Social media may FINALLY be free of buzz term status. The last few years, companies thought that Facebook or Twitter would be their silver bullet to success for every type of conversion or KPI you can think up. But it seems that now, in 2014, many have come to realize that social media channels are places where companies and their most important asset – their people – can interact with consumers. It’s used in some capacity to assist in companies getting users through conversion funnels.

I’ve always been a believer that social media is merely an expansion of conversations that normally take place. Instead of in front of the water cooler or over coffee, we’re now digital creatures who can maintain or networks constantly through online presences. But still, despite what technology has allowed us to overcome in physical barriers, social is still just people talking to each other. People researching things that interest them. People connecting with individuals or organizations that influence or improve their lives. And in our case, people connect with CareerBuilder to give them advice in order to get the job they want a little bit faster.

The point of it all

CareerBuilder’s mission: invest in social media to maximize engagement and incite participant action. Through the humanization and personalization of the CareerBuilder experience, we engage with users (B2C) and customers (B2B) by attending to their needs on their terms. We aim to build relationships, provide educational resources, establish influence, promote products, fight misconceptions and build loyalty.

We do this by:

• LISTENING AND MONITORING the social buzz of our brands, and the competition, enabling us to track sentiment and identify opportunities for improvement across departments.
• ENGAGING in the online dialogue, enabling us to respond to fans and detractors to provide a new level of service and add our voice to existing conversations.
• MEASUREMENT AND REPORTING enables us to connect business objectives (revenue, EOI, traffic) to social metrics (share of voice, sentiment, WOM, support response, insights intake) and engagement data (time on site, clicks, fan counts, shares, views, reach)

In 2013, I joined the consumer marketing team to be the first person to manage a multi-channel presence for our brand and eventually allowed us to branch into some ancillary networks like Instagram and Pinterest , while also recommitting to use existing channels like YouTube to further provide valuable resources for job seekers, as seen in our #AskCB series.

Our continued evolution

In mid 2013, I wanted to shake up the function and purpose of what our social efforts were when we were hiring our new social media manager. We all agreed that metrics were necessary – but what ones mattered? Which ones could we actually impact or affect? Why were certain metrics important to us and what did they give us? Things like fan growth no longer felt relevant. With our brand’s natural organic growth, taking credit for increased numbers that had nothing to do with content seemed shallow. That’s when we also zoomed out from only looking at social metrics and returned to the point of seeing social as a tactic of marketing and of engaging users with conversation.

But where we’ve truly shifted our approach has only come in the last few months with our transition to Adobe’s social management and monitoring product, allowing us to truly utilize more content experts to interact with job seekers who are talking to us – but also to PROACTIVELY engage with users who are talking about relevant career topics or needing help and us stepping in to their conversations to provide expertise or just an ear.

Today on the consumer front, we have roughly seven people conversing with job seekers via social channels each and every day, handling general users issues and broader education opportunities to help job seekers improve their job search efforts with our bounty of content.

In May of 2014, 21% of our escalations were for proactive and outbound messages to reach job seekers who were asking us specifically for help and those job seekers who just were looking for general career help and just telling (or asking) the universe for help. 9% were assigned as B2B opportunities.

We’ll look to continue finding opportunities to connect with job seekers to:

• Assist them in their job search
• Improve their confidence or knowledge
• Create conversations and relationships
• Improve and enhance the visibility into our personalities that make our brand unique and different among our competitors

And coming soon…gifs!