Creating a social media editorial or content calendar is important to ensure your followers remain engaged and your social footprint grows alongside your customer base.
But what if you're an employer? What if your ultimate goal with social media is to create or enhance your employer brand instead of generating new customer leads?
It may seem like a slight tweak in the overall objective. Yet, this small deviation amounts to different tactics and approaches to creating and publishing social media content. Remember: if employer branding is your goal, your social media content and an editorial calendar are not simply an amplification of your Inbound or overall content strategy. While your social media content can certainly (and should to some extent) leverage existing web or digital content, building an employer brand via social requires dynamic content that taps into relevant online/real-world discussion, is easily shareable, and reveals why your company would be a good fit for individuals following you.
Here's a quick, 40,000-foot guide on creating a social media content calendar to enhance employer branding and position your company as an advantageous career move for potential candidates.
Channel differentiation
Much like each appliance or tool in your kitchen does different tasks best, so goes for today's major social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn each have different features, kinds of followers, and opportunities for interaction. In addition, each platform has its tone or voice that you must adapt to for your employer branding to resonate on that platform. You must also remember that you may very well have the same followers across several different platforms, so simply posting the same content to each platform will not only become redundant but will also be viewed as lazy or uninspired, which is not an idea you want to be associated with your employer brand.
Along the same lines, it's important to review the performance and analytics of content across all platforms regularly to identify if specific social platforms work more effectively for your industry or brand. For example, some industries or companies that are more visual may have an extremely robust following and engagement on Instagram and less on Twitter. Knowing how and where your employer branding content resonates best will help you more effectively allocate resources and manpower.
Be mindful of mobile.
A social media post (content created specifically for use in the social sphere) is not a blog post, an article, or a statement of purpose or mission. According to leading career resource Indeed, more than 60 percent of employees engage with employer branding content via their phone or mobile device – less than 4 in 10 individuals are in front of a screen large enough to scroll through a lengthy blog post or article. This means the ability to create compressed, concise copy that conveys who you are as an employer is the name of the game. Using infographics, charts, graphs, or other pieces of visual content in place of or as a compliment to traditional written copy is not only more mobile friendly and more apt to be shared throughout a user's network (which is its residual benefit), but it also demonstrates a forward-thinking mindset and worldview that will resonate with passive job seekers when they're ready to make their career move.
Highlight employee stories and successes.
Clichés are clichés for a reason – they're true. A company is truly a reflection of its employees, and building positive employee experiences and success stories as a regular part of your social media content calendar is a powerful tool to leverage in enhancing your employer branding or advancing your employer narrative. This may sound easy, but there's more to this than taking a nice photo of a team member, collecting a brief testimonial or blurb about the experience of working there and throwing that on your social platforms. Every company under the sun is doing some variation on this, and you need to go deeper to stand out amongst the competition.
As a social media manager, when looking to highlight employees or discover a human interest element, ask yourself these questions:
- What makes this team member unique?
- Who is this team member as a person outside of the work environment?
- What did this team member do before joining our company?
- Does this team member have a unique perspective on their role?
Social media managers should consider these when creating employer branding content that is employee-centric to gain the most traction and response with published content. In a sense, highlighting employee stories and successes demand lines of questioning more akin to a reporter or magazine writer than a media marketer, and this train of thought will not only yield more exciting and innovative content. Still, it will also help social media marketers look at their work with a fresh, outside-the-box perspective.
Build in content for holidays and special events.
Simple as it may seem, aligning your employer branding social media content calendar with already established holidays or celebrations is an easy way to join a bigger social media discussion. National Administrative Assistant Day. National Bosses Day. National Employee Appreciation Day. These celebrations and events give you a built-in window to create employer-branded social content and a license or an occasion to experiment or get creative with your employer-branded content.
Every company with an established employer brand in the digital or social media sphere will publish a picture of their Administrative Assistant team on the day these employees are being celebrated, so this is where your creativity as a marketing professional can rear its long-dormant head. What about a 30-second video or montage of your AAs? Or, what about an infographic depicting how AAs add value to the company and, in return, are valued by management?
Simply jumping on the bandwagon with holidays or special events doesn't quite get you into the end zone regarding employer branding. Ensuring your content (or at least adventurous for your industry or company) should be part of your goal.
Peek over the fence
Just because you manage social media employer branding and engagement for a healthcare organization doesn't mean you're limited to observing what's happening in the healthcare space. Too often, social media managers get pigeonholed in their lane and lose sight of what other companies, organizations, and entities are doing to invigorate the social sphere with quality, innovative content.
For those looking to jump-start their employer branding social media strategy, ensure you're peeking over the fence to get a bird's eye view of what other industries are doing with their social content. For example, imagine a media company you admire has launched a series of short videos on their social platforms to engage their audience in discussing X or Y topics. Your first thought might be: "I wish my industry allowed for this fun, engaging content."
Instead, your first thought should be: "How can I adopt this blueprint and make it relevant to the needs of my industry?"
This brand of thinking is exactly what today's social media managers need to project the employer branding that will create positive buzz around their company and potentially position them as a leader among their competitors.
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