Over the past six months we've worked with several clients to help them put in place a social media strategy around the attraction and recruitment efforts. We've run training workshops, written social media guidelines and built out social channels for them to populate with content. During all these projects we've tended to focus on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as principal channels. But in terms of being able to produce employer branded content Facebook has always held the lead, with plenty of opportunities to produce content and custom branded tabs. You'd expect LinkedIn to be the no-brainer site to use, but until very recently the opportunities to build your employer brand have been few and far between.

Yes, you can claim ownership of your company page, fill out some basic details, add some copy and even create a product showcase but it's been very difficult to start to build a community around your company page, or to start conversations with an interested community of candidates. (There's a paid for upgrade to the Company page which makes it a more compelling proposition, but to be honest, for most of our clients it's been somewhat priced out of their reach.) So, having said all that...what's changed? Well a few months ago, LinkedIn added the ability to "Follow" a company page. For a long time there's not been much to reward your followers, other than quicker access to your company page through a dropdown of their followed companies. But as of last week, company pages can now issue status updates. 

This means that if you have a following, you can now keep them up to date with your latest developments and seed messages into their news feeds (and potentially those of the rest of their network, through likes and comments) which greatly improves the potential reach of your company page and begins to move it away from being just another profile page, into a much more powerful social tool. It also makes it much more important for a trusted team within HR or Marketing to claim and lock down access to the page. By default, any employee can edit or post to a company page, but the status update feature isn't enabled until you lock down the page and designate specific users who are allowed to administrate it and speak with the voice of the company. It also makes me very pleased that the careers site we're about to release for one of our clients has the LinkedIn insider tool featured on its homepage. Initially we'd seen this as a great way for users to network and generate reverse referrals into the company from people they already knew working there.

But the Insider widget also features a prominent Follow button, and our client already has a following of 1600 and growing. The addition of status updates means they've just gained a new audience, who can be reached in a professional and career focused environment...result!

If you're interested in using LinkedIn to engage with your candidate audience, why not get in touch, we'd love to catch up...