Whether you’re writing a book or selling a product, authenticity is key. Modern audiences are incredibly savvy at sniffing out inauthentic communications, especially on social media, so one of the most effective methods of talent engagement is to let your audience hear your employees’ unedited testimony. Some of the best-performing content on T-Mobile’s careers social channels has come from our employees authentically sharing their experience and giving us a view into who they really are.
When approaching Women’s History Month, we knew that we needed to cover it on the T-Mobile Careers social channels. Diversity is one of the primary themes in our messaging around T-Mobile as an employer; our employee base is already strikingly diverse, as are our customers, and so diversity at T-Mobile isn’t a program or an aspirational goal, it’s simply who we are. Women’s History Month provided us with an ideal occasion to go deep on topics like women’s leadership, celebrate the powerful women who work here, and provide a platform for employees to speak directly to our audience, contributing to and helping to shape the conversation.
We also knew of the method by which we wanted to address those topics. Instead of issuing a top-down company message, our consistent approach to social content is to let employees speak for themselves. I have the good fortune of working at T-Mobile, which has some of the most passionate employees on the planet. I am also lucky to be part of an employer brand marketing team that has members all over the country, some of whom are embedded in retail and customer service locations, which makes our team uniquely positioned to capture that employee engagement and gather their candid testimony. For International Women’s Day, we leveraged that strength and asked frontline employees to speak about the women leaders they work with. We spliced that testimony into a video published to Twitter and Facebook:
Note: Mark Diller will be sharing more of his pro tips and examples for engaging employees and candidates through social media at our free RallyFwd™ Virtual Conference on May 1, 2019. You won’t want to miss Mark’s presentation—register today!
Our approach to Instagram was different: a carousel featuring photos of a few of the women who work at T-Mobile, along with a simple caption:
This channel strategy grew out of what we’ve learned about our audiences over the last few years. Diversity is a topic that doesn’t do equally well across all of our channels; it performs best for us on Facebook and Twitter, often struggles on Instagram, and tends to struggle on LinkedIn as well if it comes across as self-celebration. In this case we chose to give the showcase video its best chance at success by publishing it to the two channels where it was most likely to succeed.
As we were doing this, other parts of the business were working toward similar goals, and our Corporate Communications department organized a conversation with actress and activist Sophia Bush. This event was broadcast via a webcast to employees, but we took this as an opportunity to live-tweet the event on our T-Mobile Careers Twitter feed for those who were not able to attend.
To extend the conversation beyond that one day, we also reached out internally to get testimony from employees who wanted to celebrate an inspirational woman at T-Mobile; we asked them to talk about what they learned from that figure, and to share their advice for younger women coming up through the business. Those videos, which are still coming in, are being published on our Twitter channel.
The response has been positive. We have an aggregate of nearly 40,000 impressions on the media published so far—with more to come over the balance of the month—as well as 2,600 video views. The engagement rate has been particularly high: every piece of content published has come in above the channel engagement average. This was particularly true on Facebook, where the post’s 22.3% engagement rate was nearly four times our average for that channel.
None of our Women’s History Month content has failed; impressions have been in the range of what we expect for organic posts, and the engagement on these posts has ranged from “above average” to “terrific.” As the editor in charge of this material, though, my biggest regret is the visual quality of some of the media we shared. As many other brands have learned, we know that it’s much easier to get user-generated content than it is to assure the quality of that content, and this month we’ve published (or are about to publish) some employee videos that pair a high-quality message with low-quality visuals. Over the balance of this year we’ll be evaluating new tools that we hope will allow us to bring even more employee-generated content to our channels without lowering our quality standards.
Note: Mark Diller will be sharing more of his pro tips and examples for engaging employees and candidates through social media at our free RallyFwd™ Virtual Conference on May 1, 2019. You won’t want to miss Mark’s presentation—register today!