Five reasons why employer brand social campaigns fail (and how to fix them)

Social media is increasingly the key touchpoint between candidates and employers. 79% of job seekers use social in their research, rising to 86% among Gen Z (Glassdoor). That's why your social campaigns often define your success in attracting great candidates. But it's noisier than ever in the world of social and, we see a lot of employers failing to capitalise on the potential these platforms offer to connect with talent.

Here are five common mistakes we see employers make and how we fix them at ThirtyThree.

#1 Your strategy is just a document

Too often, a strategy becomes a PDF you make, sign-off and never look at again - the opposite of what it should be. Your strategy should be your lodestar; a living document that you refer to throughout your campaign.

Every social media strategy we develop covers four essential elements:

• Channel strategy: what channels make the most sense and resonate with your audience?
• Content strategy: how can we bring your EVP to life on social and harness your insight into messaging and content that will cut through?
• Paid strategy: how can you maximise the value of paid to achieve your objectives?
• Measurement: how are we gauging success?

Year-on-year we've helped A&O Shearman evolve their award-winning graduate campaign because together we have defined with total clarity what needs to be achieved. That's meant we can create beautiful, effective content that aligns to their most pressing objectives.

#2 You're treating all channels the same

Too often we see employers develop a beautiful suite of assets then deploy them with minimal variation across multiple channels. Of course, it's tempting because it can feel like a quicker, safer and a more manageable way to ensure you stay on-brand. But what works on LinkedIn isn't the same as what works on Instagram. Users have different expectations and behaviour on each.

Successful social campaigns depend on knowing your channels inside-out. It takes a little extra work up-front, but it means your content will be authentic to the platform it's on and so performs much better.

We helped the Army move away from a centralised image library to creating bespoke channel assets - the results have been transformative. Their recent campaign for hard-to-fill roles delivered an 83% reduction in cost per started application.

#3 You're sticking to the channels you know best

It's tempting for employers to stick to LinkedIn, limiting themselves to active job seekers. Often organisational risk-aversion and budget concerns stifle innovation, but with strong strategy and research, experimentation across other social media channels can be integrated into your campaign.

Even if it's a small proportion of your budget, the long-term benefits of finding new audiences and learning how to connect with them will mean your campaigns go from strength to strength. It's about testing, measuring what works and reallocating your budget on the most successful areas.

When the Royal Mail needed to hire an additional 8,000 seasonal staff at Christmas, we helped them deliver a fun, festive campaign across Snapchat and TikTok. The results were so strong that TikTok became a central channel the next year - and the awards for this campaign keep rolling in.

#4 You're neglecting paid media

There are concerns about achieving ROI from paid media but a lot of channels are pay to play, and it's an essential part of finding your audience. If you've spent budget on some brilliant creative, then you should also spend some of it to put it in front of the right people.

This starts with your strategy. Paid should be integrated from day one, with media and social teams working together to understand objectives and identify the right channels. Continuous optimisation, including A/B testing, performance ranking, and budget reallocation turns paid from a one-time spend into an active driver of results.

We recently worked with a Professional Services client who had brilliant organic content but had been burned by poor-value paid media delivered by another agency. By integrating paid into the broader strategy rather than treating it as a bolt-on, we helped them reach a much wider audience for a fraction of the cost.

#5 You're not empowering your teams to make fast and bold decisions

Social is quick. Trends, tastes and behaviour change rapidly. There's a misconception that bold social is just about 'guts' but it's actually more about how you make decisions as an organisation. Complicated sign-off processes mean you can't react quickly enough to trends to effectively capture your audience.

The solution? Empower your social teams. Give them access to decision-makers. Obviously, you also need to know about trends as they happen rather than two months later, which is where our very online (maybe too online) social media team come in. They can identify trends that dovetail with the story you're trying to tell.

The Army is great at this even though they're a large organisation under a lot of scrutiny. Check out their feeds to see what we've been able to accomplish with them due to fast decision-making.

Key takeaways

So, we can boil this down to five takeaways that separate application-driving campaigns from budget-draining ones:

• Treat your strategy as lodestone for constant referral
• Create bespoke content for channels
• Build channel experimentation into your strategy
• Embed paid media from day one of campaign
• Empower your teams to make quick decisions

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Interested in how this could apply to your campaigns? Drop us a message – hello@thirtythree.co.uk – we’d love to help!