How marketers are using social media [podcast #55]?

#55 How marketers are using social media - Building a modern employer brand podcast with Susanna Rantanen

Using social media in talent marketing continues to be one of the key marketing, communication and engagement tactics in 2021.

That’s why I strongly recommend forming the habit of keeping your tabs on social media trends.

There are plenty of sources reporting and blogging about the best social media practices throughout the year.

Some of my favourite ones are:

And here is a list of Hootsuite’s favorites social media podcasts as well >>

How marketers are using social media in 2021?

As talent marketers we should definitely pay attention to how experienced marketers are using socials, especially in consumer marketing.

Why?

Because there is a lot of money in consumer marketing. Social media companies for sure want their piece of that pot and therefore must cater to the needs and expectations of seasoned marketers.

Paying attention to experienced marketers is important also, because it takes time to see what actually works on social media. Why do the same mistakes yourself? Pick up the hot tips and work wiht it!

Based on a summary of several sources as well as my own experiences working and using social media daily for about 14 years now, these are what pops up as key trends:

Less promotion and more engagement

I keep repeating this year after year, but social media platforms were designed for people to have conversations, share important thoughts, news and become connected with each other.

Experienced marketers know what really works in social media is everything that builds engagement. We simply will not get the best out of social media when we use it mainly for promoting, advertising and sharing posts about what we need (applications or sales).

Instagram has been the fastest growing social media platform years on for a long time. It is also a pretty good place to go to evaluate and analyze what are the key trends in social media.

If you look back, even if just a year, you will notice Instagram’s focus on various video related features and add-ons. The most recent being Instagram Reels.

Talent Marketing School Become a Talent Marketing Pro

While it is a whole different ball game to start using Youtube in your talent marketing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all offer video content features these days. This comes to show, people are watching short and long videos on Youtube and we should ride on to this trend.

Conversations as content get more and more attention, and exposure to your brand

Social media conversation is as much of content as writing a blog post and then sharing it on your LinkedIn-profile. In fact, writing a post about a topic you want to chat about and then inviting others to give their two cents about it is likely to gain you more exposure on social media than sharing a link.

A conversation as content looks like an idea, a thought, a question or an opinion that you have about something relevant to your employer brand or employer image. Write down your thought and then ask what experiences others have about it, or how others might act on it, or what it means to your followers etc.

Remember that in (modern) employer branding it is essential not to start conversations on any random topic or idea, or something that might be important to you as a person but has no relation to the brand image you desire to build. Only have conversations about very few selected topics related to your brand. But keep having lots of those conversations!

Listen to Episode #55

In this week’s episode of Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast I picked out and shared the key take aways from Social Media Examiner’s annual Industry Report.

Even though this report was published already in May 2020, I picked up bits of it that were about how the respondents were going to use social media in the future, as in end of last year and this year.

  • Facebook remains the most important social media for B2B and B2C marketers, especially as an advertising media.
  • Instagram is getting hotter by the year for all marketers.
  • Video marketing is growing putting also Youtube back on the radars of marketers.
  • Twitter, TikTok and Snapchat were all (according to this report) losing marketers’ attention and money.

Key benefits of social media marketing:

  • Consistent exposure to their brand or product.
  • Increased traffic to the website and website content (which enables marketers to retarget and remarket).
  • Generated business leads.

Download the full report discussed in this episode >>

Episode-length: 27:41 min

JOIN the waitlist for Talent Marketing School here >>

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