May 2015 - TSO Media

Social Media & Employment Equality

This is a re-publication. This article was published to Social Media Today by Robert Nissenbaum, having originally appeared on his personal blog in December 2014

I normally write from the perspective of teaching how business owners need to think about leveraging social media to drive branding, sales and ultimately revenue. I want to switch that up a little and tackle another aspect of social media usage: how businesses use, or maybe shouldn’t use social media with respect to their employees and potential employees.

Social Media’s Role in the Employment Process

It’s been fairly common, and there have been a number of articles recently on employees being fired or suspended (including this one from Norton Healthcare) due to social media posting, but I am particularly thinking about social media as it applies to employment practices. What prompted the thought was a LinkedIn article I read on Title IX by Bill Wagner after hearing from a friend looking for work.

Title IX is a portion of the Education Amendments of 1972 and most commonly referenced with regard to its role in providing equal opportunities for women athletes in high schools and colleges. It was originally written to prevent gender discrimination in and educational programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. While gender couldn’t be used to discriminate in hiring practices, Bill mentioned in his article “It is generally accepted that a college education leads to a better paying career and more consistent employment.” The thought being that without the education (The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not cover gender discrimination with respect to education) women simply would be less qualified and therefore not hired on that basis, not their gender. Title IX, whether you agree or not that it has been successful or even positive, has been a critical cog, just as Affirmative Action has been, in driving workforce equality.

So how does this apply to social media? Social media and modern technology have the ability to undermine the workforce equality created by Title IX, Affirmative Action and similar laws. Prior to the rise of social networking sites employers had limited access to your personal information. Employers are restricted from asking a number of questions on an application or an interview. At least in the initial decision-making process, the most they could gather would be gender (unless you had an androgynous name) and possible age based on school graduation dates. The initial selection process came down to your experience and credentials.

The interview phase would reveal more but the risk for a discrimination suit becomes more likely depending on the number of candidates in the interview pool. By then the right skill set might override a personal mindset anyway. If you fall in love with an idea and then find a few flaws, you’re likely to overlook those flaws. See the flaws first and the idea dies immediately.

Social media and technology now provide employers the ability to see the flaws first. It should be common knowledge that what we post and how we respond affects our reputation. Many employers will admit to screening online profiles as part of an application process (and even after you’ve been hired). What they’re typically looking for is activity that would impact their reputation or yours (assuming you weren’t truthful on that resume). Most do a good job of keeping private details private – there have been plenty of lessons posted on what happens when you don’t.

While checking out your Facebook profile may not seem discriminatory in the employment process, what you have posted, especially with respect to Instagram, now the second place major social network where all images are public by default, can be used to discriminate. These posts and images reveal far more than just our gender. They can help better pinpoint our age (especially for those of us getting older), our ethnicity, our sexual preferences, whether we have a family or are starting one, our religion, our financial status….all small pieces that can enter into a first impression and a hiring decision even before seeing our qualifications.

I’ll add another thought to ponder. Video is a great way to stand out in a crowd of applicants. I have known individuals who submitted resumes online with links to a video on why they should be hired as well as YouTube videos tagging prospective employers. I think this is a great use of technology and social networking BUT….what if the employer requests, or in the case of a recent job announcement I saw, strongly recommend a video be sent to secure that interview?

While I fully believe the employer’s motive was to find the best person (public presentation was part of the job description and what better tool to weed out those that couldn’t present than a video) the underlying thought – a video reveals even more than the photograph. Now your dialect and several other factors are presented. That makes video applications more open to affect hiring decisions on a basis other than qualifications.

Does social media affect employment decisions and workforce equality? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s worth a discussion. What’s your take?

Thanks again to Bill Wagner for the inspiration and collaboration.

When it comes to Facebook brand pages, every discussion tends to center on organic reach. You stress over how low the numbers are, how the latest algorithm will affect that figure, what you can do to improve it….but have you stopped to consider that how good or bad your organic reach is may not really be worth the worry?

To be clear, we’re not implying reach doesn’t matter at all. It does and we’ve posted and will continue to post techniques for increasing it (The Facebook Organic Reach Solution), but you shouldn’t be running for the lifeboats to abandon ship or pull your hair out worrying about it. Why?

Reach Is A Poor Measure Of Overall Visibility

“Your post counts as reaching someone when it’s shown in News Feed.” Simply put, reach fails to measure views when people see your content by going directly to your page or views when navigating directly to your post. Facebook is only reporting a portion of the actual visibility your content is receiving! Since your page and posts are public and there are multiple ways for your content to be seen, it’s a poor measure of overall visibility.

The Takeaway: Low reach does not mean your post wasn’t seen. It simply wasn’t seen in the news feed.
Food For Thought: What are you doing to drive additional views to your page and content to compensate for low reach? If it’s nothing, you’re wasting an opportunity to leverage Facebook’s audience.

Reach Is A Poor Measure Of Post Effectiveness

Low reach doesn’t tell us your post (content) was ineffective – just ineffective at making it into the news feeds of or being seen by your fans. Likewise, high reach doesn’t mean your post was any more effective than one with minimal reach.

One of the best ways to leverage Facebook is for branding. Normally, this is one area where you’d think more is better: more reach means greater visibility and therefore better branding. BUT there’s a flaw in the thought process. You need to take into account HOW reach was achieved.

Reach is a measure of views within the news feed but isn’t restricted to views of your original content. It includes views from shares. While shares do indicate the source of the content (Robert Nissenbaum via Tactical Social Media or Robert Nissenbaum shared Tactical Social Media‘s photo) which does provide some branding, do people pay attention to the original source? More important – do they actually take the time to check out the source?

As for any engagement resulting from the share, it isn’t necessarily with your brand. It’s with the individual or brand who shared it! (There is a technique for properly leveraging other people’s audiences to drive engagement and interaction with your brand.) Shares may get great reach, but if you’re not getting engagement, page views or page likes, someone else is getting the benefit from your content, not you. You have high reach but are you really reaching anyone?

Sadly, outside of likes, it’s extremely difficult to measure the benefit of reach derived from content shares within Facebook. Even tracking the referring source of a page like is difficult. There’s no way to know for sure if it was the result of a specific content piece.

To illustrate just how poor reach is as a measure of post effectiveness:

Our Facebook post on May 11th discussing on one of our tactical social media tips reached a pitiful 30 people ( with 7 likes, 6 comments, and 1 share). That same post, however, generated 6 referrals to our blog resulting in 2 conversions (accessing our contact page) and a new subscriber to our e-newsletter.

From a reach perspective, the post performed poorly, yet it was clearly effective.

The week prior we ran a post on our Facebook page late on a Sunday evening (well outside the timeframe we’d expect to see any reach). As of Monday morning, reach was at 5. We then had it shared by one of our admins to their personal timeline. The net result – a phenomenal reach of 256! The downside – not 1 like or comment on our post. All of the activity was on our admin’s post. We saw no engagement, no new page likes, no traffic driven to our website.

From a reach perspective, the post performed amazingly well, yet it was clearly ineffective. To be fair, the content wasn’t from a blog post designed to drive traffic as the goal was to illustrate a point (and past experience has shown sharing ‘quality content’ doesn’t raise reach as drastically and still results in only limited effectiveness).

Just to make sure we covered all bases, we did have the May 11th post referenced above shared by the same admin and, true to form, total reach only jumped by 35 and resulted in only 1 additional blog view. Again, while reach more than doubled to a reasonable level, the post wasn’t any more effective.

The Takeaway: High reach doesn’t mean your content was effective, just that it was seen by more eyes within the news feed.
Food For Thought: Are you paying attention to where the reach is originating? Are you getting engagement from the increased exposure? Are you doing anything to try to drive more reach or engagement on your page?

A Better Measurement

Reach is a good benchmark, but our preferred (Facebook) measurement is engagement per reach. The old adage ‘work smarter, not harder’ is our prevailing thought here. Given more reach doesn’t always translate to more engagement, we’d rather reach fewer people and interact with them than spend more time tweaking content and timing posts to get more eyes on it. At some point, there’s a diminishing point of return in your efforts to increase reach.

If your intent is to leverage Facebook to generate prospects and leads, the foundation is your content, but the critical piece is building trust and relationships. That comes from engagement and interaction. Rather than continuously focusing on getting more reach, focus on generating engagement from the reach you do get. To maximize this, leverage outside tactics to drive eyes to your content (cross-platform promotion, driving traffic via a newsletter), something you CAN control.

While engagement per reach is a better measurement for post effectiveness, it still falls short.

Measuring Post Effectiveness

Facebook is a valuable branding tool and using it solely as such is perfectly OK, but most small businesses can’t afford to spend their time (or money) on branding alone. At a minimum, they need to see a conversion to prospects from those who see their content. Sales and contacts via social posting does occur, but for most of us, it’s not the norm. The best source for turning social media viewers to prospects though is still your website. The most effective posts – or posting strategy – is one which drives traffic to your website The best way to measure the effectiveness of your content is Google Analytics.

Unlike reach, Google Analytics provides a more complete picture. We can see the amount of traffic driven from Facebook (or any social platform), determine landing pages, exit pages, time on page and even determine what content was accessed. We can get a good picture of how effective the post was, not only at driving traffic but also at converting that traffic.

The Bottom Line

So should you focus on reach? Yes. While more doesn’t necessarily mean better, more provides a better opportunity. If you can get more feed views, you are ahead of the curve. Just don’t get too caught up in it. Reach is still a vital measurement about the overall health of your Facebook activity but it’s only one measurement that, on its own, tells us very little about your overall of visibility and post effectiveness.

Archive for month: May, 2015