October 8, 2013
If you want to create a following for your company of the most engaged community, get on Instagram. I understand the fear, posting pictures is for kids, what if I don’t know what pictures to put up, does it make my company look like they are having fun and not working? Forget all your objections and focus on the positive.
Instagram can ensure interesting content. Your potential employees do not want to spend their time reading statistics about your company or reading information which is actually a big sales pitch or a blog about how wonderful it is to work for you. They want you to subconsciously enter their brain and stay there – and that is exactly what you want.
To engage with your audience, you have to identify them. There are two audiences: your potential customers and your potential employees; let’s follow the employee route.
Ask yourself this – Who do you want to work for you? Who already works for you? What do they do in their spare time? What music are they in to? What do they eat and drink? All sound a bit odd? Well it isn’t! You want to attract the best talent so look internally at your best talent and mimic what they want.
Instagram allows you to post pictures and videos – you want to create a following that taps into the best talent in your market – so post what is relevant to them. Post a picture of a desk top with a can of diet coke and a BLT next to it if that is what your top employee has for lunch every day – just make sure there is a caption that makes it humorous and not too random!
I saw a great photo posted by an advertising agency. They identified that a majority of their staff have iPhones, so a picture of someone’s chaotic desk with 4 iPhones piled high, with a quirky caption about what each phone is used for: ‘the wife, the office, the gym and one for luck’. It made me smile, as I have an iPhone and I love it, and my partner has two iPhones, so I identified with it but also found it amusing. Now I follow them on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.
If I saw a job post that was relevant to me, I would look at it with great detail and honestly think about it, even though I am happy in my job – this is the power of effective employer branding, creating a passive candidate following. Please keep in mind that there needs to be a balance, weighted more to non-business related content, but you should keep in mind that you are a professional company, so you can add videos of your CEO giving an interview on how the company evolved too. Just make sure it is at a point where there is already content to grasp the interests of your target audience.
It is for you to decide what content suits your company culture but take yourself away from your corporate head and think about your staff’s interest on a personal level – not too personal though, there are some pictures and videos no one needs to see – the office joker so drunk he can’t stand is inappropriate even if you all find it hilarious!
And to add to all of this, you can follow your progress, know who and how many people are engaging, when there are surges in engagement and more – this will make you more targeted as you progress.
Give it a go and let me know how you get on!
©’Using Tablet’ Vichaya Kiatying-Angsulee