I often get questions about social network marketing, and about social marketing in general. “Does it really work?” “Do you get results?” Nobody knows the value of social marketing—whether old-school networking or via tools that have recently entered the scene such are Facebook and LinkedIn—better than the human resources or recruiting marketing professional. In this profession, marketers have always relied on social networks in the past, often participating in recruitment fairs, professional conferences for the industry in which they recruit, or by simply putting the word out there in the relevant industry with the knowledge that people who work in a certain industry know others who have similar backgrounds and educations.

With the tools available to the marketing branch of a headhunting or recruiting firm, the importance of this sort of marketing has grown exponentially. Today, a single LinkedIn or Facebook post to the right person or group will get the word out about your headhunting or recruiting firm to a potentially global network in absolutely no time. When you speak to marketing professionals from the HR industry about social network marketing, it seems they are some of the most excited about it amongst us (that is, amongst marketing professionals in general). That is in large part because they are the ones who already intuitively know how to use it best, having always relied heavily on social and professional networks long before they became digitized.

What can we learn from our marketing colleagues whose job it is, in fact, to market a professional network? Here are the Top 10 Tips of Professional & Social Network Marketing as I have understood them from conversations our marketing colleagues in the recruitment industry:

• Identify your champions. Champions are clients or customers who would give you a 9 or 10 out of 10 when asked to rate you, and from whom you are likely to receive referrals.
• Identify your champion’s social and professional networks, including contacts and friends. Send information to your champion and encourage him to share with said networks.
• Allow your champions and other satisfied customers to build your social network channels for you. While you may provide them with the “hardware” in the form of discussion groups, boards, etc., encourage them and allow them to take the lead. Encourage them to answer other’s questions, engage with potential customers, etc.
• Be active online. Give your customers things to “like.”
• Be active in promoting your specific needs online and off. Looking for a group of biostatisticians to whom to market your recruiting company? Or a group of people who love scrapbooking? Get in touch with biostatisticians you’ve placed in the past, or get all the moms at the local elementary school to “like” you or review you on Yelp. Whatever works.
• Determine if you need to focus locally or globally to make most effective use of your social marketing efforts. Note the contrast in the examples above involving a recruiting firm focused on bringing in the best global talent in the biotechnology industry, and a shop/studio that fulfill all a scrapbook fanatic’s dreams. In the former, you want to target a global network. In the latter, you want to target a local network.
• If targeting global networks, make sure you: target several champions globally to help you get the word out; social and professional networking websites are a highly efficient way to target global networks.
• If targeting a local network, along with local advertisement and the internet, you have the benefit of easy word-of-mouth marketing and the ability to find clusters (literally) of your potential customers. Figure out where people with your customer profile hand out and go there. In the scrapbook example, one might target people with children (schools, ice cream shops, toy stores), and people who are interested in crafts (post ads near the local craft store, make friends with your local flower arrangement teacher, etc.)
• Provide high quality information that is likely to be of interest to your networks to make them feel that they get some sort of privilege by being networked with you. For example, employment statistics for a specific industry are very likely to interest people in any position in the industry, while if you only share and distribute job openings, marketing information about your firm, etc., there will likely be people in or near your network who will lose interest.



• Never bash the competition is the social or professional networking environment. This includes online networks, professional conferences, etc. If you must resort to such tactics, be discreet, don’t Tweet. Or let your champions take care of that for you.