How Social Media Is Changing The Way Companies Find Staff

Business Tech, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, ,

Social Media and StaffingIn a very real sense, social media has changed the world (mostly for the better) in recent years. What began as a simple way for friends and family members to stay in touch over the internet and organise their media libraries in one convenient place, has morphed into a global market sector worth billions.  YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are now household names across the globe, even amongst those who might not even own a computer! It’s also started to change the way companies hire their staff. All potential employees will doubtless have some kind of online presence and this is an incredibly useful tool for rooting out potential employees and expanding the profile of the company. Thousands of businesses across the world are using social media to hire new staff. Here we’ll explore how and why your company should be doing likewise.

The Pros

It has been proven that businesses which use social media experience a far less significant turnover of staff. This is primarily because social media networks allow companies to find staff members who are more suited to the job, not just professionally, but personally as well. Most of the top-tier companies are now using social media as their primary source for new employees as it not only works as a means for hiring new staff, but as an incredibly cost-effective marketing campaign. Whilst you’re looking for the best possible people, you can also use the time to expand your company’s brand and get your name out there. There is also the opportunity with social media to build a more tangible and emotional connection to your employees by building a more attractive and personable company brand. The most obvious boon however is the sheer reach you gain from using social media. Social media is fundamentally changing the way business gets done, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

The Cons

To be completely honest the cons are few and far between but they are there. The primary con of course is the potential for fraud. It is quite simple for an outside source to hack into potential staff members Facebook, Twitter or Linked In account and sabotage their personal information. The ‘casual’ nature of sites such as Facebook could also prove a liability as employees might think that their privacy is being ‘invaded’.

LinkedIn

Perhaps the first social media site to exist primarily to create connections between employees and employers, having a Linked In profile is fast becoming an absolute necessity if you wish to be taken seriously in the business world. On your LinkedIn Page you can upload your CV, your previous jobs, interests, personal details and (perhaps most importantly) a list of skills that other members of the website can choose to ‘endorse’. For many companies and recruitment firms, Linked In endorsements are incredibly useful tools for gauging whether or not an applicant’s claims can be backed up by their fellow professionals.

Facebook/Twitter

The undisputed daddies of social media; more than 60% of recruiters now use Facebook and more than 50% use Twitter. Although Linked In dominates the social media market when it comes to recruitment, the fact that it’s specifically geared towards professionals means that its reach is rather limited. For example, at last count there were 225 million registered Linked In users but Facebook has a staggering 1.15 BILLION. Of course this is only an estimate. The figures are undeniably impressive though and of course Facebook cannot just be used for recruitment, but can be an invaluable tool in expanding your brand and audience awareness.

Top Tips

  • Know your target audience and stick to it. Decide early on which social networking site best suits your needs and focus all of your energy on it. Being a ‘jack-of-all-trades” is not recommended.
  • Be creative. Everyone and their dog will be using the same tactics so try to think outside the box.
  • Always return messages. By having an open dialogue with your audience and potential employees, you’re encouraging growth and will come across as a ‘people focused’ company.
  • Start early. Don’t delay and let your social media profile be the last thing you decide to focus on, if anything, it should be the first thing you focus on as it can be linked to all other aspects of your recruitment campaign.

This guest post was written by Crispin Jones. Before starting work with the team at www.depoel.co.uk, Crispin worked for several SME’s and has witnessed recruitment through social media at it’s finest, and at it’s worst. He actually found his current business partner through twitter, and would highly recommend for businesses who can’t afford administrative costs to give social media a go. 

Why Is Social Media Such An Important Part Of Web Traffic?

Social Media Marketing, Web Traffic, , ,

social media web trafficSocial media is in the spotlight of all SEO companies after recent changes to Google algorithms. It’s now the number one way of increasing the amount of web traffic flowing through to your website. It’s led to questions about what this is going to mean for other SEO methods and whether this has changed the way every website has to approach promotion.

What Happened?

Google Penguin and the updates after it led to various SEO metrics changing. Whilst we can’t prove this because Google won’t reveal how much each factor influences ranking, SEOs have reported how the effects of their techniques have changed. The value of hyperlinks and keywords has dropped significantly. The highest metrics are social media.

Obviously, Google+ gets the most emphasis since this is backed by Google. Twitter and Facebook follow close behind.

The Drive to Relevancy

The SEO rankings are designed to help the most popular websites appear at the top and the least popular to appear at the bottom. In the past, they’ve been relatively easy to manipulate. It’s why you could type a search string in and get results completely unrelated to what you were looking for.

Google has always wanted to make the sites at the top more relevant to you. They want to make sure the most popular websites reach the top. The easiest way to do this is to take social media into account. If people are talking about something it means it’s more popular.

Now you have to rely on other people to increase your SEO ranking. You can’t just pay an SEO company to make a few backlinks. You need to rely on total strangers to promote you.

What Does this Mean to You?

In short, companies have to cater to their customers for the first time. Their marketing campaigns need to be less self-serving. If they’re to succeed, they have to produce content that people like and that will actually want to share. You can rate how hard this is depending on what category you’re trying to target.

If you’re involved in building or accountancy, you’ll have to rely on customer reviews and testimonials. Blog owners can rely on funny and amusing pictures and stories. The latter will need to focus more on social media than the former, though.

Does it Change the Way You Promote Yourself?

It doesn’t mean older SEO techniques are now irrelevant. Webmasters still have to optimise their websites if they’re going to succeed in ranking highly in the Google search rankings. All it means is you’re going to have to sign up to the big three or four social media websites, and these are:

  • Facebook.
  • Twitter.
  • Google+.
  • LinkedIn (assuming you’re more business orientated).

It doesn’t take much to fulfil your social media quota. There are so many plugins and add-ons which automatically share your information to your social media channels. Make sure you get full email notifications of any direct messages from these websites. Try to encourage interaction by replying to any and all queries you receive.

Today’s guest post is authored by Neal Henderson. He is a popular freelance writer and a SEO genius. He has written many SEO, business and computer related articles. He recommends megawebtraffic to his readers who want to increase their Google page rank.

5 Tips To Maximise Tradeshow ROI

Networking, Small Business Marketing, Tradeshow advertising

TradeShow-AdvertisingTo paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the tradeshow have been greatly exaggerated. Tradeshows are still a great way to network, form partnerships and relationships, and introduce your business to new customers. Their reputation has slipped a bit because they can be expensive, attendance is down, and some exhibitors treat the whole thing as a bit of a vacation, putting in minimal effort and boring the pants off of attendees. If you put in some effort before, during, and after the show, however, you can have a (personally, professionally, and financially) rewarding experience.

Here are 5 tips for a winning tradeshow experience.

1)     Start promoting your stand before the show.

According to tips on Exhibitor Central, your preparation can start six months before the show, which is about when you should start thinking about what promotional media you’re going to use. This is a good time to design a logo that suits your stand’s theme. It doesn’t need to be fancy; for example, if you’re going to promote your new eco-friendly range of products then you could wrap a vine of green leaves around your existing business logo.

With four of five months to go you should have ironed out your email and direct mail marketing list. You should also be working on the content for the broadcasts that you’ll be sending out. Don’t forget about in-store promotions during the lead-up to the show. Flyers and brochures are old standards but aren’t likely to generate huge interest. Do something a little different, like the company that gave out bags of pineapples, complete with tips on what to do with the fruit, to suit their Hawaiian-themed booth.

2)     Interactive is in, static is out

The days of flat walls and tables with banners, posters, brochures, and samples are over. Now, you need to be interactive if you want to catch attention. At the very least, you need a TV or two with a promotional slideshow or mini-movie. But you really ought to make your displays more interesting than that.

So, using the eco-friendly product line as an example, you can set up your display on different levels, with each level joined by winding creepers or vines (like your logo) and decorated by pot plants and perhaps a trendy desk water fountain and Zen garden or two. Have some background noise to create some ambience, like bird song or a babbling brook. Have a diffuser that releases a soft, natural fragrance. Engage every sense you can think of and you’ll make your stand truly memorable.

3)     Use bribery

People love free stuff, so give away free stuff. You can be boring and give away pens, but that’s hardly going to raise a blip on anyone’s interest-meter. Think pineapples. In other words, think of something different.

Back to our eco-example; if it’s an eco-cleaning product, you could give away grass- or mud- or other-muck-stained t-shirts with a sample of the product, and invite people to put it to the test. You need to be absolutely confident that it will work, however. And you need to ensure that the t-shirt is decent enough so that people will actually want to wear it afterwards.

If you’re not that confident in your product (then shame on you), you can give away something related to it, like a goodie bag made from recycled canvas (which can double as a shopping bag) and which contains things like fair trade chocolates, organic vegetable seeds, and a coupon for your product.

4)     Give serious thought to your stand.

Your stand and not your display. You need to know things like access to power points, lighting conditions, position relative to entrances and exits, and your location. Your location is important because corner and standalone stands should be planned differently to stands wedged between other exhibitors. You also need to know the size of the stand so that you can plan which display units to bring. These days, you can get customisable display systems that you can adjust to suit stands of just about any size. Modern materials, like tension fabric and aluminium frames, are easy to setup and shift around, so you can make some last minute adjustments to your stand if you find that there was a mix up with the specs, or if the design you had in mind doesn’t quite work in practice.

5)     Choose the right people.

Exhibitor Central makes another important point: Your booth is only as good as your representative staff. Remember that a good salesperson doesn’t necessarily make a good booth showperson. It could be that your chatty and winsome receptionist is the best candidate to represent you at a tradeshow. You’ll want to give her some additional training, of course, but the lesson is: Don’t close your eyes to people’s potential.

There is no reason why, with the proper preparation, you can’t make attending a tradeshow fun for you, your staff, and your customers. And, a fun experience can turn into a lasting customer relationship.

Our guest blogger, Jemima Winslow is a tradeshow junkie. She loves exploring stands, trying samples, and challenging staff with intentionally tricky questions. She’s the reason you want to choose and train the right staff. And she’ll definitely take you up on the clean t-shirt challenge.

SEO Vs. PPC: Which Brings The Best ROI?

AdWords, PPC, SEO, Small Business Marketing, ,

seo-vs-ppcPay Per Click advertising used to be the best possible way to encourage the search engine gods to work in your favor. PPC, as it is commonly called, is a method of purchasing spots within search results. They are listed as sponsored results, but are still relevant to the users initial search string.  For website owners looking to gain web presence, pay per click advertising is an easy way to generate traffic.

The Benefits of PPC

There are some significant reasons why anyone would use pay per click advertisements in order to gain website traffic. First of all, they immediately get your name out in front of a lot of people. On top of that, those people are the right people. PPC targets internet visitors who are searching for what your website is about. For website owners, it is a jump to the front of the line button that puts them in front of the consumers we are all competing for.

The Drawbacks of PPC

As good as PPC is, it has been limited by the behaviors of internet users. They know the result is sponsored and choose not to click it. According to web usage studies, the majority of users will not click on a search result if it has been sponsored.  It is also very expensive. Even though PPC is delivering its promise of getting your website to the front of the line, what value does that serve if no one visits it?

How SEO Differs

Search engine optimization (SEO), is the practice of using techniques to appear at the top of the list without buying the spot.  Called organic results, search engine results from websites that have been optimized read exactly like those that have not. Internet surfers, therefore, are just as willing to click on those as they would any other site.

Everyone Can’t Be In the Front

SEO can get you to the front of the line, but it can just as easily get someone else there too. Because of that, staying in front can be a competition that requires regular work. This is because the secrets of SEO are publically available. With a little time and motivation, anyone can be listed on top. Unlike PPC, which guarantees the spot, SEO spots must be maintained.

When to Choose Which

Because PPC will immediately put you in front, and maintain that spot for a certain amount of time, it is best suited for new websites. During that time, they can be exposed to users, even though they will most likely receive fewer clicks than the organic results.  SEO can be used for any website that is comfortable with taking the time to not only develop into the top spot, but also maintain it.

Ultimately, the choice you make will depend on your website or company’s marketing budget and time to enter the market. If you just created a new product and are launching the website in the middle of November you may not have enough time to use SEO effectively to reach the holiday online shopping crowd.

On the other hand, if you created a hot holiday item and it is the middle of March; go for SEO. It will take a little bit longer to reach your top spots, but the returns will be exponentially higher than PPC, with higher click-thru ratios to your site. In this scenario, it is also important to look at the budget and make sure it is feasible. Shop around for SEO companies and find the most competitive rate.

Our guest blogger, Ryan Duncan, has been practicing website design and search engine optimization for the past 7 years and founded Funnel Boost Media in 2011. FBM is focused on providing a unique online marketing experience to it’s clients that brings results and focuses on branding at the same time. Located in the San Antonio, Tx area, Funnel Boost Media provides internet marketing solutions to businesses all over the South Texas region.