Social Media Category Archive

5 tips to help you recruit the right people online

13 Replies Andrew Doyle

Using the internet to recruit new employees for business has become the norm in a very short space of time. For people working in creative industries the internet is an indispensable tool and subsequently online recruitment appears a natural step in order to reach out to target markets.

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The internet has quickly become essential at recruiting the right people for your business.

Recruiting on the internet gives companies and candidates alike a great opportunity to secure the ideal employees and find themselves an exciting new job. Here are five tips to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) access and recruit top talent for their organisations.

Use social networking sites such as LinkedIn

Career-focused networking sites such as LinkedIn are a goldmine of information for growing small businesses. It is a great way of viewing profiles of successful employees and entrepreneurs and engaging in discussion regarding their availability and/or interest in your vacant roles.

Many candidates choose to make their LinkedIn profile public, meaning they are indexed by search engines and can therefore be found in Google when searching for a particular type of candidate.

Extend your recruitment reach via job boards and online agencies

Don’t be afraid to submit your vacant positions across a number of online recruitment agencies and job boards. Instead of simply placing an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, extend your reach online with the potential of millions of views rather than thousands a month offline.

A vast percentage of employers use the internet daily, almost exclusively and the ability to have your vacant positions online within literally minutes improves the efficiency of your recruitment campaign.

Reduce cost-per-hire and retain flexibility

One of the biggest challenges facing HR managers is to reduce the cost-per-hire within their company whilst at the same time maintaining the quality of new talent. It is said that companies who use online recruitment technologies save up to 90% more than those who use traditional recruitment agencies and methods. Online recruitment enables recruiters to streamline recruitment campaigns, whilst promoting the company’s brand and values to a wider, more diverse talent pool.

Recruit using your own company website

Depending on how your company website is built you may be able to advertise careers and vacancies through your own content management system (CMS). Your company website should explicitly portray the vision and values of your company and is one of the most underrated ways to advertise for new talent. Remember, your own website is your time to shine to new recruits as well as new clients.

Use Facebook to develop your professional identity

Facebook is increasingly used as an online recruitment tool, with platforms and solutions for small businesses recruiting via Facebook. Workplace groups, advertisements and profiles can be created to generate discussion about your company as well as encourage applications for vacant roles.

Now is the time to embrace online recruitment and social networking both as a research tool and as a cost-effective way of connecting users and potential employees to add value to your business.

Will Facebook start charging users?

19 Replies Christopher Roberts

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There’s a lot of rumours going around about how the social media giant, Facebook, is going to start charging its users for keeping a profile. This is definitely not true. Facebook issued a statement recently stating that they had absolutely no plan or intention of charging their customers.

Even though the internet is in no short supply of unfounded rumours and gossip, it’s not hard to believe where average users would have gotten the idea.

These rumours spread across the internet for fear that many changes would be made to Facebook’s price structure. The rumour is largely a hoax, but many have been worried about the substantial changes occurring to Facebook that are planned in the upcoming months.

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the most dramatic change yet to the social site and will implement the “timeline” feature. It will take all of your information and create a timeline of your life.

Facebook's LogoZuckerberg is extremely excited about the change, but most people aren’t so thrilled. Some argue, that this is just another move by Facebook that greatly infringes on users’ online information and privacy. Either way, it’s site is free and will remain free for the foreseeable future.

Facebook simply wouldn’t survive a charge based membership services. There’s too much competition in the social media scene right now. Anything remotely resembling fees would sound the death of Facebook’s online supremacy.

Though it makes many wonder if there might come a time when social media sources will eventually switch to a pay system. Across the board, right now, we’re seeing some online features, once free to everyone, now being charged for or in the process of it.

Presently, most online social media sites depend largely on advertising as their main revenue stream. With millions of users interacting with these sites, advertisers are able to gain massive exposure.

Yet, it’s this issue that’s raised a lot of concerns and has begged the question, “Is Facebook selling your information to advertisers?” Facebook has vehemently denied these allegations, but it’s still unclear. For right now, no, Facebook will not charge for using it’s site, but no one can tell what the future of social media could bring.

Google Plus – a breath of fresh air?

15 Replies bhattman

For years websites like MSN and Facebook have been growing in numbers. Many rivals, less efficient and less popular social networking website, have died out as they are crushed by the giants. But Facebook seems immune from the possibility of extinction, with a growing number of users currently at over 640 million users!

MSN had a golden period and enjoyed strong competition with Facebook. But the Microsoft owned site has 120 million users and falling. It looks like MSN will be joining the likes of Bebo, Digg and Myspace.  I myself deleted my Myspace account when I decided to hop onto the Facebook bandwagon.

But for years it seemed that Facebook would never be challenged, and that was the case, until, now! A company which has 15 times the amount of revenue is stepping up to the plate. Google. The internet giant is taking over world computing. With 85% of the world using Google as their search engine, 15% of internet browsers in the world are Google Chrome – but this is fast growing – and now the $30 billion company is preparing to take on Facebook with its own social network – Google+.

In its two month infancy it is showing similar trends to Chrome and is rapidly growing in usage with 20 million worldwide users at the moment. Although this may seem puny, bear in mind it isn’t open to the world public entirely just yet.  At the moment, Google+ is an invitation only site until it opens fully in a couple of months.

I have put my name down to use it on its somewhat large waiting list. But what is all the hype?

Key Feature:

  • Circles – This allows me to group my friends, so for example:
    • Music pals – Joe, Tom, Abby…
    • School pals – Michael, Adam…
    • Work Colleagues – Jane, Adam, Monica…
  • Hangouts – A 10 people group video chat
  • Sparks – Using Google’s search engine you can search for interests
  • The Stream – Users can see their Circles’ updates – similar to Facebook’s wall
  • +1 – Allowing people to recommend items and websites

These are just some of the functions available to use on +.  But is it what we are looking for?

The Google+ ProjectIn my opinion yes, just like Google Chrome did with Internet Explorer it will provide a breath of fresh air to the social networking industry and I think will be a very realistic competitor to Facebook.

It seems like it is made with much more quality and with far more enhanced features than Facebook, which has many problems, technically and pragmatically.

So I for one am really looking forward to joining it and setting up my profile when it becomes open to the public.