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Tired of making social media posts that don’t get any traction? Before you go re-thinking your whole police officer recruiting strategy, I’m going to teach you the secret to getting your posts in front of the eyeballs who want to see them...keep reading! 👀
Hey everyone, it’s Tom Sye your Police Marketing FTO, and this week, we’re hashing out hashtags and why your police officer job opening posts aren’t finding their way to the applicants who want to see them! 🙈
If you’re anything like a lot of police agencies, you’re having problems with no one seeing your social media posts. From what I’ve seen from when I’m scrolling through social media, sometimes it’s by your own doing like not having an enticing hook to bring people in, having too much information in your pictures, or worse still, having no pictures at all, but a lot of times, it’s simply because you’re not indexing your posts with relevant hashtags. 💡
Think about it this way. When you go to the library, do you just wander around, isle by isle, searching for the book you want? Of course not. You use their catalog and find out exactly what isle, what shelf, and what position the book is in. That’s how hashtags work and here’s a crash course on how to use them along with some hashtag starters you can use in your next post. Let’s do it. 👍
Ok...what are hashtags?
If you're an experienced social media users, bear with me for a second while I catch everyone else up, but hashtags are those little pound symbols (for us older folks) that are placed in front of words, making them clickable and changing their colors to a bolder version. #️⃣
Hashtags, like in my library comparison a second ago, make your posts searchable, meaning users can click on one of them or search for the term on their social media platform of choice and see all of the posts that are using that hashtag. That seems pretty useful, yeah? That’s cause it is. 💯
Here’s how to use them.
You will typically use hashtags at the very end of a post, but it’s not uncommon to have one replace a word somewhere in the middle of a sentence of your caption either. To make a hashtag, you simply place the pound symbol in front of the word you believe people will search for to find your post...ala #️⃣police. 🚔
Now...here are two keys to a good hashtag...relevancy and uniqueness. 🦄
You want to make sure the hashtags you are using are relevant to what you are posting about. You wouldn’t want to use #️⃣AutoMechanic to announce a police officer position nor would you want your hashtag to be so general, like #️⃣NowHiring that thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds or thousands of posts are using it making yours as impossible to find as not having one at all. 🤷
Make sure your hashtags make sense and coincide with what your post is about and that they’re not too generic. 🎯
Also, you want to be careful with how many hashtags you actually use. Some platforms, like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, will let you have 30 hashtags without penalty, while a site like LinkedIn will allow you post up to 40, but starts slowing your posts reach if you use over 5. 😳
You’re going to have to play with these numbers to find the sweet spot for your agency on each platform. 🍭
How not to use hashtags.
Once you get into using hashtags and researching them, you really start learning which ones are popular and draw a lot of eyeballs to them. At first glance, you may say to yourself, that seems like the way to go...lots of people are viewing those and I want them to see my post, so I’ll use a trending hashtag that is getting a lot of views, and I don’t care if it matches what I’m posting...I just want more people to see it. 🤪
Well, that’s a terrible idea and there’s actually a name for doing this. It’s called hashtag stuffing and social media users hate it. 😡
Think back to our library analogy. Say you wanted to find a great book on, I don’t know, Spanish for Law Enforcement. You search for it in the catalog, go to the shelf it’s on, but when you get there, there’s a book on Mediterranean Cooking for Alaskan Eskimos in its place because that’s what the library just wanted you to see it. You’d be pretty mad, right? 🙋♂️🙋♀️
Remember, relevant, not popular, hashtags are the key to having your posts seen. 🔑
You with me? All right...let’s wrap this up with some really good hashtag starters to use in your next post.
Hashtag Starters.
OK...for general police posts you can use #️⃣police, #️⃣policeofficer, #️⃣policeofficers, #️⃣lawenforcement, and #️⃣protectandserve. If you’re a Sheriff’s Office or State Trooper you can keep the same theme going and add #️⃣DeputySheriff, #️⃣Sheriff, #️⃣StateTrooper, #️⃣HighwayPatrol, and #️⃣Trooper. 👮♂️👮♀️
In addition to those, you can throw these hiring specific hashtags into your job postings: #️⃣policerecruiting, #️⃣recruit, #️⃣lateral, #️⃣lawenforcementjobs, #️⃣policetesting, #️⃣policerecruitment, #️⃣policehiring, #️⃣lawenforcementcareers, #️⃣publicsafetyjobs, and #️⃣criminaljusticejobs. ⚖️
These will all be great for you to use to get started but don’t be afraid to experiment a little bit and see how other ones you come up with, work for you. 🧪
All right...before you go...let me tell you about one more hashtag that you should be using in every post that you make...
Bonus Knowledge.
I didn’t really cover what these are, and I’ll probably do so in another lesson, but you want to use at least one branded hashtag in every post that you make. This will typically be the slogan of your agency, like #️⃣BeGPD or can be as simple as #️⃣GlendalePolice for example. By using a branded hashtag, searchers will easily be able to find all of your posts in one fell swoop while drawing them closer to following your profile. 🤯
Ok, there you have it! You’re now armed with all the hashtag knowledge you need to start showing up in your potential applicants social media feeds. Give them a try and let me know how it goes for you! 🚀
Need some more advice on how to use social media to start recruiting like it’s 2024? My Road to Better Recruiting course is now open! You can check out the course and everything you’re going to learn on my website by visiting forcopstraining.com/rtbr. It’s gonna be awesome! 🙌
Have a friend at another agency who never uses hashtags either? Share this newsletter with them so their posts can start being seen too! Remember, the future of police recruiting is counting on all of us, working together. 🤝
Have more questions about police recruiting, marketing, or anything else you're struggling with? Don't hesitate to reach out...I’m always here to help. ⛑
Until next week my Police Marketing Squad, happy recruiting! 😃
Tom
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👋 I’m Tom Sye, your Police Marketing FTO. I founded ‘For Cops’ Training to teach Police Departments how to attract more qualified candidates through the same tried and tested methods I’ve used for the past ten years at my own department to keep up with turnover and stay ahead of vacancies.
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