Marketing is about communicating a message that is appreciated by the right audience for the right reasons. The online marketing variant can be measured in a multitude of ways – views, likes, shares, conversion, etc, but for me, the most important measure to understand is whether you are adding value to your audience.

It is easy to share a moronic maths problem on LinkedIn and garner 1000+ likes from far-flung lands. You can equally share a cryptic question or inspirational quote in the search for fame. There is even a bit of software that auto-views LinkedIn profiles so that they view yours in return, although why would you “view” their profile without saying hello? There is little true value in all this activity, and as such you can be fairly sure that the index fingers of your precious connections will be hovering over the unfollow button.

“Yes, you got 1000 “likes” (cue slow hand clap), but why on earth did you clutter up my feed with this rubbish?”

LinkedIn is crucial for the marketing efforts of any recruiter. Their clients and candidates are here in abundance, but, sadly, too few recruiters understand where this added value lies….

It is a given that these Facebook-style tactics don’t go down well, but there are a few other questions to consider as well:

Do your contacts really want to see you share every single job that you are working on at the moment? See them once, seen them all. After a while, it is like a wall of white noise, and they won’t even read the headlines. Also, the Pulse publishing platform really isn’t the right place for job ads – people want to read content (here) that will make them think, not click through to a 30k role with three sentences of poorly-worded job description.

Secondly, it is great giving people an insight into how you work, but I would question the “big biller” celebration photos, or the “can’t believe how busy we are” humblebrag team snap. Winning awards are great, but people aren’t stupid…. if they are awards that are voted for by your own people, personally, I wouldn’t shout too loudly about them. As a general rule, the more you talk about yourselves online (or in any social setting), the fewer people will listen to you.

I don’t want to give the game away too much, but there are so many more worthwhile things that you could be doing on the various social media platforms to give your presence a rocket boost. There are a few recruitment firms out there at the moment, who are “killing it” on social media in the eyes of their clients and candidates. They get great engagement, and they understand the formula for success. You can understand it too.

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