The HR Influencer Marketing Channel (HR IMC) was launched in August, and within several weeks six companies joined the program. The HR IMC allows human resource solution providers and other organizations to have HR influencers share their original content on social media, in a controlled and measurable way. The HR IMC is powered by HRmarketer’s Advocacy Software. The software provides detailed metrics on the effectiveness of each influencer’s content shares.
How the HR IMC Works
Companies pay a membership fee to join the HR IMC, enabling them to publish two content assets per month. Once content is published, the influencers have the option to share the content with their social networks via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. When an influencer shares the content, companies pay a fixed fee to the influencer, per social channel — regardless of the engagement or clicks on their shares.
The HR IMC has been running for two months with six beta customers and the results are, well, quite interesting.
A total of 15 separate content assets from six companies have been published to the HR IMC as of October 31, 2018. The types of content vary: articles on leadership, recruiting, artificial intelligence, tuition assistance programs and other HR topics.
Here is what we’ve learned
- Nobody Likes Registration Forms: Content that sits behind registration forms is much less likely to be shared by influencers and therefore much less likely to be read. This recent article by Media Post backs up this finding: Brands Are Turning Away From Gated Content And Web Forms. Our own research, in partnership with HR.com and the HR Marketing Institute, found that 60% percent of HR decision makers are less likely to access content if they are required to fill out a form.
- Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn All Deliver Engagement: We all think we know what social networks deliver the clicks and, well, we’re not always right. For example, it depends on the influencer and how engaged their network is. Sometimes Facebook is off-the-charts and other times LinkedIn is (although LinkedIn is making it more difficult to track clicks). But don’t discount Twitter — we’ve seen a number of examples where Twitter outperforms other social networks. The takeaway is to be engaging on all three social channels and understand that different influencers deliver different results on social channels at different times.
- Social Network Size Is Not The End All: There are a few influencers on the HR IMC with relatively small social networks (e.g., under 10,000 Twitter followers, under 2,000 LinkedIn connections, under 1,000 Facebook “friends”. Surprisingly, they’ve outperformed their peers on a number of different occasions for total clicks delivered on shared content.
- Length of Content Doesn’t Matter (but images do): Don’t think your content needs to be “traditional”. One of the more popular content assets was the shortest — 400 words — but it also had a very eye-catching image.
- It’s all About CPC and the HR IMC Delivers: Finally, perhaps the most fascinating finding with the HR IMC is the cost per click (cpc). This is the metric that is turning heads. Here is the cpc for each of the 15 articles published to the HR IMC. As you can see, cpc has been as low as $0.40 and as high as $2. The average is $0.89.
