Facebook isn’t the only place you can reach Hispanics though.  There are a handful of spanish-language and Hispanic-centric social media sites like MiGente.com, MySpace Latino, or QuePasa.com (http://www.hispaniconlinemarketing.com/2009/04/reaching-spanish-preferring-hispanics-on-facebook/).

Hispanics Are Really More Social

By: Lee Vann (source – http://www.capturagroup.com/)

As a follow up to my previous post, I wanted share the highlights of my recent presentation, Are Hispanics Really More Social? and also some great insights that I picked up at this week’s Hispanic PR and social media conference in Dallas, Texas.

I chose a rhetorical question for the title of the presentation because most of us know that being social is hardwired into Hispanic culture. Being at the conference with a couple hundred Hispanics really brought this point to life. The atmosphere was friendly, fun and-well-social.

In addition to being highly social, Hispanics consume a ton of media. I came across statistics that indicate that Hispanics teens spend 13 hours per day with media, more than any other ethnic group.

I then took a look at technology usage and showed that Hispanics are leapfrogging to the latest and greatest technologies, including mobile. What’s more, Hispanics have an extremely positive view of the technology and once they get their hands on it, the use it and love it. Here are some key facts:

84% of Hispanics have a broadband connection vs. 79% of Whites
36% of Hispanics view the Internet as tool for building a better life vs. 30% of general market
68% of Hispanics are wireless Internet users vs. 54% of Whites
81% of Hispanics text vs. 62% of Whites

Hispanic social media, the perfect storm

When you combine the highly social Hispanic culture with strong technology usage, you get a perfect storm. I argued that social media is the

Assessing Your Social Media Initiatives

Corporations can’t control what people post on social media sites, even though they may try! Many companies today use social media profiles, much like they use their corporate website: just another place to blast generic corporate messages using one-way communications! They turn off the ability of profile visitors to comment, and in many cases, even limit the ability to submit messages to the profile administrator. These practices are so anti-authentic that if your organization is guilty of them, you should start this assessment with a negative 20 points.

Examine your social media initiatives using the following checklist. Tally your points to determine how authentic your efforts are.

1. Corporate profile page (4 points) — your organization should have a profile page on each of the major social networking sites that service your target audience, including but not limited to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Qzone, and MySpace. If you set up such profiles, award yourself one point. If you do not restrict comments and wall posts, award yourself another point. If non-recruiting related employees, managers, and page visitors routinely comment on profile wall postings, award one point. If you assess your profile page using the checklist in part one of this article and score 16 or better, award yourself another point.
2. Function/Group profiles (2 points) — if your organization has set up profile pages for each of the major functions/groups within the organization to “dialogue” with customers, applicants, and other stakeholders, award your effort one point. If you have dedicated individuals throughout the organization who post and respond to posts daily on each of the function/group pages, award your effort another point.
3. Employee profiles (2 points) — if your organization actively encourages employees to establish profiles on social media sites and identify their company affiliation, award yourself one point. If you actively author social media posts designed for your employees to voluntarily share, add another point.
4. Blog development (2 points) — if your organization actively encourages decision makers, managers, and employees to blog about their work experience and learning, award yourself one point. If your organization actively publicizes employee blogs by linking to them via social media posts, award an additional point.
5. Driving visibility of social media (2 points) — does your organization drive visibility of social media efforts by linking to them from corporate maintained websites? If yes, award your efforts one point. If your organization also links to social media efforts in print via business cards, brochures, etc., award an additional point.
6. Using groups to engage (2 point) — Even a Facebook page established for the finance function of an organization can become overwhelming if too many conversations occur at once. To ensure adequate focus and better interaction, add two points if your organization uses social media groups in addition to profiles to support specific audiences.
7. Employee referral content/application (1 point) — if your organization has established content to support employee referral via social media or installed one of the applications available to support employee referral, award yourself one point.
8. Use of video (1 point) — more videos are viewed online each day than searches conducted on Google. If your organization acknowledges the popularity of video and makes non-scripted communication available via video hosted externally on sites like YouTube, award yourself one point.
9. Twitter (1 point) — while twitter can be a distraction, research shows that users sharing links among friends to other web-based content results in a significant increase in traffic to said content. If your organization uses Twitter (preferably via multiple accounts targeting specific audiences) to drive visibility of content, award yourself one point. If your organization uses Twitter as a market research tool to discover what people are chatting about, and actively seeks out talent to follow, award yourself two bonus points.
10. LinkedIn (1 point) — having employees visible on LinkedIn can be a curse, as LinkedIn has become the defacto phonebook for recruiters, but it also provides individuals interested in learning more about the organization with opportunities to dialogue directly with those individuals most likely to be able to answer questions share stories about life at your organization. If your organization routinely supports individuals publishing and maintaining their LinkedIn profiles award yourself one point.

How authentic are your social media initiatives? If you scored:

14-18 You are a social media best practice firm, congrats!

9-13 You’ve got a solid foundation, but probably need more focus on supporting specific populations.

1-8 You are not there yet, chances are those profiles you have created are rather dusty!

How did you do?

But before we begin, let’s take a step back. What’s the difference between search and attraction? In this case search is the purposeful use of social media platforms to look for possible job candidates as if one was using a resume database search. Attraction is the opposite. It’s the use of social media tools as a portal to attract jobseekers to an organization or opportunity.

Candidate Search

Alright, let’s talk search. For years, the only tools a recruiter had for search were their own personal network, industry Blue Books or resume databases offered by job boards. Now, there is no shortage of options from mailing lists, to licensure lists, industry organization memberships, etc. Oh yeah and about 100 different social media platforms. But not all social media sites are beneficial for search. It’s not likely that a recruiter would have much luck looking through a list of tweets if they are searching for CPAs.

In lieu of using Twitter for search, I recommend a handful of other sites. Hands down the best social media platform for talent search is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has the most extensive number of professional profiles on the net (barring major job board resume databases). Along with its large scale, it offers many of the web 2.0 tools that encourage trust and authenticity. LinkedIn does have some short falls though. Recruiters looking for hourly workers or more blue collar type workers will not find many qualified prospects on the site.

There are a couple of other sites that similar, but smaller versions of LinkedIn where recruiters might have some luck. Due to the size differences, the talent pool on these sites may be less picked over giving employers more of the candidate’s attention. These site include BrightFuse.com, Xing.com, and for the less experienced white collar jobseeker Koda.us.

Facebook and MySpace are also good tools to turn to for search. Maybe not search like you would use LinkedIn for…more like candidate screening. Today almost half of America’s recruiters use Facebook and MySpace to prescreen candidates they get from other, more traditional recruiting means. If you have 25 strong candidates for one vacancy, checking out a potential employees Facebook profile can tell you a lot about the person’s interests and maybe even work ethic.

Candidate Attraction

The other side of the coin is candidate attraction. Before the popularity of social media, an organization had to depend solely on their own career site and presence on various job boards to get their recruitment brand out to the job seeking masses. Today, several social media platforms offer a recruitment portal experience almost equal to that of a careers page. I saw almost equal because a company can do essentially what they want with their careers page, but have to work within the confines of a social site’s terms & conditions and design parameters.

The best social media tool to use in attraction has got to be Facebook. Facebook has three things that set it apart from other platforms when dealing with candidate attraction. Facebook is very trusted, it allows two-way conversations, and it gives employers a great medium to extend their recruitment brand. Some of the best examples of Facebook recruitment portals are the Ernst & Young, City Year, the US Department of State and Select Staffing.

To a lessor extent, MySpace can be used for candidate attraction. There are far fewer organizations using the site for attraction portals. Several branches of the U.S. Armed Forces successfully exploit the tool to reach out to future soldiers. Other organizations cite the less professional tone of the site as reasons to not source from within its membership.

LinkedIn is another platform that works well for candidate attraction. This site gives companies the chance to set up a corporate profile page where the companies to use an RSS feed to list all the current openings. You can also post openings for free in any number of user group pages.

Next, Twitter is a great source to find both passive and active candidates. Using any number of hash tags and lists, a recruiter can get a job opening out to a large audience very quickly. Twitter also has several third party vendors that offer Twitter posting (both for free and for fee) services that go out to a larger pool of Twitter followers who have opted in to get tweets about jobs in a certain geography, industry or keyword.

Lastly, there’s YouTube. I put YouTube at the end of the list because I feel like it is the hardest platform to use for candidate attraction if you want to do it right. Having said that, when it is done right YouTube is a fantastic medium upon which to build or extend a recruitment brand. With the right amount of time and budget, an organization can use YouTube as both an attraction space and as an onboarding tool. Take the U.S. Coast Guard’s YouTube channel. This channel has 50 videos aimed at attracting possible recruits, sharing job details this group and giving them a real-life view of what joining the service really entails.

These eight or so tools should offer plenty of options to use. As new social media tools hit the web, this question of searching versus attracting will come up again. Until that happens, this primer on using the sites for both should come in handy. When you are able to reach a broad audience in your recruitment activities, you have to look at quality as quantity refined. Using these tools should help you refine your talent pools to find that gem of a candidate you are looking for.

Social Media works because it humanizes your company, engaging your audience in a more direct way than with other recruiting mediums.

Here are some tips to think about as your analyze the social media aspect of your recruitment strategy:

1.SET A GOAL: Setting a strategy before implementing tactics is critical to any business initiative. Before you dabble in social media, ask yourself if branding and awareness, client lead generation, candidate pipelining, candidate or client communication, or employee engagement is your aim.

2.MASTER ONE MEDIUM: Many companies believe social media is an all or nothing adventure. However, the best approach is to start with one site. Head to your top pick and get comfortable with the interface and its unique features. It takes time and dedication to plan and follow through on posting new materials, developing a user base, etc.

3.MANAGE YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION: Social media is all about word-of-mouth marketing. Share success stories, from an employee’s perspective, about working with your organization. Highlight your unique knowledge and share useful information with candidates that they will share with others.

4.CREATE A USER EXPERIENCE: Social media is about creating an open dialogue and building relationships with others, with the end goal of creating an active community. You don’t want one-hit wonders; you want to start conversations that engage your audience and keep them coming back for more.

5.LISTEN, LEARN AND ENGAGE: The most important thing you can do on any site is to listen to your audience. The second most important step is to digest that information and then respond. As you build trust with your community, you will be able to engage talent in candid discussions about your company and value.

6.HIGHLIGHT SPECIFIC JOBS: Posting all your openings on social media is great, but it is more effective to focus on specific openings each week or even month. Give more than just a job posting; provide talent unique information about the company or job. Help candidates understand why the job might be the right opportunity.

7.VISUALLY STIMULATE: From simple photos and videos to fancy custom applications, get your audience visually stimulated and you will get their attention. Incorporate photos and videos in everything you do. You want your company to stand out and interesting multimedia content is the best way to get attention.

8.BOOST YOUR RANKINGS: Adding your presence to social media sites will organically boost your online profile in search rankings. Search engines weight search results based on the number of visitors to a site. Thus, by associating your company with a popular social media site, it can improve where you come up in search results.

9.PREPARE TO CHANGE: Social media is the cool new “thing” on the Internet. However, no one platform is poised to become the end-all-be-all of social media or even social media recruitment at this point in time. The hot site next month may not even be on anyone’s radar, yet. Be on the lookout for new sites and don’t be afraid to test the waters.

10.PROMOTION: Promote your presence once you are up and running on the social media platforms of your choice. Place links on your Web site, put them in your email signature, highlight them in marketing campaigns, and even send links to become fans, friends, or followers in application confirmation emails.

In the world of social media recruiting, you hear a lot about the big three recruiting tools. These three are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Often times, MySpace is completely overlooked as a source of recruitment leads. Many recruiters say the MySpace demographic is less professional. They say the medium is “too messy” to make a positive impact on their recruitment efforts.

Well, that may all be true. In the past two years MySpace has fallen from its leadership position in social friendship business to Facebook. Facebook with over 350 million active users has put a lot of concrete between themselves and MySpace.

One organization stands out in the crowd though. The United States Army gives us arguably the most impressive social media recruitment outpost on the web. With almost 95,000 ‘friends’ the Army has a recruitment tool that most organizations can only dream of. The page can be found at MySpace.com/Army.

So, let’s talk best practices. What does the Army’s MySpace page do that stands out?

1. Design – The Army has replicated its well-known recruitment brand and messages on the MySpace platform. This can be a difficult task if you choose too many social media tools as the tools vary in how much you can change the look and feel. Army has a well thought out layout that is engaging, but not over done.

2. Diversity – Diversity is a big deal within armed forces recruitment. The Army has done a really good job making sure that all the page’s visitors feel represented. Taking that one step further, a quick glance at the page’s friends will show a highly diverse group of individuals.

3. Multimedia tools – Engagement is key to a page like this. The Army has done a great job using several multimedia tools to get its message out. The page features more videos than you can count, a place to download images and wallpaper, and a virtual tour guide names Sergeant Star.

As of today, the Army is the only branch of the armed forces to use MySpace as a real recruiting tool. I’m sure that the rest of the military branches are in the process of catching up. Those of us that work in corporate recruiting can learn from Army’s MySpace page too. Here are a couple of thoughts:

- In choosing a social media tool to recruit, use the one that engages your target demographic best.

- Don’t do it half way. There are a lot of valiant recruiting efforts on sites like MySpace and Facebook that get no traffic …and
that’s a good thing. Some recruiting pages are so lacking in strategy and attention that they hurt the organization’s recruiting efforts instead of helping them.

- Design is key in candidate attraction, but don’t forget about engagement. What makes a page’s fan want to come back to your recruitment fan page after they friend your organization.

- Two way communications is a must. Job seekers view social media outposts as a place where they can get attention from a hiring organization. Users expect to be able to have one-to-one communication with a brand using social media. This is a very different set of expectations than when this same job seeker visits your website or career page. Different tools require different behaviors.