By Arianna Crawford, The Social Media Explorer
The Big Valley Marketing New Platforms Series is a collection of posts that aims to introduce B2B marketers and communications to new social media platforms that may enable them generate new, innovative and uniquely meaningful approaches to reaching out to and interacting with their audiences. Adopting and maintaining new channels is a long-haul journey and will take time before any return on your investment. If you’d be interested in partnering with Big Valley Marketing, feel free to drop us a line at hireus@bigvalley.co.
Quick background: In an effort to transition from a review site to a social media platform, Glassdoor has recently introduced new community features (“bowls”) where users can post with varying levels of anonymity about their interests and/or their current company, as well as new post formats (polls, videos) and influencers (“worklife pros”).
Potential Challenges: But there are issues, the first being that they’ve tried to build a social media platform out of what is essentially a review site featuring anonymous information provided by users that are predominantly active during job transitions. The other major concern is that the platform’s new social media features give all content control to the employees and not the brands. This combination can quickly become a recipe for disaster.
What type of brand is right for Glassdoor?: It’s the right fit for large, well-known companies with an employee base that is passionate about the brand. Think Apple and Accenture – pillar brands that invest heavily into both internal and public perceptions of themselves as employers.
If you’re considering leveraging Glassdoor to support your social efforts, ask yourself:
- How much of a role does recruiting and employer branding play into overall business goals?
- Is our brand willing to fairly engage with direct criticism?
- Am I able to capture HR attention for the social program?
- Am I confident current employees will be willing to participate?
Big Valley’s Glassdoor Assessment
Audience
- Size: Only about 63 million monthly unique visitors, but they are professionals.
- Behavior: Users are often disgruntled and anonymous, looking to vent.
- Relevance: Most users are looking for information from other users, not the companies themselves.
Ease of Management
- Tools: Beyond setting up a basic profile with some intelligence around your reviews, any meaningful listening and profile management is locked behind their paid solution.
- Infrastructure: Glassdoor has been around for a long time without any major technical issues. It is easy to set up and maintain.
- Moderation: There’s little to no option for moderation.
Content Strategy
- Uniqueness: In many ways, the content options on Glassdoor are functionally LinkedIn Lite – there’s huge overlap without any defining content option for brands.
- Fit: Company culture content is perfect for the platform.
- Transference: You can use most of your LinkedIn content on Glassdoor, even if it doesn’t perform well.
Overall Impact
Based particularly on the specific audience behavior (disgruntled, anonymous people that aren’t visiting regularly) and the fact that the same content does much better on other platforms like LinkedIn, Glassdoor is not worth a significant amount of time or care as a social media platform for most brands. However, all brands should be at least monitoring and controlling what they can when it comes to their page.
