Building the Talenteum Tribe

Interview from Ian Kamanu Wanjohi , marketing coordinator @ Talenteum

Talenteum.africa is the ultimate remote work portal in Africa. Acting as a bridge, Talenteum is a company that connects job seekers in Africa to employers around the world. I believe for Talenteum to grow further and gain more active users and employer partners we must implement a long-term strategy with the aim of building meaningful relationships and interactions with those mentioned above.

So how should we go about building these engaged communities?

Outline Our Goals for the Community

I believe that first we need to identify the type of community model that is existing and determine if this is the model most suitable for the company’s long-term goals. Is it a transactional model of one-off interactions or a meaningful community where you will continue building relationships? Is it the type of community where job-seekers in Africa can share their stories, get advice about the job-hunt and gain inspiration from another’s story?

By determining the type of model the Talenteum community will be based on, this will help us accurately shape the context of our content to our users’ needs and expectations. A huge part of community building is understanding our community members - registered users and international employer companies. What are their career aspirations? Where are areas they need support and guidance in?

What are our employer partners looking for from our talent? If we use this as the foundation for building a strong community, I believe we will see an increase in community member engagement, from sharing relevant and helpful information such as videos and articles to our talent connecting with others who share their same interests and goals.

David Spinks, founder of CMX Media, said “Startups are always in a rush to build a community as big as possible, as quickly as possible. Slow down. Get to know all of your users one at a time.” This will give you the foundation you need to eventually scale and grow your community.

The next question is how do we hook users so that they actively engage with the platform?

Create Content that the community members want

People can only communicate three ways online:

1. Audio,
2. Video
3. written

To determine the most effective method of creating engaging content, we will need to conduct interviews and collect the data to ensure our content creation strategy is geared towards our target audience. We will have to look at the demographics of our registered users, average view time on the Talenteum blog and feed posts, social media engagement in terms of likes, followers, post shares, and more, to figure out what is working and what is not.

A thoughtful content strategy is what will be the difference between a thriving community of engaged talents in Africa and international employer partners versus a one-off interaction that does not build anything meaningful. Sales and marketing, data and reporting and the people operations team would all benefit from a flourishing community. Content (blogging, videos, text, photos) is an absolute marketing weapon when done correctly. The cost to create, publish and promote is low with the benefits being huge. The opportunity and tools are there.

The content should be organized in a way that is convenient and easy for our target users to access and navigate. I did not notice a feed where users can interact with others, see the posts of those they have followed, etc, but this is a possible implementation of this, or the blog model that is existing if that is pferred. An example of a great job I found when developing community content is at Apple, the link to the community website here. The user experience is clean and easy to navigate, arranged in order, and telling the user what exactly they will learn after reading the article.

As far as content curation goes I believe less is more. Smaller amounts of purposeful content is pferable to mass amounts of uncategorized content that does not relate to Talenteum’s target audience. Content strategy plays a role in the omni-channel experience. It all comes back to brand consistency in all your content, regardless of channel. A benefit of Talenteum having a strong and engaging community is that our content can be turned into meaningful discussions, round tables and webinars that will serve to grow engagement and active interaction.

Adjust the Formula and adapt to change

Test, learn, adjust, repeat

Lastly, it is crucial to remember that Talenteum’s community building process will be ever-changing and prone to new approaches. To ppare for this inevitability, it’s important to gather insights and feedback from our community and monitor how they respond to the content we share. Through surveys, interviews, social media polls, monitoring user queries and our traffic this will help us to be rightly placed when the time comes for us to adjust our community - content strategy. And the more we understand our registered users, the more effectively we can refine this strategy.

To monitor the insights mentioned above, we can use numerous tools including, industry heavyweight Resonata, Data-Driven Documents (D3.js), a JavaScript library that allows one to visualise user data, WebDataRocks and more. By keenly analyzing the data from registered Talenteum users, we can recognize the most pvalent and popular themes in the community, and how they connect to Talenteum’s community aim.

You are a Talent ? Please register Here
You are a company ? Please register Here