This post was provided by Erin Palmer. Erin writes about topics such as business intelligence certification. Her work helps students learn about business intelligence course options.
More companies are turning to social media as an effective way to find, engage with and hire top talent. To leverage the power of social media, you’ll need to do more than just establish a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking sites. Employers also need to look at the data provided by social interactions, and use it to drive talent acquisition.
A data-driven social media strategy enables you to quickly discover what’s working – and just as important – what’s not working. Then, you can focus on the former and improve or eliminate the latter. In implementing social media analytics for long-term success, it’s important to set goals up front and identify which metrics are most important.
What Can Employers Track Through Social Media?
When deciding what data to analyze, employers often focus on awareness, influence and action. Here’s what to measure in each of these areas:
Awareness – By measuring impressions and traffic on blogs, posts, videos, tweets and social bookmarks, you can find out who is talking about your company and your job openings. Are your top-tier recruits among them?
Influence – Tracking positive and negative comments, opinions and perceptions can tell you what people think about your company, and offers opportunities to improve your reputation.
Action – Measuring data such as the number of site visits, applications submitted, referrals and ultimately, new hires will reveal what social media is actually doing for your recruiting efforts.
Knowing where and how people are talking about your company allows you to tailor your social media strategy to your needs. Fine-tuning your efforts to make hiring decisions based on specific factors can also help with retention.
Recruiting, Retaining Top Talent Requires Attention to Details
Social media facilitates a high level of engagement with a targeted audience. It also makes it easy for recruiters and employees alike to network and bring in referrals. But it can’t resolve retention issues – which are still a challenge for many firms, particularly in high-demand occupations. Improving retention requires a more personalized approach and close attention to the context behind the data.
Fortunately, social media provides ways to break down some of the traditional barriers to communication around recruitment. And focusing your strategy based on analytics can lead to improved talent acquisition and retention.
Attract the Best Talent through Data-Driven Social Media
Finding, recruiting and hiring the right candidate for a job is not easy – or inexpensive. Through social media, more companies than ever are enhancing their reputations to attract top recruits and establish relationships with them. Combining the engagement and reach of social media with the customizing tracking power of web analytics can help you make better decisions about your recruiting efforts, which can make them much more effective.