Social Media Management for HR

For many business professionals, including HR, getting a handle on social media, let alone managing an online presence / brand is a great responsibility. Sometimes managing your own personal brand is time consuming enough let alone your HR department’s Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, or Google+.  So where and how does the social media HR management start?

• Master One Social Media Channel.  There is no hard and fast rule that says you must be on every single solitary social media channel.  While owning the social media accounts and names is important, I advise HR professionals to feel comfortable on one social media channel at a time.  One can make the determination which channel looking at which social media platform (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+…) your employees are having the most conversations and go from there.  You can also consider assigning different employees in your department one channel to manage breaking up the responsibility making it more manageable.

• Create Alerts. If one of the reasons to be on social media is to monitor activities, brand mentions, and conversation happening online, consider first to leverage your marketing department who is already monitoring for customer mentions and complaints before you go re-creating the wheel.  Ask what alert systems they are using.  For Twitter, you can use a free service called Twilert.  Twilert notifies you of any brand mentions or keyword combinations via email allowing you to spend more time with employees and leaders than in the social media black hole.  Google Alerts offers a similar option free monitoring keyword combinations of newly indexed web pages and articles.

• Schedule Updates.  Use RSS Feeds to share information, articles, and resources for your targeted audience automically onto your social media channels.  I use a service called TwitterFeed to schedule the messages to automatically be shared.  If posting jobs from your careers page, there are a myriad of resources to help you manage the process making sure that you select the right Twitter hashtags and other social media sharing tools.

Most importantly, set aside 15-30 minutes a day in your calendar to build / manage your social media.  This keeps you on task and focused which often times when it comes to social media is very hard to do.  When it comes to managing social media, less is more.  Focus on building connections and relationships bearing in mind that you can’t do it all alone.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers. Photo Credit LinkedHighEdWeb