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Visionary Marketing
Social media requires proper and effective visuals for your posts to be more impactful. Any first-grade student knows that. Seasoned marketers do too. That said, a recent study by Vistacreate and the Content Marketing Institute showed that there is room for improvement in that area. In this report, CMI’s Robert Rose, founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for Content Marketing, urged marketers to better test their assumptions. The report also provides in-depth insights regarding social media visuals and how to use them effectively.
How to Use Social Media Visuals More EffectivelySocial Media Visuals are important CMI and Vista create conclude in a 2023 study. Nonetheless, marketers should be spending a little more time testing rather than creating visuals for themselves – This is a Midjourney-generated image of a painter crafting a social media visual for Twitter.The Current State of Social Media VisualsWe all know, at least intuitively that social media visuals are important. A recent survey by CMI and Vista Create is bringing evidence that our gut feeling is true. It also points out that marketers should test their visuals more carefully.
A 2023 Social Media Visuals study by CMI and Vistacreate.The survey results in a nutshellCMI selected a sample of marketers for this survey. 167 respondents were qualified for analysis and they answered the institute’s questions in June 2022. Here is a visual representation of the sample with a slide taken from the report.
Worthy of note is the fact that B2B and B2B+B2C add up to 69% of the total sample. The survey is mostly geared towards business-to-business. B2C, other and not-for-profit make up the remaining 31% of the survey respondents. The survey was essentially carried out in the US (68% of respondents).
The survey results in a nutshellCMI have derived five major insights from their surveyInsight number one: test your assumptionsThe authors of the report insist that too many marketers are behaving according to their own tastes rather than testing how effective their visuals are. This is the main finding of the report. Whereas marketing is about measuring customer response and the effectiveness of one’s messages and campaigns, it seems that most marketers are instead relying on their own tastes.
Social media visuals designed by Leonardo da Vinci? Anything is possible with Midjourney, but not sure it’s a good thing, though.It might be a good idea if your brand is a trendsetter like Apple or Gucci. When Android released its new flat design look and feel with its 4.0 Icecream sandwich version, it set a new trend for all to follow. Apple followed in their footsteps in 2013. At the time, most of us found flat design awful and too minimalistic. After a little while our tastes changed and we became used to it.
Marketers have this tendency to craft beautiful images that they like rather than pictures that are either effective or appeal to their audiences. Whereas this might be a good idea if you are Apple or Gucci, it may not if your brand is not a luxury or a beloved brand. The above picture is a Midjourney-generated image. A painter is creating a huge social media visual for Twitter with a paintbrush.This happened because every one of us had an Android or Apple iPhone in our pockets. In fact, we didn’t have a choice. For visual social ads, audiences do have a choice to click or not to click.
The perspective is very different. Hence the testing.
Insight number 2: look at visual social media as a platformThe authors are claiming that visual content creation for social media is moving in-house.
Nearly 50% of brands don’t have a separate budget for social media visual content. Yet, creating social media-friendly visuals is a job in its own right and a budget should be allocated to this.
60% of marketers said they create visual content themselves, 56% have in-house professional designers, and only 28% use freelance designers (the overlap is because some respondents indicated all three options)
What is strange though is that the authors of the report found out that ‘counter-intuitively, small businesses are more likely to have a separate budget for visual social content, as compared to larger companies (47% vs. 22%)’.
The authors claim that this is a good thing, but that brands need to have a least a small budget for content creation. After all, content creation is a job, not a hobby.
Insight number 3: build repeatable processesWhen looking at what kinds of visuals are more successful than others, CMI’s survey consistently highlighted 3 main content types:
- Video content
- Custom photos (as opposed to stock images)
- Infographics
Instagram’s top three are a bit different with ‘stories’ coming third. Reels on Facebook didn’t seem to catch up, though.
Videos are often quoted as being the top performers. That said, very few marketers manage to make their videos viral without paid social media ads. We definitely recommend brands to work on their word-of-mouth strategies before moving to ad-driven social activation.
Insight number 4: match those processes with a documented and formal budgetAs to effectiveness, LinkedIn is definitely most brands’ pet social platform.
LinkedIn scored the highest at 56% (rating it as extremely or very effective), followed by Facebook (38%), and Instagram (31%)
These results are most probably due to the strong B2B bias in the survey sample.
Insight number 5: empower visual content creators to tell storiesThe fifth insight is probably the most interesting one. CMI tested 5 different social media visuals with marketers and non-marketers. The results were completely different according to the audience.
Social media visuals should be tested with your audiences. CMI showed that the green visual was ranked highest by marketers and one of the least effective by non-marketers. QED.Content creators know that by heart. As the name goes, they bet on creativity and inventiveness and come up with great concepts. But here comes the Corporate Marketing Officer who starts shouting at you by stating you’re ‘not on brand’.
Next thing you know, the content creator in question is so crestfallen that she or he – reluctantly – opens the boring brand guidelines once more and produces a clone of all other social media visuals. So much so that all the brand’s social media posts and ads look the same.
Marketers are too self-obsessed and they value their brand guidelines too much. Whereas brand guidelines are, in general, a good thing, they also tend to make all your content uniform and bland.
Try and work with third-party content creators and external media partners to generate more diverse and more social media-friendly visuals that appeal to your audiences. This is a trick we have often implemented while working as a social media director as well as with our customers.
About the authors of the reportThe authors of the social media visuals study report
Important notice: our most observant readers will have noticed that we like to produce our own creative visuals without testing them. This is because we have been trendsetters for nearly thirty years 😉
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Forget about phishing, enter LinkedIn hackers! cybercriminals are upping their game and are now using LinkedIn to plant viruses on your machines. As they are sending their messages through LinkedIn navigator, they are catching professional users unawares. Indeed, the latter are less prone to expect cyber attacks to originate from that channel. This is a strong reminder that multi-factor authentication is now a must-have for all platforms, amongst other protective measures like strong passwords, which must be changed regularly.
LinkedIn Hackers are targeting pro usersMidjourney’s interpretation of hackers using LinkedIn to install viruses on their personal computers. Quite scary but LinkedIn hackers’ attacks are even more worrying.Hackers are getting smarter every day. They are now using Sales Navigator to send you targeted messages in plain Italian or French and possibly in English.
We aren’t sure about this but generative AI may have played a role in correcting the cybercriminals’ grammar.
Readers should be on their toesVisionary Marketing received one of these messages this very morning, hence this breaking news post, as we are keen on warning our readers who should be on their toes while they are using Microsoft’s professional social network.
Despite what Midjourney believes, hackers don’t look like pirates. They may even be wearing three-piece suits and they are using LinkedIn.Here is the exchange which took place as we were lecturing and our attention span was not what it should have been.
TUESDAY
Contact name – 11:26 a.m.
Hi, I have a project on advertising on social networks but I am too busy to receive it, would you like to receive this project? I will share it with you
Visionary Marketing (He/Him) – 1:33 PM
Hello, how can I help you? I’m busy until 6p.m., we can have a call after that if you want.
Contact name -1:39 PM
I will send you their project to see, if you accept the project, I will hand them your contact details.
Visionary Marketing (He/Him) – 3:22 PM
OK
Contact name -4:13 PM
https://drive.google.com/XXXX
password:2023
WEDNESDAY
Visionary Marketing (He/Him) – 12:06 PM
Thanks
I should point out that this is a known contact. The person in question teaches in the same school as we do, in the same class, we had seen each other a few weeks before and a lunch date was on its way. Obviously, the LinkedIn hackers didn’t know that because it had happened IRL.
Clicking on the Google Drive link (one could have thought it must have been secure because of the password…) takes you to a .zip file that contains a.exe.
.EXE is a fishy file extensionThe .exe file extension was a warning that something fishy was happening. Even though I had my doubts since the message was very well crafted. Besides, the file was over 700 MB. Way above the size granted by online virus scanners.
I don’t have a PC, so I had to find one and scanned the file without opening it and, of course, it’s a virus (I didn’t investigate further, it looked nasty!)
The original message in French. Many attacks took place in Italy as well.It must be said that many LinkedIn accounts have been stolen and resold.
The attack was very subtle and well targeted. People familiar with the matter told Visionary Marketing that similar attacks took place in France in Italy.
Our recommendation is to protect your accounts systematically, generate automatic passwords (such as the ones proposed by Safari on macOS) and be wary of suspicious messages offering jewellery or anything else for that matter.
Above all, implement multi-factor authentication at all times.
Special note for macOS users: don’t even think that Macs are immune even though they apparently safer.
People from our network reported that attacks did occur in the past, most likely triggered from Russia. Yet, these were based on fake accounts. In today’s case, the LinkedIn hackers probably took advantage of a major data leak from LinkedIn to impersonate real people. That’s what makes this cyberattack so credible. Knowing the person who writes you tends to catch you off guard and that’s when you are at risk.
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Is Twitter still the right platform for advertisers? Twitter has been in the news lately for changes that have happened within the organisation as well as in its user policies. More recently, Musk even decided to ask Twitter users whether he should resign and it seems he didn’t quite like the answer. Journalists reporting on the whims of Mr Elon Musk are having good fun but what should advertisers do? Should they put Twitter on hold? To find out I interviewed Kelsey Chickering, Principal Analyst – CMO Practice at Forrester on how these changes are likely to impact brands and B2B marketers. Kelsey shed some light on where the platform is headed and what marketers should do. And her advice is clear: advertisers should put Twitter on the back-burner, both for ads and word of mouth. Let that sink in! Elon.
Forrester Advises Brands to Put Twitter on the Back-BurnerIs Twitter still the proper platform for advertisers? Forrester’s Chickering’s answer to that question is a resounding no. Let that sink in, Elon!Twitter for advertisers: should brands pay attention to Twitter’s new boss’s whims?Kelsey Chickering: From the advertiser’s perspective, you have to pay attention to Elon’s whims, because at this point these are directing the future of Twitter, the way moderation is happening, and the new tools that are popping up.
It’s a sound decision to pause your Twitter dollars for most advertisers as Elon Musks’s whims can change on a dime.
They should keep a pulse check on what Musk is tweeting and indicating about the future of Twitter, while taking a conservative approach to spending on it.
We don’t know the future, so let’s wait and see. I wouldn’t say take Twitter off your list forever. But it’s a sound idea to stop spending on it for the moment given the uncertainty associated with the platform. It’s proven in the last several weeks that it’s not really the safest place for brands to be.
The Future of Twitter for AdvertisersShould advertisers still dish out their advertising dollars for Twitter visibility? Our once favourite blue bird is crying its heart out.Consumers are worried about the future of Twitter and what it might become. Will it be a place where they want to spend time, or a place that gets overrun by misinformation and disinformation?
However, I think from an advertiser’s perspective, most brands don’t really need Twitter to meet their business goals in terms of advertising.
It’s not as big of a concern since you can put your ad dollars where you can get mid to upper funnel results. Many brands weren’t using Twitter for lower funnel direct response activities. I reckon there’s minimal impact to your bottom line to move your ad spend elsewhere. There are, of course, exceptions to it.
“Advertisers can find new avenues,” Forrester’s analyst warnsThus, for advertisers, they can find new avenues. For consumers, it’s a little different because Twitter is offering something that no one else is offering them right now.
It is a place where people go to find information, get real-time updates, and see the news as it’s happening. That’s something you can’t necessarily find anywhere else at this point.
Kelsey Chickering kindly answered our questions – photo by Valerie SarronTwitter for marketers is more of a use case than a must-have. There are certain use cases like customer service where Twitter becomes important and is a channel you manage. It might mean that you have to find new vehicles to handle customer service.
Influencers and TwitterTwitter has certainly been a platform for the media and news reporting side. It’s a place where you can get seen and heard. All that said, there are new platforms popping up. TikTok, for example, is creator-born and a lot of creators are flocking to it. You might see more people on the news side spend time on it as well.
Alternative Platforms for Twitter Advertisers and MarketersTwo channels I believe are viable places for both creators and friends: TikTok and Reddit. Reddit is similar to Twitter where you can find very niche audiences. There are conversations about different and specific topics, a provision which Twitter had bestowed upon many communities. Major difference though is that Twitter is more real time and events-based.
Then we have Bluesky by Jack Dorsey. It’s quite unclear though what Bluesky actually is, what it will be and whether it would be a replacement for Twitter. I haven’t yet seen anything that indicates if it would be a replacement. However, this landscape is ripe for a new platform that has similar functionality to Twitter with the safety and content moderation it offers.
Verified Status or Paid StatusWelcome or Goodbye to Twitter advertisers? Whoever understands the current status of his or her verified account wins a free Twitter bird.Having a verified account on Twitter could actually be a good thing. It would be helpful for people to understand whether content is coming from a real person or a fake account.
But unfortunately, the recent changes have made it easier for impersonators to get verified. So it had a bit of an inverse impact.
All of the information that I’ve seen, it seems to be a back and forth from Twitter trying to figure out the right balance, while realising that there’s a problem if it’s accessible for everybody.
Regrettably, verification meant impersonation instead of true verification, which implies it was hard to put more trust in information from such accounts.
Current landscape and future of social mediaWe are at a turning point for Meta. Suffice to say, social media advertising has struggled in the last year with Apple’s privacy changes.
If you look at any report from Meta or in the more recent Forrester’s Ad forecasts that were released this November, social media advertising will decelerate to its slowest pace, rising only 7.4% this year.
Hence, there is a slowdown in spending that we’re projecting over 2023.
However, agency executives and brands are still seeing social media maintained over a year. They’re deliberating on how to continue maintaining those budgets, as the budget deployment avenues are changing.
Meta is a channel that delivers on many different aspects of customer lifecycle, everything from discovering a new product all the way through to managing conversations with your current customers. It has certainly gained the lion’s share of media because on the lower funnel side, it’s actually proven very efficient for advertisers. It’s a way for them to get lower funnel media for a good price.
New platforms emerge and you see consumers shift into new places like TikTok, for instance. We are beginning to see brands figure out how to shift their dollars into new modern spaces that people are spending time on. It presents a whole new set of challenges, especially from content creation perspective. In the foreseeable future, you’re going to see shifts out of legacy platforms like Meta into emerging ones like TikTok, and integrators that help you create the content for those platforms.
Content Creation: Brands Versus InfluencersWe’re starting to see a trend toward brands and agencies hiring creators to make content for organic channels. That’s not just to gain influence from their followers, but also to make content for them to publish. I reckon they’re realising that when you enter a platform like TikTok, you can’t use the same old strategy. Their content teams probably don’t fully understand how to make compelling content for that platform. So they’re hiring creators and outside resources to either make their content or advise on it.
Brands going back to work on their own content and channelsYou need to have your house in order while you’re advertising.
Your owned properties are incredibly important because consumers are seamlessly moving from social media platforms to your website, back to something else, and on to the blog content you might create.
It is natural and seamless for consumers at this point. So every touch point that you expect a consumer to have with you should reflect your brand and values. It should reflect your look and feel, and the experience that you want people to have with you. Regardless of social media, it’s crucial for brands to get their house in order and ensure that their own presence is good for consumers.
What’s in Store for Twitter Advertisers and ConsumersThe Twitter verified account status saga was enough to get the entire planet completely confused over what should or shouldn’t be done. It sued to state that your verified account was worth bloody nothing and that it was just a legacy verified badge granted to someone who used to be known. It now points out that “this account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category”. Advertisers are now granted a yellow “This account is verified because it’s an official business on Twitter” badge. Heck! Isn’t all that utterly confusing. I will not make any comments on Musk’s management capabilities.Wait for a Few Months Forrester Analyst SaysIn the next several months, things will pave way for some clarity. You might see that consumers double down on Twitter and realise they can’t go anywhere else and this is where they love to spend time.
Or there might be an exodus from the platform if it becomes a place that has a lot of unsavoury content or content that you don’t want to keep. Any of those two scenarios may happen with consumers, but I don’t see brands going back to Twitter in the next two quarters.
This is based on the uncertainty with the platform combined with brands tightening their belts.
Right now, we’re in a period of economic uncertainty where brands aren’t flushed with cash to spend on advertising.
So they need to make hard choices about where to show up. The way the platform has manifested itself recently makes it a pretty easy choice for brands to decide where to cut or put money elsewhere.
Organic Content on TwitterIf you think the platform is not suitable for your ad dollars, it’s not suitable for your content at all. Removing your content from a platform because you feel it’s not safe, translates into your organic presence as well.
Here’s the result, cowboy. Let that sink in! https://t.co/H4Fq8xRLd6
— Yann Gourvennec (@ygourven) January 22, 2023
Forbes showed that the result of Musk’s new governance is pretty clear. It stressed a 50% drop in advertising volume in November 2022 alone. Kelsey’s advice must have been followed. For us on the B2B marketing side, it might be high time we start exploring other platforms. Not forgetting to spruce up our digital assets.
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Social Selling is about strategy, it’s not about tools or tactics, let alone the infamous LinkedIn Social Selling Index. Social Media is one of the most important avenues for B2B marketers in the post-pandemic world. Let’s hear it from an expert on what it takes to be great at social and leverage this channel effectively. In this podcast Tim Hughes talks to us about the updated version of his book on social selling.
Social selling is about strategy it’s not about toolsSocial selling isn’t a tool, it’s about strategy and it’s a must-have in a post-pandemic world – Buy the book from Amazon now!TH In this new version of the book I have added more content and bolstered it after discussing with 15 practitioners – people that are doing social selling. For an organisation’s executive team, social selling ought to be part of the strategy.
When social media came out, many didn’t know what to do with it. The marketing department would leave it in a cupboard and then bring it out every week or two. They’d post something on a corporate page and ask everybody to like it, which more often than not doesn’t fetch good results.
Social now is a clear competitive advantage for an organisation. But it has to be run as a strategy, not as a tactic.
The key thing about the book is that I want to show there’s a clear connection between social media and leads and meetings. How are you going to use social to build a pipeline and get revenue?
Social Selling Is Not Communicating Online, It’s About DollarsWe have a definition as well as methodology for social. Social selling is using your presence and behaviour on social media to build influence, make connections, grow relationships and trust, which lead to conversations and commercial interaction.
A proper Social Selling strategy isn’t about communicating online Tim Hughes says, it’s about dollars and cents!The key thing there is we’re driving commercial interaction. Organisations now at a leadership level should be able to say at board meetings that we’re spending ‘x’ on marketing and getting ‘y’ from social media. It’s not about getting likes and clicks and views, it’s about revenue. They should be able to say we’re getting $10 million from the use of social media. That’s about driving a strategy from the top down to actually understand why they’re on social.
Let’s talk social media in terms of a classic exhibition. You as a buyer know what supplier you want to talk to. So you go over there, sit down and have a conversation. Probably at that exhibition there would be somebody who would have seen you and would talk to you. Now, we would expect what happens on social media is I walk into it and a salesman comes up and smacks me in the face with a brochure. Nobody’s interested in that.
LinkedIn is your shop window!
We know from research that people come to social media to be social. We’re not coming to social media to be smacked on the face with a sales brochure.
One of our clients is Namos, an Oracle reseller, with whom we worked to transform their sales team. We now have buyers coming on to social media, walking up to their sales team, which is transformational. Normally when it’s about sales people, folks don’t like or trust them. Here, we have buyers coming up to their salespeople saying, I think you can help me – and that’s translating. One of them has recently signed a $2.6 million deal.
We have organisations that are doing multimillion-dollar deals purely because of their position on social and treating it as a strategy, while ensuring that everybody within the organisation is involved.
Creating a mission statementWe do a classic brainstorming session where we get the C-suite and probably one of their advisors into a room. Then we work through with them about the importance of strategy and using data to show how the world is changed. People quite often recognise that there’s been this change, but they don’t understand that now 60% of the world’s population is active on social media for two and a half hours a day. This is the data that comes from Simon Kemp.
Telstra Purple came up with a mission statement which says a social organisation sees social as a platform for closing the distance between clients, prospects, remote employees and potential recruits. Social gives them the ability to get traditional visibility that you would expect from marketing. They’re a cybersecurity company. So they are very keen to be trusted and to get the trusted advisor status, for people to say that company looks like they know what they’re talking about.
Humans are social animals, and social selling is well suited for social animals who need to converse and collaborate with one another.Tools for Social SellingWe as a business actually use very few tools because this is about you and being human centric. We use Slack internally. I have used internal social now for a number of years. When I was in corporate, we used it to attain an increased efficiency of the employees by 25%. That’s like getting 25% more employees at no cost and it saved so much time. It didn’t stop meetings, but it used to cut down their time. It works only when you have senior leadership using it. Leaders should say, as they did in my previous organisation, that if you want to get hold of me, I am on Slack. I might check email only at certain points in the day. So Slack is where we should connect.
What Matters Is Conversations and CollaborationsWe use Slack, LinkedIn and a number of social platforms purely because today we live in two worlds – physical and digital. As soon as we go online onto social media, we’re in digital.
What we need to be able to do as salespeople and leaders of organisations is to be able to walk digital corridors and have digital conversations.
The key is to make sure that if you’re going to start in sales as the point of actually transforming your organisation to digital, then what you need are people who have seen it, done it and whom the sales team respects.
Age doesn’t have an impact at all on understanding social
Mindset required for social sellingIt isn’t just about social selling, but transforming your organisation to digital. We have the physical world that we all know and love, and we have the digital world. Social media is a conduit to the digital world. Your LinkedIn profile is you – it’s your digital twin. So the way that your LinkedIn profile looks is how you want the digital world to recognise you.
For example, at Cambridge Display Technology, they’re not using any recruitment consultants or recruitment advertising anymore. They have gone digital and empowered their people to talk online that it is a great place to work for. They articulate how great their diversity program is, or how well their ESG program unfolds. Those who read this on social say that it looks like a place I want to work for.
It the world of digital, social gives us new efficiency and new ways of working.
It’s not about tools, a new ERP system or anything like that. It’s about using digital is the way that we work, and that empowerment across the organisation means that we can work in different ways. We can strip out cost and be more efficient. What we would recommend is having an open mind and understand that there is a new digital way of doing things.
Businesses Navigating Their Way in the New Digital WorldWhen Adam Gray and I started our company six years ago, we thought we had eight months, at which point everybody would get it and it would become the norm. Here we are in our seventh year and 99.99% of companies do not understand this. There are companies who have got big marketing budgets and don’t understand digital.
There’s this misalignment from a leadership perspective to understand what social and digital stand for and what it means for their business.
To break away from this, it’s about likes and clicks and things like that. I recently read about an organisation who have got 300,000 employees. They’ve got 8 million followers on LinkedIn, but get 15 likes per post, out of which seven are internal. This clearly means they aren’t influencing their prospects and customers.
It’s about understanding the world of digital, the way it works and not just an understanding about social, but having the business acumen about how to apply it.
Things have changed because of Covid-19 and we need to do things differently. Organisations are coming to us as they are completely redesigning their processes which are 30 years old.
Social Selling Doesn’t Take LongLook at the speed of things – LinkedIn allows you to have 200 connections a week. That’s 200 conversations with people you’re trying to influence. Social selling actually shortens the sales cycle because of not having to deal with a lot up front. People will see you as soon you are online and have a conversation with you instantly.
We saw a real tipping point in October 2020 when people in the UK went into the second lockdown. We had to relearn the way we worked. I don’t need to commute anywhere, I can sit in my office or at home and run a normal day’s work.
The impediment to success on social and digital is that there are still so many mental models out there that 30 years ago is the way that we do things.
LinkedIn and its impact on social sellingIn the physical world, when we meet a potential client for a meal or sports, we don’t immediately talk about work. We try to get close to the person, and this is what being social is about. We don’t talk about business posts and personal posts. This is life posts. This is about understanding each other. It pulls people towards you. I know social selling, but also the fact that my father has dementia and he’s in a home allows you to know the real Tim Hughes – the Tim Hughes that you would deal with if he delivers a service to you.
What you’ll find is that LinkedIn will become more like Facebook, because more people will actually recognise the fact that by doing this you’re getting people to understand you
When you come to my LinkedIn profile, you should better understand what it is that I stand for. Your LinkedIn profile is your shop window to the world. It’s about as soon as your ideal customer spots you, he thinks you are interesting. He is curious about that and walks towards you. Your LinkedIn profile explains who you are, and it cannot merely be the fact that you go to work, but that you’re going to spend the next weekend seeing your parents. That’s part of me and who I am. People respect that and I get people coming to me which punches out my network, punches into the people that I’m trying to influence.
Social Selling Strategy: Social Media, Not Spam MediaSocial is not about putting a brochure online – neither your ideal customer nor anybody wants it. People buy people. I’m looking for a relationship with somebody. Someone that can help me solve my business issues and that I can trust. Somebody that I know that if the project starts failing and I ring them up, they’re going to take that call. Even if it’s a Saturday, I can look upon them that they’re an organisation I want to do business with.
Now, when I do business in the physical world, I don’t walk into a meeting and immediately give people brochures. I sit there and say, I’ve been working here for 20 years. I’ve been selling accounting systems for 20 years across industries. I generally know about some things about accounting, but there’s bound to be something I have missed.
It’s about bringing that expertise and also bringing your personality as people buy people. This is social media. This is not spam media.
It’s about empowering the people, that’s when things actually start happening and the magic takes place.
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Handshake* has quickly taken the world of job search platforms by storm. It has been becoming highly promoted to students through their universities in the US. This is resulting in Handshake becoming one of the top ways that students are finding jobs. With the workforce flipped upside down by Covid-19, companies are looking to fill many positions. Their target; eager students looking to start their career*.
Does the rising popularity of Handshake appear to be the end of Linkedin?
Handshake: Is this the end of Linkedin?The next great job search platform, Handshake, is sparking the interest of many companiesWhat is Handshake?Source – joinhandshake.comHandshake is a fairly new platform founded in 2013 by Stryder Corp.
According to their site, Handshake has become the leading early career community in the US in only a few years.
This is an online recruiting platform for higher education students and alumni. The key attribute that sets it apart from other job searching sites is the connectivity. They work with connecting employers directly to students through their school or university. The job listings, as a result, are specifically directed towards students.
Currently they are partnered with more than 1,400 colleges and universities and over 750,000 employers.
This job search platform allows students to look at jobs based off their skills as well as giving students personalized job suggestions based off their major.
Students are given the ability to quickly connect with specific companies they’re already interested in. Better yet, since these companies know they are listing positions for students, they understand that they don’t have a very long work history if any experience at all.
Through Handshake, students will no longer have to feel the excitement of finding a great job opportunity only to find that they’re unqualified due to a lack of work experience
Is Handshake the New LinkedIn?Linkedin is an online business social networking service officially launched in 2003. Their mission is to ‘connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful’. The platform not only allows people to connect with other people on a professional level, but, like Handshake, allows for people to connect with businesses. With 822 million registered users and 57 million organizations, Linkedin typically ranks in the top 5 in most ‘job search platform’ ranking scales.
According to Forbes.com:
Given LinkedIn is about connecting with people you know or helping you build relationships from your professional experiences, in some sense that is, by definition, backward looking. Handshake, by contrast, focuses on the future and where you’re going
Unlike other social media platforms, Linkedin remains professional and helps people gain exposure to employers and recruiters. People can assert their brand and display their skillset to the public and can keep people connected without the drama and nonsense other platforms may bring.
As promising as this sounds for many professionals, there are still downsides.
The DownsidesLinkedin is broader than Handshakes niche demographic. Anyone can sign up for a Linkedin account resulting in over 25% of US adults being Linkedin users. Though, job searching on both platforms is great, depending on who you ask, one might work out a lot better than the other.
Creating your account is a time consuming process and people might find it difficult to fill out all the profile details.
On Linkedin, it doesn’t take long for the fake and barren accounts to begin sending requests for a meaningless and inactive connection.
Similarly, Handshake comes with many spam listings. Hundreds of companies push their job listings by messaging hundreds of students in hopes of a reply.
Speaking from personal experience, there are currently about 200 messages in my inbox from companies sending automated messages about their jobs
As a result, students find it difficult to distinguish if the company is truly interested in working with them. This results in tons of dead links to filled job listings, creating a feeling of general disconnect.
Handshake Versus LinkedinIn conclusion, Handshake and Linkedin may have similar goals, they also have their own set of benefits and features. As a student, Handshake proves to be a great way to gain necessary experience when first joining the workforce. As a professional, Linkedin proves to to be a great way to maintain connections and promote your personal brand to a wide audience.
In turn, both platforms are still on a steady rise. One can only benefit from having as many tools in their toolkit as possible.
As a result, they both are here to help people on their path to finding their dream job.
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