Your employees are one of your company’s greatest assets.  Without them, you’re just another pretty face in a stadium full of supermodels.  Building good relationships with potential candidates fosters loyalty and gives you an edge in the war for talent.

An excellent way to start building relationships with people who are interested in working with you is by developing a community of talent.

Facebook has over 850 million active users and is quickly becoming has become a must-have tool to increase your visibility among the vast talent pool that is the entire globe!  It is also a great way to complement your existing recruitment strategy.

So you’ve created a Facebook fan page to promote your employer brand and you are looking at creating a community of talent and future employees from scratch.  “What the heck do I do now?” you ask?  Seems intimidating, doesn’t it?  Don’t you fret!  Here are some steps which will help you develop a utopia of brand champions on Facebook.

1. Utilize Your Existing Presence –

You already have a presence, a career website, an email list of candidates or you are utilizing a more traditional form of advertising.  This is a great place to start driving traffic to your fan page.  Include links to your Facebook career page on your career website in a prominent place.  Now, when you send your next newsletter, let your subscribers know of your Facebook page.  Start mentioning your Facebook page link and logo on your business cards, brochures, print newsletters, magazine ads, emails signatures, etc.  Tattoo it on your forehead!  On second thought, scratch that last bit of advice.

Below is how Sodexo is promoting their social media presence from their career website –

Since Sodexo has a separate Facebook fan page for their company, (below) they have linked it nicely to drive candidates to their careers fan page

2. Define your targeted audience and be relevant –

You need to know who you’re targeting so you can understand them better and collect the information they’re dying to know.  The content shared by a company which hires seasonal or temporary staff of drivers, package movers, etc has to be different from the content shared by a company that hires hackers.  Get the drift?

Only posting the job openings and PR stuff might be seen as spam and not share-worthy by your fans.  It will make your page look like it’s run by a robot.

Here is a list of things you would probably want to share.  Remember to keep it simple, fun and relaxed.

• Career-related articles

• How it is to work with your company
• Employee blogs
• Videos showing your company culture
• Workplace pics
• Information and pics of events your company is attending
• Industry insights

• Interesting articles about your company

You need to think like your targeted audience in order to get them excited.  Remember it’s not about you, it’s about them.  Being the go-to resource and sharing relevant information is the key to developing a lasting relationship and succeeding in building an amazing community.  People tell their friends and colleagues about good places to find things.  Zero in on this opportunity!

3. Be responsive and engaging –

Facebook isn’t the traditional one-way communication vehicle, so you need to immerse yourself into the world of modern conversational-driven media.  People will post on your page to ask a question or get information.  You need to make sure that you are responding to your community as quickly as possible.  The more you engage, the more it shows how much you value them.


You might run into a situation where you don’t have an answer to the question.  Be polite and do your best to help in these cases and people will go away with a positive image of your brand.  Remember “not responding = not caring” and your community will go where they feel more welcomed.

4. Ask questions.  Run a contest or post a riddle –

It’s important for you to engage your community and also provide them with content they would want to share with their friends and followers.  Asking questions, running contests, posting riddles, etc are great ways to grab attention and expand your community through Likes and Shares.

You can create interesting puzzles around coding, run a case study contest or create a general quiz about your brand.  Have the community caption a funny photo.  The possibilities are endless!  Another thing is prizes/freebies.  People love free stuff!  Consider giving away a prize and if you’re giving one away, make sure it is an attractive incentive that’s sharable so that your fans are able to tell their friends about the giveaway.  Depending on your targeted audience, it can be a new tech gadget, backpacks, t-shirts or free book vouchers etc. (A few examples below)

5. Facebook ads –

One of the most effective ways to target a relevant audience, steadily increase your fan base and gain Likes, is to utilize Facebook ads.

Facebook ads allow you to target a specific demographic such as friends of those who have already Liked your page or those who are in a certain age group and maybe came out of universities in a particular year.  You can choose your budget to generate meaningful results, engagement and referral traffic to your site.

When it comes to advertising on Facebook, you have different options.  You can post an ad wherein the post shared on your wall will be shown in the advertisement. (example below)

You can create a beautiful landing tab on your fan page and choose to do Facebook ads for a landing tab by selecting it as a destination tab. (example below)

You can also choose to create Sponsored Story for following user actions:

• Likes a Page
• Likes or comments on a Page’s post
• RSVPs to a Page’s event
• Votes on a Page’s question
• Checks in to a Place
• Likes or shares a website

6. Measure –

Facebook has introduced new insights which are easy to understand and have stats which will help you to understand your community better.

Now you can view your overall community health from your dashboard.  You can see how many people are friends with your fans and your data’s overall reach.

You can also see statistics about virality, engaged users and people who are talking about you for all of your posts.

You can view the demographic information of users who have Liked you, are talking about you and who you’ve reached.

 
All this looks very exciting because, with these new insights, you now can understand the data better and make better decisions.  You’ll know what content is working for you and what isn’t.  Rinse and repeat.  Go with what you know!

7. Experiment –

There is no magic formula for being successful in social media.  No one is in absolute control in social media.  It’s one huge, ongoing experiment.  If your business isn’t using experimentation as a social media tactic, you’re not truly maximizing your social media presence.

How we use social media is ever-changing.  Turn back the clock just two years: Did you foresee so many businesses (or even yourself) being so active on Facebook that it would become an integral part of not just Gen Y, but society as a whole?

We can clearly see that social media is growing and being used in many ways it wasn’t initially designed for.  One thing is for sure: Social media has changed the way we communicate, where we go for information and how we consume it!  Seize on this!

How do you like the tips shared above? What are you doing to grow your facebook community? Share it all in the box below.