The U.S. Air Force organic social presence for recruiting aims to inspire, engage and recruit the next generation of Airmen while retaining our current Airmen and reinforcing their pride in service.
“Inspire and engage” means reaching new, quality leads and encouraging them to explore their opportunities in the Air Force. Through social media, we are able to speak to the next generation where they spend most of their time—on their smartphones. We know that representation matters. Through our social content, we can give them the opportunity to actually see themselves as Airmen and our future leaders.
Social media is the ideal place to provide real-time news and information and tap into trending conversations about innovation. When people do decide to join the military, we want them to think of the Air Force first, not last. Through our efforts, we’ve been able to build and grow an engaged social community around content we care about, driving positive conversation and sentiment among our audience.
We face several unique challenges. With each challenge comes an opportunity to rebuild trust with young Americans by showing them how they can help build their future in the Air Force, whether that’s breaking stereotypes and misconceptions, highlighting the educational and financial benefits, or helping promote a more-diverse and inclusive military branch.
As a military-recruiting page, we face challenges other social accounts do not. Our country is dealing with all-time low numbers in recruitment, and we’re trying to convince the most ambivalent, anti-military generation in American history to join. Generation Z wants to use their careers to find their life’s purpose, and with their declining trust in institutions and embrace ofing “tough-love patriotism,” our approach to our content creation needs to be unique. By using different platforms/approaches to market to different audiences and connecting with our audience in ways we’ve never done before (see: live streaming during career chats), our recruitment pages work toward breaking stereotypes and ultimately proving the Air Force is more than just combat.
Facebook: We’re treating this platform as our community message board, sharing important information about the branch, community wins and partnership highlights. The language is geared toward the “influencers”—parents, counselors, teachers and prior service members—this content aims to be shareable by these people to the aspiring Airmen in their lives.
Twitter: On this platform, we show the personality and relatability of the Air Force with popular trends and a casual tone. Since Twitter is ephemeral, we’re looking to grab the attention of those who might be aimlessly scrolling on their feed. It’s all about discoverability on Twitter, so we need to impress when we can.
Instagram: Instagram is how we show our audience a look behind the curtain into the lives and experiences of real Airmen. We use this channel as a way to open up the conversation with those interested in learning more about the Air Force in an honest, unedited way. Our goal is to get our audience to engage. If we can capture the audience enough for them to drop a comment, they may see themselves as Airmen.
LinkedIn: Since we function as the official Air Force page on LinkedIn rather than the recruiting channel, we’re using this platform to highlight our stance as the leaders in the world of STEM and innovation as well as providing an up-to-date look into what’s going on in the Air Force, like policy updates or big wins.
YouTube: We use YouTube as our at-home video hub. Here is where we host our monthly career chats—simulated “live” career chats that highlight Airmen from particular career fields or specialities—as well as post interesting and creative spots that reflect our recruiting mission.
Snapchat: Here we’re able to market our videos to the 42 million Gen Zers on the platform. We choose our eight strongest-performing videos to permanently live as “highlights” on our page.
As a result of our efforts on the U.S. Air Force Recruiting social channels, we’ve been able to onboard new clients in the U.S. Space Force, the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve. We’ve discovered different ways to engage our audience, from hosting live chats on careers and opportunities within the Air Force to engaging with unexpected yet relevant formats and figures along the way. As a result, we saw over 3.66 million engagements, 142.5 million in reach and 134.2 million impressions across our social platforms and 142.52 million post reach.
We have several ways to engage our audience in authentic ways, like our Recruiter Ambassador program, where we work hand in hand with recruiters to create content that allows our audience to authentically see themselves as successful Airmen. Additionally, our support on large national campaigns like Own The Sky result in more than just numbers. It changes the mindset held by the up-and-coming generation about what it looks like to serve a higher purpose.
