Morning all, just a quick question. In the run up to our next intake we’ll be getting quite heavy on the social media posts.
Has anyone used the pay for boost post function on Facebook?
And if so did they notice any positive impact on recruitment?
Cheers
Jim
Yeap. We paid for it. We got a few extra followers, but no noticeable surge in recruitment numbers. HOWEVER recruitment is often a complex issue - most of ours come through word of mouth and school presentations. Adding a Facebook advert can reinforce the message and help be a prompt to recruitment rather than an exclusive method.
We pay for a post for our October intake days. Done them for three years so far.
Got 9 in the first year, 12 in the second, and 14 this October, but that has led to a Recruit intake of 30 as they went away and spoke to their mates, and they still keep coming. My numbers have doubled since october.
Drop me a PM if you want to chat about it.
Relying on social media for recruitment is a dangerous path, given there are so many different ones. Our cadets don’t use FB as far as I can make out and is considered the domain of saddos, like Twitter judging by the sniggers they give. if you’re intent on using social media piggy-back the local community pages. One of CWC follows the local community ones and puts things on there from time to time, but it is just one strand.
The best recruitment tool is getting out there and being seen. We recruit more through being out there than we do from any other source. We also have a chap on a local rag who is very, very, very pro community and we’ve had umpteen photos in the paper and mentions, just because we’ve been at things, not doing anything special. He’s visited the sqn on a few occasions and given us column inches with pictures and puts it on the website and it ends up on the e-edition as well. I’d sooner have someone else doing the work for us.
Don’t get me wrong. We do the community events and newspaper articles too. Posters on boards and in shops, and visits to schools.
Yeap - I’ve noted from our FB stats, when something is shared by one of the community groups, our page gets way more hits than when we’ve had then from paid for marketing!
Also, having a good alumni network is quite effective. It doesn’t necessarily work via targeting cadets directly - but by targeting parents and family of cadets. We don’t have a current formal alumni network - but we’ve got a number of ex-cadets who constantly like and share stuff we post - and when they do, our digital footprint grows.
Keep the FB stuff current, interesting and relevant. A few years back the broader ACO (as was!) had the strap line “what did you do last weekend?” - exploit this via social media by showing the diverse range of stuff we do actually do! It doesn’t have to be a whole squadron effort - but one cadet going on band camp, somebody going to a Wing shoot, or a potential NCO going on a JNCO can all be worded to get good coverage. A couple of snaps of the cadet doing something interesting or a portrait photo (not a selfie!) adds value (and will increase your page hits). From about a month prior to an intake add the “you can join us on [dates]”.
Utilizing lessons learnt from the behavioural insights team, falsely generate some demand - “book your place on our intake evening - only 10 places left”. Even if you’ll happily take anybody, having a “booking” system, or making you look more popular than you actually are works wonders at encouraging people to make contact and book a placet! It’ll also give your training officer the heads up on how many people to expect and how to resource it properly so you can convert interest into a cadet.
Then get it shared across your local community FB pages. Even via the local rag FB pages if you can - they might even put it in the paper! This is easily done - don’t rely on doing it organically. Make contact with your local pages (most towns and villages have a few - be it a “Spotted in” one or one of the more formal ones. We’ve got those, a formal FB group, a local online newsletter, a “community vision” FB group, buying selling groups and a community “whats on” guide. I’ve also persuaded the local town, parish and LA facebook pages to share stuff. A much bigger footprint without giving Facebook your cash!
By all means get the RFCA, RAFA or RBL to share it - but you really need to target your local community pages to get the local audiences. And, as @Teflon says, don’t make the wordology target the cadet group - it’s the domain of teenage saddos (apparently!). Target the parents and grandparents.
But use this as one part of a series of recruitment tools. Doing it in isolation isn’t going to work.
Not the teenagers that are the saddos as far I’ve made out, it’s more the general adult user base.
Something I’ve picked up on is that social media is very dynamic and the things used by the youngsters change constantly. So trying to do any sort of marketing campaign this way would require more time than any of us would necessarily have.
I’m the social media officer for our squadron (for my sins!) mainly because I use social media a lot in my work life. I put a post together, from whatever is relevant from that week, with some photos, ping it off to our OC, who approves it, I then put it out publicly, sometimes sharing it myself. I dont worry massively about the time frame either, so long as I’m advertising what we do. For example, this week has been Remembrance Parade, but I’ve also got one tucked away for an adult member of staff who’s been recently promoted. I hung onto one from the summer, where a cadet did some work experience picking and packing poppies with a local RBL and sent that out recently, because it was more relevant to the poppy selling.
If we’re coming up to recruitment, I do a general “look at we do” post, with photos of all sorts of things - shooting, drill, AT, STEM, so there’s a variety and send that out and then share on the local community pages. Ok so doing that takes around 20-30 mins, but our digital footprint increases considerably and we have had a few recruits as a result of this. I dont hit the community groups on a regular basis, otherwise they’d either get bored or I’d get banned! But every now and again seems to do the trick. FB also has a slideshow facility, using a max of 7 photos. I used that with our last recruitment drive and the hits were enormous. I tend to target parents/carers/grandparents and we encourage them to share on.
I also share on anything interesting from RAFAC, CAC, RAFA Youth, our parent station, that kind of stuff, that just keeps us above the radar.
In answer to your query, I’ve never used the boost function, so its been interesting to read other response.
An interesting piece on the BBC today relating to the increased use of social media by those under age on some platforms.
Interesting when you think/realise that social media in our organisation is seen as the way forward.
If ‘we’ were to stick to the rules, how would some people get the message out to the younger cadets!!
We have a closed FB group, but cadets aren’t allowed access unless they are 13 and only then with signed parental consent. I’d like some parents to have parental consent to use it as well!!
Parents are to blame for this problem, especially those who give their young (primary school) children smartphones and then being social media users themselves do not see anything wrong with their children using it … until it goes wrong. It’s no wonder kids get into all manner of problems.
I think it’s wrong to make so much of social media and rely on it so much, unless you strictly control, an this is all about self-governance, what you put on it, especially given how much piffle gets put on the various platforms. Our own CAC is practitioner of this imo, along with anyone else obsessed with it.
We have closed facebook groups for parents and cadets, if they have a facebook they get added. Once they leave they get removed. Having a parent group is vital as letters printed off and given to the cadets often get lost between sqn and home.
I don’t like to rely on parents as a buffer for a cadet’s failure. It is up to the cadet to be aware of the calendar and manage any paperwork they need to permit them to attend an activity. If important information needs to go direct to a parent then I’ll mail it to them
Absolutely. Too many squadrons rely on social media as a primary information source, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be. Mind you CAC etc seem to use it like that.
We had 3 parents complain about their sons not being able to go on a camp. We had given all cadets letters and mentioned the need to get returns in. These 3 young men hadn’t mentioned it and said they knew about it, in front of their parents. I explained that we do expect cadets to take personal responsibility and tell parents / pass on letters etc. It turned out one of them never passed letters on from schools and his parents got phone calls about things they should have been at.
Used to be given letters back in the day when I was a cadet but was never posted any letters either. If it wasn’t for social media then some activities would be short on numbers as cadets often get bogged down with homework or mock exams to revise for so Wednesdays planned climbing comes second to that. Posting that a space is free on Tuesday often means that empty spot gets filled. I’m sure a lot of sqns do it differently from homing pigeons to giving cadets letters to posting letters. Our sqn is social media friendly with most of the staff being in their mid 20’s. A social media post often lasts longer than a letter and is often seen by the parent regardless if the letter makes it home or not, plus it’s cheaper than printing 60 plus letters every week.
Hell, I wouldn’t be doing weekly mail drops anyway - just critical info like subs changes, AGM invites or “I’ve binned your cadet - cancel the standing order and return the kit” letters.
But that then removes any real need to attend the squadron more than once a fortnight.
Whatever happened that thing I did when I was a cadet, with homework and exams … oh that’s right time management. I used to get in from school and do homework, until teatime and then get ready for cadets and walk the 3 miles there and or back, depending on dad’s shifts. If wanted a lift there and he was on nights, I had be ready to go.
I don’t buy the homework etc as a reason for not attending, our kids had homework and exams and wanted to do the things they did, but were told home / course work was first. Even revision can be managed and again they had to.
I bet if you could look behind the curtains of bedrooms etc where the homework and revision is supposed to be done, they’d be doing anything but. I don’t question cadets who say they are doing whatever and not at the squadron, as the important ones are those who turn up.
The problem with social media comms is that it can be deleted or lost in the noise of everything else. We have to re-post things so that it stays at the top of list. A letter, yes can get lost or thrown away, BUT people tend to look at things before throwing them away. I’ve done a mass delete of emails and deleted some I should really have kept, but because you get so much rubbish you can miss the important ones. I know people who are self-employed and ignore emailed speculative job enquiries, but will read ones sent in the post, as they’ve had to open the envelope.
Yeah, you are old and can’t cope with electronic communications - we get it!
Attendance and preparedness are ideal but not always achievable and it can be far easier to “go back and retrieve” something from a FB group if it has been lost or forgotten than it is to get the information from a letter or note that has been lost/washed/eaten.
The key is effective information flow. Like it or not, there are times where we cannot wait until the next parade night to distribute information and there are times when parents simply will not permit cadets to attend as regularly as they or we may prefer. None of this means that the organisation should grind to a halt.
We have a closed FB page for those cadets that have access to FB it is for Cadets only and parents are made aware of that for all cadets we have flight what’s app groups which are run by flight SNCOs as we are aware not all cadets have access to FB. The issue we have with admin is we can.print letters off non stop to find them on the floor after cadets have left etc so waste of time money for ink paper etc. We have an open FB group but restrict information about events etc for security
A split / multi-transmission “system” with amended priorities for response cut-off & where / who you are targeting seems to work moderately well. Digital is good for calendars - most cadets / parents have a smart 'phone = add the event to e-calendar with a suitable reminder beforehand.
Yes, there will always be the “lost letter” home or “cadet memory issues” so however much you remind the little darlings, things will get over-looked.
Homework - there seem to be more & more “tiger” parents who want little Johnny or Josephine to participate in everything, but in particular, to excel at school. Also, schools focus on their Ofsted gradings & exam table ratings (“we are the XXth best school in the county for “A” levels, etc.”). As such, there seems to be much more coursework & after-school revision options; parents / pupils are certainly having more involvement.
No real difference, but it tended to be self-applied, especially when annual report time approached! 
Now, monthly summary of progress accessible to pupils AND parents on-line, maybe more focus on parental input??
Our Facebook group is an imoortant part of our comms channel with cadets, but not the only one. Any upcoming event will be posted on the notice board, announced at the unit and posted on FB as well.