Measuring Social Selling Success

In our previous blog, we discussed the trust economy, having a digital-first mindset, and what social selling might look like to your recruitment business.

Here, we look at how you can measure the success of your social selling efforts.

Website traffic from LinkedIn

Google Analytics provides you with the various sources of your website traffic. For a simple overview, in GA4 head to ‘Acquisition’ on the left hand side > All Channels > Traffic. This will then display a list of sources that your website traffic has come from. Use this to analyse how much traffic you receive from your LinkedIn efforts.

If you want to go one step further, you can use UTM tracking for specific campaigns or profiles. A UTM code is a simple snippet code that you can add to the end of a URL and you can build one here.

LinkedIn analytics

In the admin view on your company page, simply head to ‘analytics’ from the menu bar at the top of the page. From here, you can click in to visitors, followers or content; and will be able to see a breakdown of each.

Personal profiles

Personal profiles also show analytics, although without third party apps like SHIELD they are somewhat limited. If you use a scheduling tool, this may also offer a form of analytics; but here’s what you can get directly from LinkedIn itself:

Head to your personal page and just below your intro section you should see 3 boxes containing profile views, post impressions and search appearances. You can click on these to get more detail.

You can also see more detailed analytics per post (if you’ve got the time!). To do this, click on to the post you want the breakdown for and in the bottom right hand corner you’ll see ‘view analytics’.

Social Selling Index

If you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you will have access to your social selling index score. This will tell you where you rank in your industry and in your network, as well as giving you a breakdown of how you’re doing in 4 key areas of social selling: 

1. Establishing your professional brand

2. Finding the right people

3. Engaging with insights

4. Building relationships.

Contributing content 

Social media, especially, is content-driven. Ask yourself these questions to help you formulate your next post:

• What are you working on at the moment, or preparing for?

• What are you looking forward to? For example, an event, webinar or presentation

• What did you learn from a recent event you attended or podcast you listened to?

• What has inspired you that you’d be willing to share? For example, a book, TV series or webinar - or maybe even something you’ve witnessed by a colleague, client or candidate

• Do you have a question about a recent piece of industry news? Pose it to your network!

Content sources 

The more information you consume, the more you’ll have to say. Never run out of content ideas by keeping your mind full of interesting and inspiring content. Consume blogs, social media content, books or podcasts. Watch industry relevant tv shows. Whatever it is you enjoy doing, do more of it, and you’ll have more to talk about.

Top tip: keep a record of all the things you want to share on LinkedIn in the future, either in a note app on your phone, using voice notes or using a scheduling tool like Paiger.

Another tip for keeping your feed full of valuable, consumable content, is to share pieces that have been written by someone else. Be mindful to credit the original author though, and always add your own thoughts or opinion. 

Implementing social selling in your recruitment company

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again….people buy from people. Having a social selling strategy will boost your recruitment business’s reputation and success; and it starts with employee advocacy and personal brands. 

The collective reach of employee LinkedIn networks is vast - far bigger than the company page alone. Think about it - if you have 10 employees and each employee has 10,000 connections, that’s 100,000 prospective consumers of your brand’s content. Excite your recruitment teams to promote the content your business is producing and build a strong network of thought leaders who share valuable expertise in your field of recruitment. 

And finally, be sure that your efforts aren’t wasted by measuring your personal brand and actively engaging with your LinkedIn network. Commenting on posts and reacting to activity is key to a successful personal brand.

Get in touch

Contact Jo, through our website, or by connecting on LinkedIn to discuss marketing your recruitment company, and how best to position your brand in front of your target audiences.

6 Ways to Leverage LinkedIn For Your Recruitment Brand

Recruiters have utilised LinkedIn as a tool since it was officially launched way back in 2003. Nowadays, the platform is so much more than a place people go to upload their work history and look for jobs. In fact, in March 2022, LinkedIn, which is predominantly a business networking site, had over 33.6 million users in the United Kingdom, making up around 49% of the population. This gives the likes of Facebook and Instagram a run for their money, who have 48.5 million and 34.6 million users in the UK respectively and are targeted at all people from kids through to pensioners. Globally, LinkedIn has 185 million members, of which around 29.97 million log in to the platform daily.

What these statistics mean is that recruitment businesses have a completely free marketing tool (add-ons excluded) at their disposal that has the potential to reach millions - with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands in your target audience.

For recruitment businesses, even the free version of LinkedIn opens doors of possibility that would otherwise not have existed. Here’s some of LinkedIn’s free features and how you can use them to leverage the platform to your advantage:

1. Building an audience

Company page admins on LinkedIn are gifted the ability to invite 100 of their connections to follow the company page each month. The icing on the cake is that every time a connection accepts the invitation, LinkedIn will give the credit back. So, if you invite 100 connections and 50 accept, you’re actually getting 150 credits in that month.

Use this to your advantage. Add your most active and well-networked people as admins to the page and encourage them to invite their connections to follow the company page. In doing so, you’re transferring some of your best recruiters’ audiences to your brand.

The ‘invite connections’ to follow function can be found on the right hand side of your company page when in admin or super admin view.

2. Broadcast your brand

The best way to spread awareness of and amplify your brand on LinkedIn is to comment on conversations, either as the company page. Share your knowledge and demonstrate thought leadership in the comment section to consistently grow your following over time.

Find conversations that are relevant to your brand by using hashtags. Anyone who is an admin can then use the ‘comment as company’ function by clicking on your profile image at the bottom left corner of a post. This is basic, but it barely gets used so it’s a brilliant opportunity to increase visibility.

3. Target demographics

This one will blow your mind… 🤯

Did you know that you can actually target certain geographical locations and demographics FOR FREE? 

Many recruitment businesses are multi-sector, which can lead to a newsfeed full of content that isn’t necessarily relevant to everyone; and if a post isn’t relevant to someone, they won’t engage with it. Posting the wrong content to the wrong people can lead to low engagement, so it’s better to target your IT content (for example) to IT professionals, right?

To do this, as an admin of the company page, draft your post from the page. Then, under your company name, you’ll see ‘anyone’. Click on that, change to targeted audience, et voila! You now have the ability to target your content at specific industries, job titles, locations and more.

4. Built-in lead generation forms

Oooooh *rubs hands together in villain-like way*...

Yes, you can now have a lead generation form built directly into your company page. Previously, LinkedIn users had to leave LinkedIn to be able to contact a company (via the ‘visit website’ button or the like) but with this tool, users are able to quickly enquire about your recruitment services easily and without having to leave the platform.

This makes the user experience much smoother, as LinkedIn pre-populates some of their details too, so wait no longer and get that form on your page.

To do so, simply go to your company page in admin view, click edit and then go to lead gen form in the menu on the right. You’re welcome.

5. Newsletters

LinkedIn newsletters offer recruitment businesses a massive opportunity to enhance their brand and reach more of their audience, but like any newsletter it will involve more work.

The benefits of utilising LinkedIn newsletters are that you already have a captive audience, ready and waiting for your content!

Whilst this is still a free tool, there are some criteria you’ll need to meet in order to start using them for your company (or individual) page.

6. Amplify your brand

OK so whilst this one isn’t free, or directly on the LinkedIn platform, if you’re a recruiter and you haven’t yet heard of Paiger, listen up…

Utilising tools like Paiger to amplify curated or organic content will no doubt save you heaps of time in the long run. Paiger is a magnificent tool which can automate your job shares, boost your LinkedIn content offering, provide insights and analyse your performance. The tool can be used to utilise employee networks, which has 8x more amplification than company pages alone!

Growing a company page organically on social media these days can be difficult but, with LinkedIn, it doesn’t have to be. Gone are the days where a recruiter can get away with constantly spamming accounts for potential business. That approach is more likely to repel business rather than attract it. Taking advantage of these tools and integrating LinkedIn as part of your marketing strategy will help you protect the integrity of your brand.

Recruiters have long seen LinkedIn as a networking tool but, in 2022, it’s so much more than that.

The benefits of this platform as a marketing tool for recruiters far outweigh those of other platforms… and it’s free!

Get in Touch

Contact Marmalade Marketing today on hello@marmalademarketing.co.uk, or call us on 0161 637 7244.

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