An Employer Brand Success Story – Netflix!
If we look at the past few years, we can see that Netflix has created a very valuable employer brand from scratch. Their accounts, which they positioned as WeAreNetflix on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and as Netflix only on LinkedIn, currently have more than 6 million followers around the world. Although the main purpose of employer branding activities is to attract talent to the company, we can say that these activities of Netflix serve the company’s holistic marketing tools very well.
For example; As the world rapidly changed with the Covid-19 pandemic and other human rights protests, the employer brand team knew very well that they needed to adjust their strategies to reflect and be responsive to the new reality. They arranged all their brand work in a way that explains the stance of the company culture against all this.
Speaking on the LinkedIn Impact 2020 conference series, Netflix Employer Brand executives Amir Moini and Marquise McCoy talked about a few key tips for their success in reflecting their company culture.
- Moving from cool and humorous content to more upbeat, humane, sincere and realistic content.
The suddenly changing world agenda with the pandemic has caused Netflix to change its content sharing. Amir and Marquise say that it is more appropriate to publish content that develops empathy for current events, instills courage, unity and solidarity, rather than cool and humorous content, and they change their strategy in this direction. For example; They shared a “courage” themed screenshot from the world-famous personal development expert Brene Brown’s documentary on Netflix. Another example is; Thinking about the impact that smiling can have in these difficult times, Netflix’s Spain team shared a photo collage of them wearing all-colored outfits and smiling.
- Prioritizing informative webinar content.
Amir and Marquise say that they think that there should be content that can take people to the next level from their current situation professionally, apart from content that instills courage, joy and inspiration. As an example of this type of content, they give a video sharing of their employees’ experiences, the content of their duties and their conversations about how they came to these duties. In this way, they have inspired people professionally and broadened their horizons.
- Don’t care about quality over quantity, even if that means releasing content once a month.
As part of Netflix’s recent employer branding efforts, there seems to be a decrease in the number of content they publish on social media and other platforms. Amir and Marquise summarize this as not sharing for the sake of sharing something, but sharing when something meaningful happens. This way of thinking is really impressive. Instead of showing up on platforms by sharing a lot of unnecessary content, we can say that the thought of making a bigger impact by sharing when there is something worth sharing is risky but also valuable.