How Effectively Are Your Recruitment Agency Competitors Leveraging Social Media?
Are your competitors reaching passive candidates on Facebook? Could you be generating more client leads with Twitter? How much website traffic are you missing out on by not being more active on social media? If you’re anything like our clients, you’re no doubt eager to make sure your competitors aren’t getting results in ways you’re missing out on. You wouldn't want them to have figured out ways of attracting lots of passive candidates to engage with their agency... or worse still, to have perfected how to use social media to bring new client leads into the business.
In some sectors there are now clear leaders emerging, in terms of agencies who've mastered getting results from social media. In the majority of sectors this isn't yet the case - and the potential to become that market leader is still very much up for grabs. Your first step in becoming that market leader may well be figuring out just how effectively others in your market are already using social media.
The following type of analysis can be produced within a couple of weeks - with this level of detail, or in far greater depth, depending on how seriously you'd like to understand existing activity in your market (see report commissioning if you can't do this work in-house).
Here's a snapshot of the mid-sized Digital Marketing / Agency recruitment market in London from some analysis we did earlier this year. You'll see there are big differences in the results these agencies are getting from social media - and some agencies who've clearly invested in this more than others (though note that none have built an insurmountable lead).
A quick analysis of where companies are generating shares of their website content is enlightening. The chart below shows that the agencies in this sector have focused more on LinkedIn than anywhere else, with modest activity on Facebook and Twitter.
This finding is really interesting, because recruitment agencies typically generate the most candidate and client interest from Twitter and Facebook, once they’ve experimented with branching out beyond LinkedIn that is. So in this niche, monopolising the market reach offered by social media is still very much up for grabs. To reinforce this point, we would expect a recruitment agency in a social media savvy sector like this to be generating 200+ shares per post if it had invested in some content and had built a half-decent social media presence. Therefore the current performance levels could easily be surpassed within a few months by a recruitment agency investing in having the best presence in the market.
There’s the potential for one or more competitors in this market to rapidly improve the results being generated from Twitter. We can see from the following pie chart that some of the agencies in this market have already invested in a Twitter presence and built a decent following. Both Blu Digital and 3Search could drive significant web traffic from Twitter with the right content strategy and tactics to leverage this existing Twitter audience.
The picture is markedly different when we look at Facebook, where we can see that only Gemini People have invested in growing an audience there - though some agencies may be advertising “below the radar” on Facebook.
The two elements of social media activity that really generate results for recruitment agencies are engagement and social sharing. If we start with social sharing first, the huge power of social media is to have your brand and its content made visible to an audience that extends way beyond the candidates and clients who already know and interact with your business.
A good benchmark here is that a company reaches an audience that is at least 10 times as big as its own fan or follower count. So for example, each Social-Hire account with 50,000+ followers we would usually see reaching an audience of 500,000 to 1 million people a month.
No one in this market is anywhere close to achieving this viral reach effect, so the opportunity to become the market leader is very much there for the taking.
Alongside social sharing, engagement is also key. If lots of people are engaging with your social media updates, they are far more likely to respond when you put an advert or a request for help in front of them. Plus each and every time someone engages with your company in some way on social media, that creates the window of opportunity to start a conversation with them - particularly key if you want to generate client leads or want to build rapport with passive candidates.
Data for Twitter and Facebook below shows the varying levels of social sharing and engagement that the competitors in this niche market have achieved over the preceding weeks. There’s considerable room for improvement with all these accounts, with none of them having mastered influencer marketing for example.
Clearly defining the target audience your company wishes to appeal to - and the actions you would want your audience to take over the coming year to make them valuable for your business.
Writing profiles and developing a content strategy that will make your company profiles appealing to your target audience to follow and interact with.
Proactively ensuring your company profiles are seen by as many candidates / clients / influencers in your market as possible.
Experimenting with engagement and conversion tactics to ensure that your growing social media audience turns into a flow of candidates you can place (or new client enquiries you can act upon).
I hope this has inspired you to investigate your own niche market - and given you a good steer on how you would then dominate social media at the expense of your recruitment agency competitors. If you need some help with this, see below. Good luck!
Doing a good job of this will require having a marketing expert whose time is at least 50% devoted to social media activities, or an admin person working on this more or less full time. You’re welcome to book in for a social media consultation (£149 + Vat) to work through these four steps with us if you’re going to attempt to do this work in-house. Or for a more comprehensive assessment you could commission a report on your market, complete with our recommended strategies and an hour’s consultation to talk through our in-depth findings.
Alternatively, the most cost-effective option that's also likely to generate the most compelling results is to outsource your social media activities to Social-Hire (max. £899 + Vat per month, a tiny fraction of what it costs to employ someone to do this). If you’d like to talk through this option, simply book in for a convenient call time. Our testimonials say all that needs to be said about the effectiveness of this approach - see here.