I haven’t had a rant for ages so I thought it was about time I put that right! Unusually this time I’m not ranting at a company or a person, I’m ranting at what is fast becoming a “universal truth” of recruitment advertising.
One particular person may not have started it but the belief in our industry that advertising on social networks doesn’t work for recruitment is certainly wide spread. The wisdom says that social networks like Facebook are for friends and social networking and therefore targeting recruitment advertising messages into them won’t work. Further more it goes on to say that anyone who does this is simply frittering their client’s money away trying to be “innovative”
Well do you know what? Nothing could actually be any further from the reality of the situation.
As I’ve mentioned many times before we use third party software to track all the advertising we place online for our clients. Guess what…Facebook advertising not only works, it is often the most effective placement on the schedule in terms of number of applications generated.
Now there is obviously a caveat to this. It doesn’t work for all roles and it doesn’t work in all locations but when it is included as part of a properly considered and well researched media strategy the results can be tremendous.
There is actually an interesting dichotomy at work here that may go some way to explain how the waste of money myth came into being.
If you actually ask most Facebook users what they think of the advertising and whether they would click on it the response is nearly always negative. So why are the click throughs so high and the ultimate results often so good? The answer is two words…targeting and relevance.
Now I’m sure you can all think of a time when you saw a contextually targeted advert on a site you were using and thought “how rubbish that's an advert”. However I bet there are also times when you saw an advert that was so relevant to what you were thinking right at that moment that you clicked on it straight away.
Don’t remember doing that? Well the stats say you have. You probably don’t remember because you thought of it subconsciously as an incredibly useful link and not an advert. This is what the stats tell us is going on with Facebook advertising
So next time someone tells you that advertising messages in social networks don’t work for recruitment just ask how they know that. I bet they won’t be able to tell you!
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