In the previous post, our expert at Medical Engineers emphasised three simple guidelines on how to pick the right candidate. Social media is the gateway for candidates to learn about your organisation. Approximately 1 in 5 potential candidates have applied for a job through social media and 79 percent of job seekers utilise social media to find information about a job (Glassdoor). Therefore, it is important to have a strong presence on social media to attract the best potential candidates.
Set the Objectives and Design a Digital Blueprint
The first step is to determine the goal and objectives of your social media activities. Do you want to focus on raising the awareness of the organisation’s culture? Or, would you like to be the thought leader in your own industry? Try to answer those initial questions as a starting point to draft a social media guidelines for the organisation.
Whether you are familiar with social media or not, the digital blueprint of the organisation must be easily understood. During the initial process of drafting the guidelines, you might want to start with the initial guiding question: What social media platforms that your organisation should establish? For example, you want to connect with key opinion leaders amongst medical devices industry, then you might want to use Twitter and LinkedIn since you can follow their ‘tweets’ and engage with them through @ ‘replies’. Next, what are the content themes that I should emphasise each day? How many times should I post those contents on our platforms? How do I know the success of my content? How ‘mobile friendly’ is my content? The complexity of the digital blueprint will rely on that information, therefore you need to prioritise the what activities that you want to execute on social media each day.
Monitor the performance of each content on different platforms to determine the success of your social media activities. Familiarise yourself with the ‘jargons’ such as impressions, reach, conversion, CPM (cost per thousand). Focus on the number of ‘likes’ on Facebook, Tweets impression on Twitter, or Followers on LinkedIn when analysing the insights of the post. Try to grasp the knowledge on the changes of those elements. Find out which post generates the most number of comments or likes or sometimes you do not have any engagement. Use this information as your future guideline to produce content that can engage the audiences. The key to monitoring the activities on social media is to ensure that you can yield the content based on the interest of the audiences without losing your brand identity.
You are Talking to a Human
So, you have identified your audiences and established the social media platforms with a sufficient number of followers. Next, your job is to nurture the relationship with them. If you are using social media to be the thought leader in the industry, then make sure that you are using the right lingo. Do not use jargons if you know the primary audiences of your social media is fresh graduates. It might not appeal to them. Also, do not focus your effort on producing content about strategies to balance between study and work while your followers are mostly PhD graduates, where their interest might be to find out the latest research on medical devices industry. They might unfollow you because the content is irrelevant. Remember that they are a human. Interact with your followers by ‘RT’ (retweeting) or click the ‘favourite’ button on Twitter on interesting content are the key driver for you to be successful in social media.
Sponsored post
If you are still in the process of exploring the power of social media, then sponsored (paid) post might not be the priority. Although, investing a small amount of capital for a particular post on social media to attract a higher number of audiences could potentially increase the number of conversation between you and the followers. Ask yourself whether the investment will help you to reach the goals and objectives. Also, make sure that you understand how to track the performance of your capital, therefore, you can determine the return on investment.
It does not mean that you cannot grow and engage the followers of your social media when you decide not to put some financial incentives to the post. An organic post can be viral when you can attract the attention of the candidates however you need to think about the ‘shareability’ factor of the content.
It is our task at Medical Engineers to find you the best candidate for the role. However, creating a clear and strong presence on social media will help to convince the candidate to decide to work for the organisation. Always refer to the objectives on the digital blueprint. Identified the key audiences to know which social media to pursuit, then start producing contents to engage the conversation. Lastly, do not ignore the power of data from the social media analytics to find out the performance of your content.
We hope that the article can help you to re-strategise social media activities. A strong presence on social media would not only attract but have the ability to give confidence for candidates to work in your organisation. For more related news on the latest trend in recruitment and jobs in medical devices and diagnostics industry from Medical Engineers, you can follow our Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Also, follow us on Instagram to find inspiration on related engineering news.
