Social media is not a fad or something used only by kids and people who want the world to know about their lunch; it’s a proven platform for marketing. But while most companies have one audience for their marketing, staffing companies have two: candidates and clients.
Trying to speak to both audiences at once using one channel results in the communications equivalent of a mullet. You may think it’s working, with the business in the front (your B2B client marketing) and the party in the back (your B2C candidate marketing). But what you’re really doing is creating confusion and putting everyone off. (Just like a mullet. Look at it.)
Instead, customize your social media to match what each audience is doing, and pay special attention to the ways they use that social media channel. For instance, most people use Facebook on their “personal time,” when they’re interacting as themselves, while people on LinkedIn are more likely to interact as a representative of their company.
So it might make sense to pitch your candidate social media conversations to Facebook and your client social media conversations to LinkedIn. However, when high-end candidates are job-hunting, they’re likely to interact on LinkedIn as themselves (but in a way that promotes themselves as a business asset, rather than the more casual presentation people use on Facebook).
To make sure you’re using the right channels for your social media, think first about who you’re trying to reach, what they’re looking for, how they use social media and what kinds of conversations they respond to. Treat social media like the major marketing instrument it is and put the same level of thought into it that you’d put into an advertising campaign.
Keep the business with the B2B channels, and the casual with the B2C channels, and you can avoid a lot of ugliness.
What social media channels do you use? And have you ever rocked the mullet? Let us know in the comments!