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Following our previous blog, we have established that Social Media is very important in marketing activities that help generate leads. Particularly where you are looking for new candidates and clients and want to fill your pipelines full of people to talk to.
In today’s blog, we discuss two things.
The first one is pretty easy, and that’s around what to post. Should you be using video? Should you be using blog posts? Should you be using images? Should you be using all of these different things?
We’re also going to discuss the different types of content. I like to put the content into four buckets.
- The news bucket.
- The promotional bucket.
- The value add
- The personal branding bucket.
Modalities
Let’s talk about modalities, i.e. the media you use that will impact your candidates and clients. Some of us, you’ll know, prefer visual media; some people like to read, and some people like to listen.
Text
First of all, are words and phrases – text. People read text all the time. One of the most wired modalities we all have is to read something.
Visual
Some people like to look at pictures, people want to look at infographics, people like to look at diagrams, and all of these different modalities; it’s a good idea to use them on social media so you can get your impact across.
I find images go down incredibly well on LinkedIn. In fact, on all the social channels. We have ‘Marketing hacks’ and ‘Sales hacks’ that go out on our Social Media, and they’ve even surprised me with how well they’ve done in terms of engagement and impressions.
We’ve got a nice image related to the overlayed text on the image (Click here for an example).
Video
The video is still incredibly well received. Post it onto all of the social channels. Some channels are more popular than others. For instance, on Instagram, people love doing videos that are easy to record.
Sound
Our podcast tends to appeal to people of an audio nature. They like to listen to things; they can process them, and maybe they’ll listen to them while walking the dog. Of course, you can also break videos and podcasts into smaller audio snippets.
Make sure you are mixing up the types of content you use. As a basic requirement, you should use some form of visuals to accompany your text. Using imagery will be simpler, but a video is more engaging and worth the investment.
Four Content Buckets
Let’s now talk about those buckets of social content to share.
News Content
Let’s start with the smallest one, which is news content. The other buckets that we’re going to talk about, I think, are more important, and you would share more content in those, but depending on where you are and your sector, you might want to share local news, particularly when it comes to organisations recruiting or moving to the area.
We have one particular client, and they’re in a buoyant part of the U.K. Things are always happening there because they’ve had a lot of government investment. They share some great content about what’s happening now. I know different social media platforms can help you with this, and they go out and find data, but it’s not too difficult to set up a Google alert for local business news in your area.
Promotional Content
The next thing I want to talk about is promotional content. That is a very important bucket because, as we always say, “There’s no free lunch.” Social media is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate who you are, why people should work with you, the results you can get for people, and obviously the job ads you have.
It’s not ideal to be sharing JUST job ads. Some people who follow you may be ready to look for a job, but some aren’t. People will get very bored quickly if you’re only posting job ads.
It would help to consider your ‘Calls to Action (CTA) when thinking about promotional content.
A call to action could be a little about you and your organisation, how long you’ve been in business, how many candidates you have placed and how you work with people. You want people to contact you by picking up the phone or sending you an email. It mentally stimulates the brain of somebody reading about what they need to do and how they get in contact with you.
Something to remember as well is to make your images stand out, make the font easy to read and use a contrasting colour to the LinkedIn colour.
Make them easy to read and well put together, and you can do all of these things in Canva or if you’ve got a designer or a marketeer.
Then what you want to be doing is sharing things like why you, why your brand, how you answer some of the challenges that may be happening for candidates, perhaps the challenges for clients, and maybe what’s going on in the market. You want to be sharing content around that.
If we’re not connected on LinkedIn, come and connect with me, and you’ll see the content that I’m sharing. Send me a connection request and say, “I’m a podcast listener,” and I’ll automatically accept you.
Then you can look at some of the content that we share.
You will notice our promotional content. It often leads to a question that a candidate or a client would have. Have a look at the style that we use. What we do is we talk about an issue, a problem. This is a top tip for you here. These are all things that prospects say to us on calls.
We flip that over and tell them about Super Fast Circle and why it would be a good idea for them to have a conversation with us about it.
You don’t have to ram it down people’s throats. Ours go out onto LinkedIn weekly. Go and have a look at them.
You can follow me or follow Sharon. Drop her a quick connection request and just say, “Listening to your podcast,” and we’ll accept you.
Another vital thing in today’s market, because people are scared of making decisions and moving forward, is to think about social proof.
We ran a whole training session for our Superfast Circle members on social proof and how they can do it, but it’s really important that you are sharing testimonial and case study content out to your audience so that people can have a little bit of a look at you and who you are before they make that decision.
Value Add Content
I want to move into value add content. Using value-added content links to promote you and your brand; it’s just doing it differently, because as you’ve heard me say before about the great Frank comment that demonstrates you can help people by actually helping them first and doing it for free.
Then, of course, you can do this with your content. I think the limit on LinkedIn is something like 1,300 characters. Facebook is long, and I think something like 3,000 or 4,000 characters. I think it’s something like 2,200 characters on Instagram, which fundamentally is a couple of hundred words.
You can give a lot of advice and say a lot in 200 words with a nice image and maybe a couple of emoticons that could impact somebody. Remember to think about content; you can share it in that way. You can share a valuable report, and you’ll see things like this on all of the channels where you can download. We share ours, and we get a lot of downloads from social media.
People see an image that we have, and they’ll download our marketing checklist, our social media report, our automation report, and all the different reports we do. We promote those on social media, and it helps to build our list of targeted prospects that we can talk to when they’re ready to move on the market.
It’s the same for you guys, and it helps you to build your list. Now, obviously, you’re doing this in an organic way rather than paid advertising, but it works and putting your brand name out there in front of the market is exactly what you want to do.
Of course, you can do this for clients, candidates and talent you want to work with. Some of the content you can do, and you’ll see this from us, we’ll share a podcast. Each week we’ll share our latest podcast, and there’ll be a link there where you can go and listen to it or download it. It’ll take you back to our website. Of course, if you can get people back to your website, that is a good thing.
We know that LinkedIn can be a bit odd, and it prefers to keep everyone on the website, but I like to do a balance of the two. You can do that as well. The other thing you can do regarding value add is to use LinkedIn newsletters.
You can have a company newsletter on your profile, which could be a great piece of content that you’ve got. It could be a report, anything. The more eyeballs on you and your brand the better.
Personal Branding
The final thing I want to talk about is personal branding. Personal branding is all in. It works. Many people are a little bit reticent to share their personal brand, and it’s crazy. Look at your LinkedIn feed, and you will have certain people that do this incredibly well.
What they’ll do is share a related business story, there’ll be a picture of them, there’ll maybe be a picture of where they work, perhaps an insight that they’ve got, and that can help. In fact, you’ll notice that Sharon and I have recently started doing a lot more around personal branding.
It’s never something we’ve done as much. It was time that we got out there and started doing a bit more around personal branding. You’ll see lots of stories, and you’ll see lots of pictures of me. I will suddenly become a face, not just a voice at the end of the podcast.
Our clients usually see me because I’m on coaching calls every week, virtually daily. People who don’t work with us as closely don’t see me, so you’ll get a sense of that over the coming weeks and months, and it’s something for you to do as well.
We were chatting with one of our clients recently; we encourage her to post pictures of herself and her dog on social. The dog has now got its online fan base. The thing about this, you might say, well, what’s that got to do with getting more candidates and clients?
It’s got everything to do with it because people will only work with people they know, like, and trust. Think about when you are elevating your brand. You might be sharing things in your local town that are happening, a picture of you outside an office building. You might be sharing something about you and your family or your journey and how that’s going because people love people.
We covered a lot today.
We talked about types of modalities, visuals, text, images, and posts on all sorts of different things and topics. We’ve spoken about promotional content. We’ve talked about value add, we’ve talked about sharing news, and we’ve also talked about personal branding. A lot for you to digest here.
The great thing about social media is you can automate some of the content that you share. You can post just in time.
If you start to focus and actually think through what areas I want to focus on, and which of these buckets are we doing now and which aren’t we doing? Then you can cycle your content around that. It makes you and your life so much easier.
How We Can Help
Knowing what content to post on Social Media can be challenging.
Are you posting valuable content? Do you promote your personal brand as well as your company brand?
As members of the Superfast Circle, you will receive monthly content that you can post to social media to increase your brand presence.
Book your call and demonstration here if you want a quick chat to see how Superfast Circle can work for you.
Thanks,
Denise
P.S. If you want to learn more about how #SFC can help support your marketing speak to us here.
