Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn are the social powerhouses of our generation and most of us have accounts on one if not all of them. We use these tools to see Super Bowl commercials ( was my favorite), get annoyed with the constant alerts from friends playing on a Facebook app or use it to expand our business networks. With 1 out of 4 web views occurring on Facebook, 200 Million+ unique users on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn and an expected $28.5B in ad revenue in 2011, companies have been using these as a medium to instantly reach and continually engage targeted customers. This is something that is here to stay…well at least until something else replaces it.
Social networking has been used by recruiters to source candidates for positions and has proven its effectiveness over the last 15 years. In the last 2 years, HR is now also starting to use this as a way to continually engage and promote their ‘Employer Brand’ with possible new hires or their internal workforce.
With social networking being instantaneous, viral and multi-pronged (i.e. using Twitter, Blogging, Facebook and LinkedIn simultaneously), measuring its effectiveness should be the most important aspect of the program - if organizations are not able to measure their social programs, they not only miss out on opportunities to promote their brand but might spend resources on social sites which are no longer effective/ relevant or let negative social messages get viral.
Using the companies within the WARP Index and ‘Twitter’ as the social networking medium, below is an example of how you would do a basic measurement to assess your HR social effectiveness.
Metrics:
-Number of people following your company’s and your competitor’s Twitter account
-Number of people following your company’s and your competitor’s HR or Job Twitter account
-Ranking of your competitor’s and your ‘social score’ through one of the social measurement companies. In this case I used Klout. Klout measures and scores a Twitter and/or Facebook account based upon reach, amplification, influencers, and network. How well an industry’s HR Social ranking is reflected in the Visuals below by its color. Green Good, Red Bad and something inbetween Average. My social ranking is www.klout.com/hcmanalytics.
-Number of open positions at your competitors’ and at your company
-Caveat: This is the bare bones. You should include additional measures such as; how often do post a tweet or blog, programs associated to your Social Networking strategies (e.g. meet the team for lunch posted on twitter/100 Best Places to Work), how many hires did you get from this source, how many positive/negative re-tweets where there, how has this been adopted internally, etc.
Visuals:
Two visuals, bubble chart and table, are shown here to demonstrate different ways to communicate this data. If you haven't updated your browser's flash add-on in a while and can't see the Bubble Chart, click on the "Full Screen" link at the bottom left.
To see the bubble chart and table go to my blog @ http://www.hcmanalytics.org. Sorry HR.com doesn't allow embedded flash in their blogs.
Analysis:
The analysis shows that the industry with the best HR Twitter ‘score’ and with the most followers is the Information industry. It also shows that HR has only 1.1% of the followers that their company Twitter account has, that only 7 out of 13 industries have any type of HR social presence and for the ones that do have 1 follower for every 3 open positions.
Based on these findings, do you think the companies in the WARP Index have an effective HR social program?
