The Secret to Getting More Responses on Social Media

So the big question is this. How do recruiting leaders like us who have 12 to 15 other job responsibilities win at this game of recruiting? How do we build a system that allows us to recruit effectively in a minimal amount of time while motivating recruits towards meaningful change? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Richard Milligan, and welcome to Recruiting Conversations.

Everyone, I just thought this was going to bring value to you, so I have to record this in this moment. Because I know a lot of you will benefit from it. Social media is going to be closely connected to your success as a recruiter or as a recruiting leader. The data supports that recruits are using a lot of the information they're gathering as social proof and making a decision around a leader and around a company.

One of the things that is part of your social proof is content that you create. Now, what I'm going to give you is more, this tip I'm going to give you is more than content. The tip that I'm about to give you is actually any message you send to a recruit, anything that you communicate to recruit. There's a framework here that has been incredibly beneficial to me and to my coaching clients in just having something simplistic to move towards.

And it's this statement, people move towards clarity of communication. The more clearly you communicate to someone, the easier it is for them to move towards that complex communications, difficult to sift through, make decisions around. And where we sit today in our evolution as a, as humans inside social media, we're evolving. The amount of time we're investing here is changing the way that we respond to an ask, how we respond to content, whether we engage with content.

So instead of writing complex, most of us write complex. Normally, as I measured my writing over the years, I'd write somewhere between a, uh, a 10th and a collegiate level. That would be normal, long sentences. Okay. Complex thoughts, people that write complex thoughts inside social, what they do is they diminish. The number of eyes that see their content.

And here's why this simple statement, people respond in kind. If it's written simply, people can respond simply. If it's written complex, people will only be able to respond to it with a com. Another complex thought that compliments it. Think of it like this. If I am, if I treat someone poorly, they treat me poorly back. If I'm really kind to someone that would be normal that they would respond in kind and be kind back to me. Okay, so what we want to do is when we write.

We have written word inside social media. We want it to be between a third and a fifth grade level. Now we have a media company here that's been representing executive leaders for some time now. And what we were blown away by year one, year two, is that as we begin to measure the engagement that people would get, that engagement was directly connected to the simplicity of the thought that was shared. And here's the, if you're not really getting all this, here's a missing part.

When people engage with your content, they like it.

They comment on it, the algorithms, the computer, the machine reads it as being good content. And it promotes it to more people to see it. So the more simple you write. The easier it is for people to say, love this, great share, great post, Richard, whatever. It's easy for people to respond back to that when it's written simply. If it's written complex, it requires thinking, it requires processing, it requires a more thoughtful response.

So when I write simply and people engage with it because they can very quickly as they're breezing as they're swiping or scrolling through their newsfeed. They can very quickly know that they're aligned with that thought, like it, comment it and move on. And the algorithm says, Oh, great content. We should promote it and let more people see it, which then. Duplicates the cycle. More people see it, more people like it, more people comment on it.

And so what we have noticed is that someone that will write content between a third and fifth grade level is a content that is somewhere between typically 300 and 400 percent more engagement. And it's just because more eyes see it and it's easier for people to respond to it. Now, here's a big aha, if you're still in this video, here's probably the biggest aha as a leader, and you're writing messages to your team, sometimes delivering complex, difficult ideas, thoughts.

Request we as humans have evolved in that what we want, the information presented

it to us in the simplest framework, not collegian level, your team, because they're now investing up to three hours a day inside this, these platforms, your teams will be more likely to respond to your email, engage with your email, okay. Read fully read your email when it is presented in a simplistic format. So I will take a complex email. Where I'm trying to deliver a message that's maybe a meaningful message for the month. And I'll put it in an app called Hemingway app. com.

So Hemingway, one word, app. com. Immediately, bam, it'll show you is what's the grade level that's been written at. It'll even highlight in yellow, the hard to read sentences, and then it will highlight in red, the very hard to read sentences. And what that will allow you to do is it will allow you to then oversimplify, begin taking that information as a feedback loop and beginning to simplify it. And the more you do this, the more, more habitual it will become, the easier it gets.

Let me just show you real quickly in my newsfeed, what this looks like. So this is my newsfeed right here. I'm going to select someone that looks like they're writing a complex thought. This, these are larger sentences. So let's just check this and see. So I'm going to cut and paste this. Into Hemingway app. Okay. So it comes with this pretext already put in there.

I'm going to cut and paste it and notice over here in the top, it has it listed as an eighth grade level writing and it's highlighting everything

that could be written simpler. The yellow is hard to read sentences. The red is very hard to read sentences. What this means is that those sentences need to be shorter and not so lengthy. That's the first part. Some of these things probably need can be bullet pointed out versus being a long sentence. Some of those can have numbers. Versus being a long sentence. And I found that bullet points and numbers oversimplify things.

Now, when you get into social media and you're numbering things, people can say, I loved your third point. versus having to read the whole thing and regurgitate what you wrote. So you're just making it easy for people to respond. This is about, this is real value here. This will change some of the dynamics of your social. Why am I not getting engagement? Why am I not getting more engagement? Why are people not engaging with his and not engaging with mine?

Because some people are writing things that are simpler ideas that are easy to respond with simple thoughts. Got it. Now this brought some value to you today.

And until I show up again with another podcast , hope you're having a great week. See everybody. Want more recruiting conversations? You can register for my weekly email at 4crecruiting. com. If you need help creating your own unique recruiting system, you can book a time with me at bookrichardnow. com.