Recruiters and HR professionals should want to, and need to, get good at content marketing. Increase your credibility, build a reputation as thought-leader, generate passive candidate leads, build a talent pipeline, increase your quality of hire… the list goes on.
In part 1 we showed you how to build a content strategy, and in part 2, we talked about writing best practices to help you create content your candidates want to read. You could write the best content in the world, though, but without proper promotion it simply won’t get read and all your efforts will be a waste of time.
Here’s to the final portion of the content marketing mix: how to publish and promote your content. If you’re looking for some quick and practical tips, skip straight to the end for a cheat sheet of social media promotion best practices. Searching for free recruiting software? Try Recruiteze to recruit with ease!
Publishing & Promotion
There are two ways of doing this:
- Use a hybrid social media/blogging platform
- Use a blogging platform to publish and social media to promote
Let’s look at each of them in turn.
Hybrid Publishing & Promotion Platforms
The main two social and blogging hybrid platforms are Google+ and LinkedIn. LinkedIn Pulse is a great example of hybrid done well – it’s breaking down the traditional boundary between social network and publishing platform, allowing you to do both in the same place.
ADVANTAGES
LinkedIn is a platform used heavily by recruiters and HR professionals – 89% report successfully hiring someone through LinkedIn – so the fact you can leverage your existing network for your content is a real advantage.
For recruiters who are likely already active on and highly familiar with the platforms, LinkedIn especially, publishing content through them is simple.
Posting to LinkedIn Pulse is easy:
- Click on Publish a Post icon on your Homepage
- Add your headline and content
- Add images (think back to part 2 – break up the text and add interest)
- Add a cover image
- Add tags so others can find your post
- Hit Publish
Your post is then added to the published posts section above your summary on your profile. It’s also shared with your network – for recruiters, who’ll generally have almost all of their clients and candidates on LinkedIn – the potential reach can be huge.
If you are using Google+, this is how you publish content:
- Click ‘Share What’s New’
- Create a headline (*use asterisks to make it bold*)
- Add the body of your content
- Upload a picture
- +Mention anyone you’ve referenced in your content to extend your reach
- Add hashtags
- Select audience and share
You can share your content publically, with Circles, or with individual users, although you’ll most likely share publically – there’s no point putting out content if no one can find it!
Mike Elgan calls Google+ the “the best blogging platform available today” because of it’s simplicity, snowball-like growth tendency and easy segmentation using Circles.
Sounds great, right? Except there are disadvantages too (I know, it can never just be simple…)
DISADVANTAGES
A hybrid platform lacks the custom functionality of a blog, including features like an archive and widgets to improve the candidate experience. They also make it difficult to monetise your blog, which can mean that it’s difficult to drive tangible results.
One of the biggest disadvantages of relying on a hybrid blogging platform is the lack of ability to capture email addresses. Normally, a blog can play a fundamental role in capturing details to feed into your CRM. These leads can then be developed – “nurtured through the sales funnel” – to become valued clients/candidates.
In reality, though, the biggest problem is that you don’t own the platform. You’re held ransom by any changes that platform make, and they don’t have your best interests at heart. If you don’t own the platform where you publish content, you lose control – and that’s almost always a bad thing.
For that reason, many people choose to set up their own blog, relying on social networks to promote and drive traffic back to that blog.
Publishing Through A Blogging Platform
Which of the two publishing & promotion options you choose is personal preference, but many see owning a blog as the better option. If you’re an individual recruiter, or your content marketing is more on the casual side, then publishing through a hybrid platform might be simpler.
However, you’ll generally find that larger organisations who view content as part of an overarching strategy will invest in building a blog.
There are two options if you want to set up a blog:
- Free hosting
- Self-hosting
Personally, I think free hosting blogging platforms aren’t worth your time. They’re basically doing exactly the same thing as LinkedIn and Google+, with all the same disadvantages, but with none of the advantages.
The only real advantages to free hosting is that they’re free, and simple. With that in mind, most recruiters would do better to use LinkedIn and be done with it.
Which brings us to self-hosting.
The major advantage of self-hosting is that you own the blog. You have complete control over your content, and you can easily collect email leads.
Publishing content through a self-hosted blog is generally your best bet if you want content marketing to be a serious, fruitful part of your candidate acquisition strategy. You can track, capture and retain leads much more easily, and measure your results more easily too.
The most popular blogging platform is WordPress, which offers both free and self-hosted options.
WordPress.org
WordPress was originally created as an ope