Social network sharing

It's common to find "share" and "like" buttons similar to these on web sites today. The idea behind share buttons is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to share interesting pages to Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networks.

More sharing probably means more traffic, which is normally a good thing for your site (though of course, sharing is no silver bullet, and increasing the traffic to your site depends on how actively visitors use the share buttons, which in turn depends on how interesting and relevant your content is).

With InnTrack, you can easily add sharing to your careers site or microsite.

InnTrack supports sharing to the popular social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. To enable sharing, you just need to add the "sharing code" to each page on your site (InnTrack can normally set this up for you at no cost).

Who can share?

Anyone who visits your site can share any page, as long as the page has the share buttons showing on it.

Often, the best way to add sharing to your site is to put the share buttons on all of the pages, and always in the same location. This makes it easier for visitors to locate the share buttons. If you do this, then every page on your site can be shared. This might include:

• the home page
• a page describing the benefits of working for you
• a page showing details of a specific job
• entry points to microsites

If your site makes use of digital assets (like recruitment related news articles that appear on your site) then those pages should probably be shareable too. In fact, if you're doing the sharing yourself, you may find that sharing news items and campaigns is more interesting to your contacts than just sharing a steady stream of jobs.

Note: You should bear in mind that sometimes the visitors to your site will be your employees. Because your employees may be able to see some content that normal visitors can't (such as internal jobs), it may therefore be possible for them to share pages that can't be accessed by other people.

How does it work?

Sharing is pretty simple, and asking InnTrack to add it to all pages on your site may be all you need to know about it.

However, under the covers, sharing on a careers site is a little more complex than sharing on a normal web site. This complexity is due to source tracking. It's handled for you automatically, but read on if you would like to know a little about how it works.

Essentially, on any "normal" web site, you would typically set up sharing like this:

1. add sharing to the site
2. use Google analytics (or other) to measure increased traffic to the site (in page views)

On a InnTrack careers site, you need to support one extra step (but its a big one):

1. add sharing to the site
2. use Google analytics (or other) to measure increased traffic to the site (in page views)
3. use the site's own reporting to measure increased job applications (and other data such as success rate of applicants from each social network)

It is this last step that adds complexity. Google Analytics (the most popular tool for measuring web site traffic) is an extremely useful and powerful tool, but it only works on web visits. It will track a candidate's movements as long as they are interacting with the careers site, but as soon as they leave (perhaps after applying for a job), Google Analytics has no more insight into them. Google Analytics can answer questions like "How many unique visitors am I getting from Facebook?".

However on a careers site, most of the action takes place behind the scenes, long after the candidate has left the site. This is when the employer screens the candidate, processes their job application(s) and possibly marks them for future use. This activity can only be measured by the site's reporting system (i.e., InnTrack Analytics). SnapHire Analytics can answer questions like "What is the percentage of the applications that come from Facebook that reach interview stage?".

Making sure that both types of reporting work seamlessly together is handled for you by the InnTrack sharing system. It makes sure that the links that get shared to the social networks are fully trackable, just like the links you would use to advertise on a job board.

Note: You are always free to use any other form of sharing code, such as addthis.com - its just that to get these to handle source tracking correctly, you may need to do quite a bit more work. The InnTrack system understands the link formats needed and so can do this automatically.

Sharing is available on all InnTrack sites at version 8160 or later.