Despite how social recruitment is as an industry, many agencies and consultants are making big mistakes in the ways they share news through social networks.

Some of these mistakes are basic, some are less obvious, but each of them can significantly hold you back from gaining the followers and influence you deserve.

They post nothing but vacancies

Social media is meant to be social, but what could be less social than posting nothing but lists of vacancies?

It’s easy to set up your Twitter or Facebook account to automatically share the latest openings as they’re made available. And while you may pull in candidates who search for locations and industries, there will be no engagement and few followers. After all, who wants two hundred job postings in their feed every day?

A good solution is to have two accounts on, for example, Twitter: one for the automated job feed, and one for social posting.

They don’t talk to clients

As a recruiter, you’re probably very focused on the candidate. The candidate however is not the one who pays your bills.

Your strategy should focus on clients and candidates in order to make prospective clients aware of the services you offer.

They ignore LinkedIn

Virtually every recruiter is on LinkedIn as an individual, but not every agency or recruitment services company makes proper use of it as a social platform. LinkedIn offers an amazing range of social services, many of them for free – starting and participating in discussions, sharing links and images, commenting in groups and posting jobs on behalf of the company.

LinkedIn might not have as many users as Facebook or Twitter but its position as the leading social network for business means you can’t afford to ignore its social potential.

They don’t monitor

Social networks are often underrated as media, so it’s easy to overlook the fact that you should seek feedback and analytics as much as with any other part of your business. Every major social platform allows you to see how well your posts are performing over time, what’s popular and what’s not, and even which are the busiest times of day.

They treat all networks the same

Why is there more than one social network? Well a pretty good reason for there being more than one incredibly popular network out there is that they excel at different things.

Twitter is not Instagram is not Google+ is not LinkedIn. Resist the urge to reproduce the same content on each network, despite the many apps available that resubmit the same post among different sites.

Just as you’d probably write a letter differently from a text message, you should aim to share updates differently, using the respective strengths of each network. You can share more images and text on Facebook than on Twitter for instance, and you can be more professional on LinkedIn than elsewhere.

Paul Breton is a Marketing Executive with online recruitment specialists Blue Octopus Recruitment in Otley, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom.