Check Your Newsfeed: The Implications of Facebook's Latest Announcement on HR
Have you seen Facebook’s latest status update? If not, head to your newsfeed, because it’s about to get a big change. On Thursday, Facebook announced that it will be overhauling the look and feel of its popular newsfeed feature. Coming on the heels of the Graph Search announcement, and a full year and a half after the roll out of Facebook Timeline, the update to this third pillar of Facebook stands to impact the way your business recruits online.
Newsfeed is one of the main ways your business connects to its followers, and one of the main ways that passive candidates and potential fans discover your page. The new Newsfeed, like Timeline and Graph Search, is a huge opportunity for you to not only improve, but also spread awareness of, your employer brand.
At Work4, we and our partners often talk about employer branding as the basis for a strong social recruiting strategy. An employer brand, the recognizable tone, voice, and image that people associate with and use to recognize your company, can be the single most important thing for your company to establish if it wants to influence and engage potential candidates, fans, and others. It is these associations that give users the ability to identify--and identify with--your company. This identification can drive engagement, sharing, and job applications--which is the ultimate recruiting initiative.
Here are a few reasons why the new design of Newsfeed holds so much potential for your social recruiting strategy:
Visual Content
Your employer brand helps color your candidates’ perception of your company’s culture--and the new Newsfeed will help your talent “perceive” you better. Since its first release, the Newsfeed has been central to the user experience, although it has increasingly evolved from text-only status updates to about 50% visual content, according to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But the other 50%--the text--can often get lost in the noise that we, as an increasingly visual culture, cannot always hear.
In study after study, visual content has proven to have a measurable and significant impact on the likelihood that users will engage with your posts. Now, more than ever, with almost full-screen images that flow seamlessly on a newly de-cluttered page, the Newsfeed will give you the opportunity to create compelling images that help you tell the story of your company culture to your talent community and capture the imagination of even passive talent who may be learning about your careers for the first time.
Everything from branded cover photos and employee videos to campaign-specific images and graphic job ads can benefit from the added emphasis that the Newsfeed will now place on your content to attract candidates to your Facebook brand page.
Filters
Speaking of attraction, the Newsfeed redesign is great news for both your brand awareness and your job ads. With the addition of filters, which help users increase the relevance and specificity of the content in their feed, you have a huge opportunity to increase your visibility, credibility, and potential for conversion.
First, filters allow users to specifically follow their friends’ activity--and with Sponsored Stories, you have an increased chance to make it into potential candidates’ field of vision. Sponsored Stories are Facebook ads that appear as personal recommendations based on the companies, jobs, or posts that a user’s friend “likes.” These Sponsored Stories increase credibility, since they come as endorsements from trusted sources (the user’s friends), and boost discoverability because they put your branded elements in a prominent position in the Newsfeed.
In conjunction with Promoted Posts, which appear as status updates from your company in a targeted user’s main Newsfeed, Sponsored Stories will put your employer brand and your careers on center stage as your potential candidates scroll through their feeds.
Second, filters give you a chance to continue to engage the talent that already follows you. If you start relying on images to tell your brand’s story, your photos (and jobs and events) will start showing up in the Photos feed, which, if the skyrocketing engagement with platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are any indication, will be hugely popular with a large number of Facebook’s users. Moreover, users will specifically be able to filter their Newsfeed by those brands that they follow, which will give them the opportunity to more directly engage with your content, instead of losing it amidst updates from their friends about music, games, and social lives.
As long as you continue to create compelling content--not just promotional material, but actually compelling, visually interesting, interest-piquing content, then filters will give candidates a reason to narrow down their feed to encounter your company more often.
The Takeaway
If Facebook’s Newsfeed performs as Mark Zuckerberg has planned, then it will turn Facebook into the “best personalized newspaper.” No one is expecting Facebook to supplant the newspaper, per se, but it will continue to revolutionize the way in which we define and visualize news.
I believe that the Newsfeed will help us look at social recruiting and employer branding on Facebook the same way: we’re using our ability to target, reach, attract, and engage candidates with our brands, our talent communities, and our open jobs. This will create--and may even transcend--the definition of the “best personalized social classified section.”
What do you think? Will Newsfeed change the way you interact with your talent on Facebook? How will you change your social recruiting strategies to keep up with all of Facebook’s changes?
With more than 10 years of startup experience and HR technology expertise, Stéphane Le Viet is the CEO at Work4 Labs, the #1 Facebook Recruiting Solution. Founded in 2010, Work4 Labs develops the market-leading social recruitment application, Work for Us, and the company's award-winning products empower employers to to optimize their social recruiting strategies.