March is Women’s History Month, featuring International Women’s Day on March 8, and the perfect time to use your social media platform to voice what your company is doing to support and celebrate women in the workplace. In doing so, it’s also an opportunity to attract talent with equality at the top of their priorities when choosing an employer.
However, without a best-practice approach to social media, your efforts to celebrate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day could fall flat. Your social content needs to be optimized to reach and engage your talent audience. Otherwise, it won’t perform well among your followers, which, in addition to not supporting your intentions, will have a negative impact on your social channel’s performance overall.
Here’s why: the less engagement your content gets, the fewer followers the social media’s algorithm will show your content to, which ultimately means fewer candidates discovering your employer brand and wanting to learn more about your company.
So to help Recruitment Marketing practitioners make sure this doesn’t happen to you, we went to the data to see what works and what doesn’t. We analyzed LinkedIn posts from March 2021 related to Women’s History Month, including International Women’s Day, that were published by users of Rally Inside, our analytics & benchmarking tool that tracks, measures, analyzes and reports on candidate engagement with Recruitment Marketing content.
While our analysis relates specifically to Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, the findings can be applied to your social media strategy for Pride, Black History Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month and any other holidays, and events that your company may celebrate.
The results at a glance
Rally Inside data for last year’s Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day revealed the following insights:
- Nearly all employers published multiple Women’s History Month posts throughout March 2021, indicating a proactive strategy to participate in these events with a content plan prepared in advance.
- On average, Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day content made up 6% of the company’s organic posts on their LinkedIn channel during March 2021. For several employers, it was the main focus during March, representing up to 60% of their content on LinkedIn that month.
- On average, Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day content received 210% more impressions and 148% more engagement than other posts the companies made in March.
What does this data mean for your Recruitment Marketing strategy?
Consider planning your Women’s History Month content strategy for the entire month of March ahead of time (don’t worry if that isn’t possible this year, we have you covered with pro tips you can implement right away below). Even though March has already begun, it’s not too late to take time now to prepare your posts for the rest of the month. It will help you incorporate our pro tips below to ensure that your content will have the maximum impact.
But on a similar note, just because a post relates to Women’s History Month doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to hit with your audience. The data from Rally Inside also revealed what distinguished an engaging post from a non-engaging one.
Rally note: Rally Inside offers a free version for everyone in the Rally community. Start analyzing your content and improving your Recruitment Marketing strategy by signing up for your free account today!
What to include in your Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day social media content
People
In general, posts showing how employees celebrate or posts featuring specific employees in relation to the event get the most engagement (reactions, comments and shares) and the most impressions (reach).
An example of an employee in a leadership position sharing what International Women’s Day’s hashtag, #BreaktheBias, means to her personally.
It’s great to show what you’re doing as a company to celebrate, but posts showing real employees are more authentic. They also paint a better picture for interested talent of your company culture especially if you can show employees in their work environment, even working from home.
Further data from Rally Inside proving the need for people-centric content. People-focused stories are receiving twice the engagement compared to Q4 2021. Engagement with culture content, in particular, is up by 174%.
Plus, posts focusing on specific individuals are more likely to be shared by that person across their personal networks. Not only does this mean a much farther reach for your social content, but also more engagement from people inside those networks.
Rally note: For help sourcing and creating libraries of content for employees to pull from and post across their personal networks, read our How To
Guide, The Ultimate Guide to Building an Employee Stories Content Library.
The right hashtags
You might not find it surprising that an informed hashtag strategy is key to a successful post, but from this comes an important reminder: hashtags may change every year — even for the same event.
For example, this year’s hashtag for International Women’s Day is #BreakTheBias in an effort to spotlight and break through the bias that still exists in communities, workplaces and education systems preventing women from reaching their full potential.
For the farthest reach possible, make sure to stay updated on these event themes, what hashtags people are using “in the wild” and all of the standard ones, which, this year, include:
- #InternationalWomensDay2022
- #IWD
- #IWD2022
- #WomensHistoryMonth
Along with #BreakTheBias, another theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is the X pose, featured here. On top of the actual initiatives you’re promoting, this pose is an easy addition to include in your content that also shows your connection to the cause.
Group celebration
Some employers bridge the gap between corporate and personal with content showing group celebration. This means multiple photos in the same post, photos of multiple people, a collage of faces or anything that shows support in numbers.
If you’re wondering how to source this kind of content, there are a number of ways to go about it (some of them requiring planning ahead of time):
- Hosting education or training sessions during lunch, or inviting notable members from your community to host (Zoom event photos were just as effective, according to Rally Inside data)
- Spotlighting work being done to support women in your organization and your community by your company’s employee resource groups (ERG)
- Giving employees time off to attend local events related to Women’s History Month or supporting them to participate in their own way
- Highlighting a collective of people who have made major contributions to the advancement of women within your organization
A LinkedIn post sending thanks for being featured in a company article by Making Space highlighting 21 Women in Cybersecurity You Need to Know. This is a perfect example of how employees like to share the right kind of company content with their personal networks.
Whatever you choose, remember to tag everyone included in your content! Other than giving credit where credit’s due, tagging people also leads to posts getting seen by more people, resulting in more engagement and shares across more networks.
Of course, group celebration also further shows that equality is not just something you talk about. Showing ongoing work being done by your ERG, for example, shows that you actively pursue and back it up with action throughout the year.
What to avoid in your Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day content
Corporate initiatives that sound “corporate”
Some employers made announcements on LinkedIn that read more like a press release than a show of support. Needless to say, these didn’t perform very well.
Rather than using your social platform to focus on what your initiatives mean only for your organization, have leadership and employees talk about what your corporate Women’s History Month initiatives mean to them, ideally in a way that also appeals to candidates.
Poorly designed graphics
We love Canva, but be thoughtful about your choice of templates. If possible, create a graphic where most of the real estate is a photo, preferably a close-up of someone smiling, with minimal text (put your text into the post content itself, as best you can).
And pretty please, no stock photos pretending to be your employees!
Shares of other people’s content, or shares of your previous content
The impressions on these types of posts weren’t necessarily lower than original content, but where their inferiority became obvious was in their engagement rates — people just scrolled right by them. To get your audience to stop scrolling and take in what you’re posting, original content is the way to go.
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It’s important to note that while these kinds of LinkedIn posts perform the best, according to Rally Inside data, following in their footsteps isn’t a guarantee that your content will be a big hit this month. There are lots of other factors that can affect social media engagement, such as how much digital noise there is when you post, and the day of the week and time of the day that your audience is most likely to engage.
What we’re learning from Rally Inside is just how important it is to understand the interests of the talent audience that you’re reaching through each of your recruiting channels, and to craft your content in a way that’s optimized for each channel. It’s not good enough to just “check the box” by publishing a post with a graphic that says, “Happy Women’s History Month.” That kind of post will almost certainly get poor candidate engagement, which will negatively impact the reach of your future posts. Who has time to waste on stuff that doesn’t work?!
As an action item walking away from this post, take a moment now to look at your content calendar for March and prioritize more employee stories in your Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day content. This one change could have a huge impact on your social strategy this month!
And remember that candidate engagement is dynamic, and social media algorithms can be a bit of a mystery. But we hope these insights gathered from Rally Inside data can help you navigate social media nonetheless, and help you get a wider audience for your company’s celebration this year of Women’s History Month, International Women’s Day and other important social celebrations going forward!
