Many search engine marketing experts today agree that videos and images drive more traffic in search engines than simple text-related results. In fact, a study done by Socialbakers, a leader in social media marketing and statistics, showed that as of December 2012, image-related posts led Facebook interaction by a whopping 89 percent. In 2012, according to Reuters, YouTube had an average number of four billion views per day.
With a multitude of free mobile image and video posting apps that are available for smartphones today, the ability to reach the public through multimedia has grown significantly, and today many companies take advantage of these major marketing channels. So what does this information mean for recruiters?
The most valuable aspect of multimedia from a recruiting perspective is that many of the image and video sites with the highest Alexa traffic ratings are free to use for both companies and individuals and often allow users to message or connect for free. Even if they are used for connecting with candidates found elsewhere online, the free messaging capability alone makes them a sourcing strategy goldmine.
Several of these same multimedia sites with large numbers of user profiles are indexed at large search engines, such as Google and Bing, where they are easily uncovered through various search techniques.
Besides sourcing and contacting through individual user profiles, multimedia sites offer recruiters an opportunity to both brand and harvest. That may sound like somewhat of an oxymoron, but both aspects apply to these sites when it comes to hiring. Many companies today use employees for career branding within both videos and images to attract more top talent just like them. Top performers want to work with other top performers, so highlighting them within multimedia is a great approach to free career branding which all industries are taking advantage of. From a sourcing perspective, however, that same public data generates names of top-performing passive candidates who may never be uncovered through any other search methodology.
To get started, since so many social media sites are connected in one way or another today, its only makes sense to use the largest ecosystem first: a Gmail account.
With the wide array of Google-owned social sites and tools, a Gmail account is the single-most valuable free tool (in my option) any recruiter can get. In addition to connecting a Gmail user to a long list of free Google-owned products, a Gmail account can be used to log in or sign up for an abundance of other online communities and tools, including YouTube. Being the third-most-visited site daily in the United States makes YouTube the most important multimedia website for recruiters today.
How are you using multimedia?