Social Media ROI | Social Media for Recruitment | BlueSky PR

Are you struggling to demonstrate social media ROI to your manager or the wider team at your recruitment firm? Measuring the return on social media metrics can often feel like a real struggle as not everything you do will result in a new candidate or client.

When used correctly, social media can become a powerful recruitment marketing channel to generate awareness among your target audience and build relationships with prospects. So, what can you measure to demonstrate that your recruitment firm’s investment is paying off?

What is social media ROI?

ROI stands for “Return on Investment” and usually when someone thinks of ROI they immediately think of revenue. However, for social media, as with other recruitment marketing activities, this may not be the case. To be able to clearly demonstrate your recruitment firm’s social media ROI, you will need to review your overall business objectives and ensure you have set social media goals that help these to be achieved.

For your social media goals to be attainable they should use the SMART template. This is where you are:

• Specific about what you want to achieve
• What you are setting is measurable
• You have carefully considered your goal to make sure that it is attainable
• It is relevant to your business’s objectives
• And it is time-bound so that it has a clear deadline of when it needs to be achieved

Below are three examples of recruitment firm business objectives and social media goals that have been aligned with them:

1. Business objective:

Increase regional brand awareness

Social media goal:

Acquire 30 new Twitter followers each month that reside within that region

2. Business objective:

Increase the number of candidate leads

Social media goal:

Increase the number of candidate registrations generated via LinkedIn by 5% month-on-month

3. Business objective:

Increase overall website traffic

Social media goal:

Increase the number of website visits from Facebook by 10% month-on-month

Why do I need to measure my recruitment firm’s social media ROI?

By measuring your social media ROI effectively, you will gain some valuable data that you can use to evaluate the success of your social media strategy and demonstrate its success. If you find that you are currently failing to deliver ROI, you can use these insights to refine what isn’t currently working so that you can start to see an improvement.

Being able to demonstrate your social media ROI is vital so that you can produce a successful business case to secure further investment in your activities.

How to measure social media ROI

As mentioned above, it is essential that your social media goals are measurable if they are to be achieved. Once you have set a goal that is measurable, you then need to establish what metrics you will monitor in order to evaluate whether or not it has been successful. Below are just some of the metrics that you can use depending on what your goal is:

• Reach – the number of impressions that your posts have generated
• Engagement – such as likes, comments, retweets and shares
• Website traffic – back to the website or a particular landing page
• Conversions – such as the number of people who have signed up to receive a newsletter
• Leads generated – such as potential candidates who have applied for a role or potential clients who have downloaded an e-book

It is vital that the metrics you use relate directly back to your social media goals instead of falling into the trap that many recruitment firms do and report on what are known as ‘vanity metrics’.

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that look good on paper – such as generating a high numbers of post likes or building a large number of followers – but if these metrics aren’t relevant to the goals that have been set and are simply used to make a brand’s performance on social media look better than it really is then they are vanity metrics.

Tools recruitment firms can use to measure social media ROI

Once you have clearly outlined how your social media goals align with your business objectives, and the metrics you are going to use to measure your ROI, it is important that you have the right tools for the job.

Here are just a few of the most common tools that recruitment firms can use to measure social media ROI:

Social media analytics

Each of the main social media channels has its own native analytics tools that you can use to assess post performance, engagement and track audience growth

Google Analytics

This helps recruitment businesses track website traffic and conversions, such as job vacancy applications and e-book downloads

LinkedIn Insights tag 

This is a JavaScript code that you can add to your website and not only does it bring a number of benefits to your LinkedIn advertising campaigns it also powers LinkedIn Website Demographics – which provides you with demographic information of your website visitors

UTM code builders

These allow you to track traffic source data across your social media and email marketing campaigns.

Ways you can improve your social media ROI

It is vital that you analyse your social media performance and refine your social strategy on a regular basis if you want to improve your ROI. Here are just a few tips on what you can do:

1. Analyse your top performing posts

Are there any specific trends? For example, are your most engaged with posts all on a particular topic? Or are they all the same content format, such as video or infographics? And what times are these posts being sent out?

2. Make sure your content resonates with your target audience

Use our tips on creating a persona for more advice on producing content that is tailored towards the interests of your audience

3. Post frequently enough so that your content is being seen by your target audience 

Author: Dan Stobbs