This article will provide best practices to make sure you are capturing the attention of your candidates and telling the story of your brand through your Instagram business account.
Multiple Images:
Include multiple images in your Instagram posts, so you can take advantage of the reels feature in Instagram and show off more of your Employee brand to your potential candidates!
BIO
Think of your bio like an SEO goldmine. Use key terms for your industry to lure attention. Include an optimized link in your bio as well. It could be to a link hosting site, link to your careers page, or best of all, a link to your CareerArc job map so candidates can quickly and easily find the jobs they’re searching for. Special note, links for Instagram are currently only accessible in your bio or through Story-stickers, so don’t post them in captions. Adding #LinkInBio or #LinkInStories is enough to indicate to the users where your links are posted. Worried you have to have 10,000 followers to post links to stories? Relax! That’s no longer required. It’s accessible to everyone now!
Use Linktree to include every link as part of your Bio
Linktree is a 3rd party application that allows you to share your links out in limitless ways. Setup your own Linktree account and include the link in your bio to point your active and passive candidates to all the right places with just one link in your bio.
Extend your posts by adding to your story
If you want to extend the life of one of your posts, simply share it to your story. To share a feed post to your story, just tap the paper airplane button below the post, just as you would to send it via Direct. At the top, you will see the option to create a story. Tap it to see the feed post as a sticker with a customized background ready to share to your story. You can rotate, scale and move the sticker — and tap it to explore other styles.
Instagram post length:
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Instagram was founded on visual content. The platform was made to showcase compelling pictures and videos, but the right combination of words will promote engagement on any post. Engagement, of course, is crucial to maximizing your content’s reach, since Instagram’s algorithm places posts with the most Likes and comments near the top of your followers’ feeds. We recommend an Instagram post length of 140-150 characters. On Instagram, captions can be up to 2,200 characters long, but you’ll only need a fraction of that limit to move the needle. Most people scroll through their feed quickly, so it makes sense to keep your captions clear and concise, punchy. Brief copy is easy to consume. It also doesn’t get cut off with an ellipsis.
Hashtags:
You can include up to 30 hashtags on a regular post, and up to 10 hashtags on a Story. If you try to include more, your comment or caption won’t post.
That said, just because you can use that many hashtags for Instagram doesn’t mean you should. There’s no right number of hashtags for every business, or even for every post by the same business. Do some testing to see what works best for you.
Keep on Posting!
You might not know it yet but you’ve got plenty of jobs and plenty of employer brand content. Posting daily will keep your followers in-the-know about open jobs and the value of working at an amazing company like yours! Break down the components of your Employer Brand into categories and then break down each category into various bits. For instance, if you have 5 branches of EB categories and you think of 5 posts within each category, that’s 25 EB posts! Same with jobs! Are you hiring for entry level jobs, c-suite placements, a growing accounting department? Categorize them and post some of the job descriptions each time. This entices candidates to learn more. Pair these with great corresponding photos or videos and you’ve made an impressive impact on your hiring potential. You’ll easily get to a place where you can post 1/day or more (but each brand is different so don’t get caught up in that number).
Plan ahead: Got a big event in February? Start planning imagery, sourcing content and editing captions early so you can schedule in advance. Worried about changes to dates, times, etc…? Don’t be! You can edit posts after they’ve been scheduled for easy updating.
Job Posts:
Keep it clean and simple.
- Text-based examples can just include the job title and location. Want to spice it up and really gain interest? Include the starting salary or genuine salary range for the role (remember those ranges are dependent on fit).
- Photo-based can be various images of your own staff but those aren’t always easy to come by. Hiring for nurses? There are ton’s of great stock images to use. Same goes for government roles, restaurant workers, IT roles and more!
- Tag the location of the job. This is easy to do and is more likely to show up for users who don’t even follow you!
Employee Advocacy
Get your whole team involved! We tag our staff photos for hashtag holidays. Our team gets alerts when we post, so they’re more inclined to share in their stories. People WANT to share about open jobs to help their friends, family members, and colleagues.
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