Nielsen Report: Facebook Homepage Ads Effective in Lifting Your (Recruitment) Brand
On April 19 Nielsen, the seminal audience tracking and rating company, released an intriguing new report that it co-authored with Facebook at the Ad:tech show in San Francisco. The report titled, Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression, dealt with the question of is advertising on Facebook effective. The short answer…yes it is.
Now, let’s look at a couple of things. The report focuses on the use of Facebook Homepage Engagement ads. This ad unit is found exclusively on the homepage in the upper right-hand corner of a users newsfeed. It is the only ad unit on this page and because of that, it’s kind of expensive (and well worth the money). The report does not talk about the use of Facebook “right side” ads. These are the ads that show up in the right hand margin of subsequent pages after you leave your newsfeed. This might be when you view a fan page, your pictures, or a profile page.
The reports tells us this, using Engagement ads is a great way to boost brand recognition. But it is even more effective once users engage with the ad and the ad becomes social. An engagement ad for Virgin Airlines is good, but an engagement ad for Virgin Airlines that has gone social (meaning someone in your network has become a fan of it) is great. Stats say that ads that have the social aspect build twice as much awareness as their ad only counter-part.
Further, the Nielsen report goes on to talk about the efficacy of being mentioned in a user’s newsfeed. Once a Facebook user fans an engagement ad, that “story” is loaded into the newsfeeds of all that user’s friends. So if I click on the Virgin Airlines ad to become a fan, that notice shows up in the newsfeeds of all 600+ of my friends. This organic media impression is called “earned media” by the report. This earned media is the real power behind Facebook advertising.
What does this mean for recruitment? It means that just have a Facebook page for your company or organization is not enough to be a social recruiter. There are three things you must have to be successful recruiting on Facebook…a presence, fans, and engagement. Engagement ads help you with two of the three aspects; the fans and the engagement.
If your company has a Facebook recruiting page today, kudos! How many fans do you have? If you have 50+ fans you are on the right track. There is a tipping point where too many fans actually hurt your efforts, but few organizations have that problem today. For our purposes we want to build our recruitment fan base as high as we can. How do we do that?
First, start an engagement ad campaign on Facebook. Today only very, very, very large advertisers can buy homepage engagement ads directly from Facebook. Recruiters can buy these ads from Facebook’s exclusive reseller partner for engagement ads, CareerBuilder.com.
The report says that the optimum number of impression to drive ad recall, brand awareness, and finally purchase intent (or for recruiters an expression of interest to apply to a job) is at least nine (9) exposures per targeted individual. So if you are recruiting nurses in Illinois and the target audience is 90,000 nurses, you should plan on running at least 810,000 impressions to get the most bang for your Facebook buck.
Having said that, not all Facebook engagement ads are created equal. The article says that some Facebook ads are more effective at driving the organic earned media than others. It does not really give any clear indication on how to write or target such ads though.
In all of this the goal is to get the organic viral effect of engagement ads to catch on to your message. Per the article, the only way to do this is to just dive in. You have to run a lot of paid impressions to get the earned media impressions that are so precious to advertisers/recruiters. The article states, “advertisers can’t buy earned media; it has to be earned through user engagement and connections between users and brands. Paid impressions on consumers’ homepages are a key opening to the more impactful social and organic impressions, but driving these more valuable impressions requires advertising tat sparks engagement and connections between brand and users.”
So, build a Facebook recruitment page. Add impactful and engaging recruitment and organization-related content. Then grow your fan base with engagement ads written to get targeted job seekers to take action and make your engagement ads social.
All stats and graphics from Nielsen.
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