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Why HR Professionals Need to Make More Use of Social Media

Posted on January 29, 2021

Whenever the topic of social media and HR are spoken of in the same sentence, there’s a good chance one topic is in mind: Recruiting.

From gauging a candidate’s personality and compatibility with a team via their Facebook account or tweets on Twitter, to thoroughly exploring their professional career on LinkedIn, social media is an exceptional tool for HR professionals.

Then there is the promoting of roles. Approximately 95% of employers use social media when searching for talent and up to 69% of social media use by HR professionals is for recruiting, but there are plenty of other uses for it, right?

While social media is an effective tool for recruiting, especially when done well, HR professionals can make good use of it beyond simply looking for new talent.

Engaging with employees

One of the greatest strengths of social media is how socially beneficial it can be. It is in the name, after all.

Maintaining a line of communication with your team via social media can be an effective way of showing that you care about them. This is especially true during conditions like the COVID pandemic, with many businesses’ teams working from home. An HR team specialises in ensuring the well-being of employees and that includes keeping in touch with employees.

HR professionals within companies have proven that they can effectively use social media. Communicating through WhatsApp, Facebook and LinkedIn groups or internal social networks like Yammer, Slack and Facebook for Work have made constructive chat easier.

Then there’s the more public updates such as posting updates about the company on Facebook, sending out tweets weighing in on important topics, or even celebrating specific employees professionally on LinkedIn. Of course, the danger is with relying on external social media platforms is that the algorithms operating on each may stop your employees ever seeing them…

Opportunity for training & development

Regardless of whether you’re training HR professionals or you’re improving the skills of your team in general, using social media can improve any type of training.

For example, before you even begin your training, gather the participants and use social media platforms like LinkedIn. This professional space can serve as a great place to create a community area, where your team can discuss the upcoming training. Whether it’s establishing what they expect and desire from the training or it’s expressing concerns and questions about it, LinkedIn’s groups can be incredibly helpful even before the training has begun.

The groups can also be effective when it comes to ensuring the training gets put into actions – challenges can be set and discussions continued.

As far as methods for team building goes, using social media is certainly an effective option.

Spread social media across the entire company

You’ve developed a way for an HR team to use social media – now, they can spearhead social media use across your entire company.

Small steps could include encouraging your team to share company updates on their social media accounts. Having your team actively spread the word of your company and its accomplishments can only help your brand and industry image.

On the other hand, larger steps would be HR professionals helping teams with recommendations for useful apps. Whether it’s the workflow-monitoring advantages of apps like Trello or exploring the possibilities for further training with LinkedIn’s Learning Courses, ensuring that your entire company is aware of the tools available can lead to improvements like greater productivity.

Developing either of these steps are incredibly helpful for internal business on a day-to-day basis, but they also open the door for aiding external business. If your HR professionals are comfortable with this use of social media, you can begin exploring adding more social media-focused workers to your team and start formulating your social media strategy for directly boosting external business efforts.

Spreading brand awareness

While many will argue that branding and promotion is a marketing team’s job, few can dismiss how effective this can be in the hands of HR professionals. After all, an HR team can often be seen at the heart of a company, so who else would be better to promote the positives of the brand?

This can include using HR professionals’ ability to keep their finger firmly on the pulse of what’s going on in a company. For example, any inspirational stories of employees, any collaborations with charities, any initiatives to be more eco-friendly; these are all praiseworthy pieces of news that an HR team will likely know about better than anyone else in the business.

Discussing these positives with any dedicated social media teams can be a fantastic image booster. Sharing these with the outside world lets your potential clients, audience, and the industry as a whole know that you’re doing great work outside of your usual 9 to 5 duties.

And this is true whether it’s from an employee’s account OR the company’s social media platforms.

Kate Palmer, HR Advice and Consultancy Director at Peninsula UK

Guest blogger Kate Palmer is the HR Advice and Consultancy Director at Peninsula UK.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you and your HR team make the most of social media then get in touch.

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