Tag: LinkedIn

Social Media Hacks to Attract Top Talent – Part I

Posted on by Tal Harel

Finding and keeping employees is a challenge, and it’s especially tough for startups that don’t have big budgets for high salaries and expensive employer branding campaigns.

Social media can help. Here are some methods we perfected with our startup customers to help them attract and retain top talent.

Before we start, it’s important to understand that in today’s job market you should view your employees as customers. This requires a real change, but it will make your hiring work more effective.

Start with creating a strong employer brand identity

Distill what makes you unique as an employer. Ask your current workers: is it the flexible hours and work-life balance? Is it your work culture? The interesting technology? Promotion Prospects? Your values? The salary?

Write this in bullets – this is your unique selling proposition (USPs), and together with your company’s vision and mission statement, you now have your brand identity. Every personnel in HR and all managers should know it and speak it.

Create a narrative on Social Media as a great workplace

Use your brand identity to post regularly on social media, creating posts that convey who you are as an employer according to the brand identity you created. Social media is essential because that’s where potential recruits check your out – even before your website.

What kind of posts should you create? “Employee of the week”, a welcome post for a new employee, a banner of your vision, a new project or customer, a product/project milestone, and a photo of the employees who took part.

Pictures of office parties are good, but showcasing your company’s offerings, business achievements, and employees at work is much better: a software engineer will want to see your company’s value beyond balloons and cupcakes.

Which social media platform do your employees use? The rule of thumb:

  • Israeli employees aged 30 and up are on Facebook
  • Israeli employees aged 30 and below are on Instagram
  • Everyone is on LinkedIn – if they’re looking for a job – so you should be there too.
  • Regardless of their age, Israelis aren’t big on Twitter
  • TikTok is growing fast, but not quite in the realm of Israeli employer branding. You can skip it for now

How often should you upload posts? 1-2 a week is good. Don’t aim too high. Remember, traction is key. Once you start, it’s vital to continue uploading posts in order to create awareness on social media and to get the platform algorithms to notice you.

When you’re creating good content on an ongoing basis, and you get engagement, the algorithms of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook will take note, and show your content to similar eyeballs, so you’ll get more engagements.

Create Engagement

You want your posts to receive likes, shares, and reads. How do you do that?

Start by getting your employees to like and share your posts. Create a WhatsApp group and update them with new posts.

Then add company managers as LinkedIn page Administrators, and get them to invite connections to follow. YOu can do the same with Facebook, only here it’s Likes. This is a great hack. Use it.

Building an employer brand presence on social media is a start. Now you need to optimize your job posts so they reach the right audience, catch their attention and convince them to apply. Read about this in our next blog post.

Achieving Business Goals With Social Media

Posted on by Tal Harel

We’ll dive headfirst into the story: a recycling technology startup was about to go public, and Cognis was called in together with Top Interactive to build a pre-IPO social media presence.  The aim was to create a narrative of a credible and profitable company with breakthrough technology and deliver it to potential investors in the target market.

Creating a solid online presence is more than just building your brand and creating market awareness. Your online presence can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals, such as reaching and converting investors, and post-IPO – raising your stock price.

In this case, our social media work contributed to a successful IPO, to a robust post-IPO trade in the Company’s stock, and to the rise in stock price. How did we do it? We captured the attention of private and institutional investors, and when they came to our Company page – we showed them the Company is worthy of their investment.

When creating the Company’s online presence, from the get-go we implemented a strategy developed through years of experience: creating traction through posts displaying the Company’s business acumens by showcasing deployments, and by providing our take on events in our ecosystem. We also deployed the organic-first method of growing our followers. Both activities raise the Company’s rating (making it float, so to speak) and lay a solid foundation for future paid promotions.

When the client issued a press release on the commencement of public trading, Top Interactive promoted it to potential investors in the target market – both private and institutional –  with razor-sharp precision. Investors became aware of the stock, went to the Company’s social media pages – which ticked all the right buttons – and bought the stock.

The results were astounding (even for us): in just 48 hours, the number of followers on LinkedIn jumped from 120 to 1120. The truly impressive feat however was the increase in stock prices – a whopping 50% during those 48 hours; which means people heard, came to take a look, and were convinced.

These results demonstrate how a social media strategy that utilizes market research and understanding of the ecosystem to build your reputation can be a powerful business tool. So next time you make a major decision about where you’re heading and how – your social media gal (or guy) should be in the know.

How Employees Can Help Build a StartUp’s LinkedIn Presence

Posted on by Tal Harel

LinkedIn celebrated its 18th birthday last month. With nearly 740 million users, LinkedIn has grown into one of the largest platforms for creating business connections and finding investors. This is particularly important for startups who use LinkedIn as a primary tool to find the funding they need to beat the 1/10 statistic for success.

Your company’s LinkedIn page holds unique value to your investors and, therefore to you. Sure, your website will be one of the locations potential investors will go to get a feel for your company. Companies also implement tools such as presentations and product brochures, which give a more in-depth description of your offering.

However, your company’s LinkedIn Page gives viewers insight into your development over time. Your history, your pace of growth, and as an extrapolation, the stability and growth potential of your company. Increasing your credibility, as well as public awareness to your LinkedIn page is important to catch the attention of investors, and convince them that you are worthy.

So what can you do to elevate your startup on LinkedIn?

Start by using the biggest asset you have at your disposal – your employees. Startups are known to be highly selective when choosing team members to join their endeavor. Budgets are tight, and the stakes are high, so employees must be at the top of their game. One of the many benefits of hiring quality employees is the professional network that they are connected to.

The first step is to ensure that your entire staff is connected to your company page. Meaning, their most recent job is at your company. This allows potential investors to see your management style and HR choices in a way that a simple bio on the company’s website won’t give them. Remember, your workers are your most significant assets.

Once your employees have listed your company as their place of work, encourage them to invite their contacts to follow the company’s LinkedIn page. This is an excellent way to boost your page’s ranking and visibility. LinkedIn allows up to 100 invites per month, and once you reach your first 100 followers organically, you have built real traction for your company page.

Since workers typically do not have time to send out invites, in the intimate setting of a startup we could often ask the employees to share their credentials to do the inviting on their behalf. This depends of course on their willingness to share those credentials. If they don’t cooperate – don’t nudge. It is their personal property, after all. Start with the founders and build it from there.

Once you have opened the conversation between the company and your employees, you can utilize this every time you upload new posts on your company page. Click on the ‘Notify employees’ button when you make your post, and the employees will receive a notification encouraging them to react. And they can always share.

The new LinkedIn algorithm places weight on personal connections, as it measures your credibility with that audience. The higher the engagement level of your followers – the higher your rating. So that early role your employees can play is an important one for your visibility and success. A startup is only as good as its team- and together you can do great things.

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