As social media feeds continue to become increasingly saturated, it is undoubtedly harder than ever for brands to cut through the noise. So how can your recruitment firm attempt to stand out from the crowd?
Here are three tips that recruitment marketers can use to develop a cohesive and recognisable brand on social media.
1. Create brand guidelines
One of the biggest mistakes that we witness small recruitment firms and start ups make is to cut costs on their branding and ask their design agencies to simply provide them with a logo, font and a couple of different colours to use rather than a basic brand guidelines document. This ends up causing all manner of problems (and a lot more money!) when it comes to producing marketing content, such as leaflets and flyers through to social media imagery.
As such, you should always ensure that you have brand guidelines in place that cover key branding elements such as:
- The RGB and HEX codes of your recruitment firm’s colour palette
- How your logo should look on a light background and a dark background
- The fonts to use in both traditional and digital media
This will enable you to have a clearly defined brand identity and make it far easier to produce compelling social media content.
2. Maintain a consistent brand identity across your social media channels
While each social media platform has a certain look and feel, it is vital to that your recruitment firm maintains a consistent brand identity across each of the channels you have a presence on.
To do this, you should ensure that your account visuals and bios are on-brand and optimised for the specific layouts of each channel as well as the audiences you are targeting.
For example, Instagram’s business bios are far shorter than Facebook’s – this means you will need to succinctly communicate what your business offers for the former in comparison to the level of detail afforded by the latter.
Additionally, if each of your social media channels are targeting different audiences you will need to convey this clearly. For example, if you are using Facebook for employer branding purposes and LinkedIn to advertise executive level roles, then your header images and bio text will need to be tweaked to highlight this.
It is also critical that the visual assets you use are high quality and meet the requirements of each platform. I recommend using Hubspot’s guide to social media image dimensions which is updated regularly.
3. Establish a brand voice and tone
While visuals are incredibly important in engaging social media users - with research showing that tweets with photos receive an average 35% increase in retweets and Facebook posts 2.3 times more engagement – words still play a vital role, particularly when you consider the character limits that platforms such as Twitter impose.
Not only should you ensure brand continuity in terms of visuals, but you should also strive for a consistent tone of voice. This is incredibly important if you have more than one person contributing to your social media channels, as everyone has their own sentence structures and go to words or emojis that they will often use – whether they’re consciously aware of them or not. And this often results in contrasting posts which sound noticeably different from one day to the next.
Why not take a look at some of the most successful brands on social and see how they have woven a cohesive tone of voice across all of their channels? While not every company can have the wit and humour of Innocent, they can certainly establish a tone of voice that matches their brand values.
