efforts.
Read on to learn how to grow your career center using social media.
The Member Engagement and Loyalty Study by Community Brands highlights a trend seen across multiple Community Brands studies: Job opportunities are important for acquisition as well as retention – especially among those early in their careers.
The study also shows that while job opportunities are important to members, organizations have work to do in this area. Member viewpoints about the topic of job opportunities differ from those of professionals who work at associations (Pros).
These disconnects suggest that more time, attention, and marketing focus should be placed on how professional membership organizations help members get the right job and advance their career. In short: It’s time to take your association’s career center to the next level. With the right technology and some proven techniques, your online career center can be a great source of engagement (and even added revenue) for your organization.
Here’s a comprehensive list of best practices for posting on social media to market your career center:
Create a plan
Like with any marketing channel, building a plan and having a social media schedule can help ensure platforms are consistently being used. Reach your audience when they are most likely online by using an online scheduling tool, like Hootsuite, Buffer, or TweetDeck.
Set S.M.A.R.T. goals
Your social media strategy should start with your goals. First, identify your marketing goals for promoting your career center and how you want to communicate that. Define your short-term goals and your long-term goals that will increase your online presence, increase member engagement, and will appeal to prospective members. Having these goals defined will help you reach your members on the right channel, with the right message.
Make a list of goals that are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Trackable. An example of a SMART goal could be: Post on our social media channel twice a week with messaging and links that drive five new member leads to our career center within the first six months.
Put hashtags to work
Use or create a hashtag for your association and its career center and use it in every relevant post. Hashtags perform best on Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok. Always include more general hashtags, such as #job or #industryjob, to get your post in front of more users.
Choose your platform(s)
With many social media channels available, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and to decide which platform will best help you reach your communication goals. Each channel is not made the same. Consider each network in your marketing mix, before posting and decide what channels would be best for your digital strategy.
Once you master and consistently use one platform, add another one. For example, if most of your audience is using Facebook, create a plan and schedule for that platform first. Focus on engagement. Then add LinkedIn or Twitter to your mix.
On LinkedIn, turn off the Jobs tab
Do not bypass your association career center and push jobs to LinkedIn, which trains your job seekers to go to LinkedIn during job search. Instead, link back to your Career Center on your LinkedIn page. This will push people from LinkedIn to your specialized career center.
Optimize content across your social media platforms
People often enjoy seeing a lot of visuals such as beautiful images, infographics, videos, and more. You can keep this informal on Facebook, Instagram needs to be very visual, and LinkedIn needs to portray your expertise. Be careful with the tone of your message. Engage your readers to interact with your message by linking to your career center or if hosting a career event, linking to the registration page.
In addition, make sure your hashtags can significantly increase your overall reach with your content on Instagram and Twitter. Best practice is using four to six hashtags while looking at existing conversations that have high engagement.
Set up automatic social feeds
Set up an RSS feed for new job postings to automatically integrate your career center with Facebook and Twitter. Promote new jobs at a set interval or distribute only featured jobs.
Get your messaging out there
Post a career center promotional message geared toward employers one day per week. Do the same for job seekers on another day of the week. Ask for reposting of your job and promotional posts. When people do it, reach out with a personal thank you by reposting them with a response.
Post at least once each week with a link to your career center. Remember to include career center data such as the number of jobs you currently list, the number of resumes, the number of registered job seekers, or the number of employers registered. Use this channel to promote your career events as well.
Offer discount codes
Send out a coupon code for 20% off a job posting once per quarter on your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. Discount codes are great to use during holiday periods as well.
Share career center emails on social media
Link to the web version of your email with a social status update or group message. For example, “Get your job into the inboxes of 5,000 pharmacists.” Or provide the number of new jobs recently posted to encourage members and registered job seekers to visit the career center.
Check out the competition
There’s nothing wrong at looking at other associations to see how they’re posting on social media. Outline how they are engaging and communicating with their members and use that as a reference. For example, we’ve created branded social media images for several associations, in order for them to promote features of their career center on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The messaging included different features their career center offers, such as uploading your resume, receiving a free resume review, and expanding their professional network. These are just some ideas that can help you start your own unique social media plan.
Prove your value
Prove that your career center provides member value through social media. A great starting point is to create a post that identifies a solution to their problem, such as getting a free resume/CV review. Or post a link that allows users to sign up for job alerts through your career center to decrease their time spent looking for jobs. Have a virtual happy hour or career fair event coming up? Be sure to post that on your social media channels to engage them and make your members aware that you’re here for them.
Utilize social media advertising
Analyze and adjust
You can track pretty much everything you do on social media. dule a bi-weekly reminder to review your metrics. Do more of what works well and less of what doesn’t. Every platform offers their own variety of analytics showing you all your traffic and insights. You can improve what your future content will be like from looking at your past content and results.
You can see which social channel is giving better results and if you have a budget, you can get into additional paid campaigns to focus your efforts on specific opportunities. Be creative, explore your industry for new innovative findings, and follow these steps to begin your social media journey to an effective plan! This engagement not only helps drive traffic back to your career center, but spreads awareness of your career center brand and what you offer to members throughout their career journey.
