Blog: Advertising

How We Advertised a Job on Facebook

When we needed to post a new job ad online, we started going through the list of usual suspects: Idealist, Craigslist, various DC tech job boards, and advertising on sites where we knew people might be. Then we thought, "What about Facebook?" We couldn’t remember ever seeing a good job ad on Facebook, but we figured we'd try it out. Here's what we found.

First, Facebook's combination of price, targeting options, and ease of use made it just about unparalleled from the perspective of the ad placement itself. But those of us who use Facebook are used to these ads being nightlife promotions, surveys to make quick cash online, or corporate ads. I even remember once seeing an ad for a plastic surgeon in the Midwest (they weren't making the best use of the targeting feature, unless they expect a 26-year-old male from Colorado to fly to Wisconsin for Botox ;). Would a reputable job ad work? We created one in order to find out.

We guessed that our best chances would be to target it to people who live in the Washington DC metro area and have interests in things we might look for in a job candidate. We used Facebook's ad placement tool to target people in DC, VA, and MD, and then listed out keywords that we thought the ideal candidates may have. Some of the keywords we thought of didn't hit any users' profiles, but others did. When they hit, the Facebook ad placement interface told us how many people used this keyword in their profile. In the end, here's what our list looked like – there are a couple odd ones, but it was what we had to work with:

In the car on the way back from my interview at Nightline on the Chevy Tahoe ads, Marty and I talked about the impact networks are having on advertising, which is very evident with the huge display of activism through culture jamming the Chevy ad.  In this carcast (yeah, just a podcast in a car), we talked about what ads were the most interesting and what this type of activism means for organizations trying to do real grassroots outreach.  

Here is the show for streaming.
You can download it here.

Our client Haiti Innovation recently received a Google Grant and we’ve been helping them on their AdWords campaign. In the past few months they’ve been blogging pretty aggressively to try to increase website traffic, and it’s worked. So when they came to us looking for ways to put their grant to use, we thought what better way to capitalize on what is already driving people to their site than to post ads that pertain to their daily blog posts. Now in addition to ads that appear when people search using phrases like “Haiti news,” Haiti Innovation’s ads appear in more specific keyword searches like “Haiti kidnapping” and “sustainable environment.” And they’re updating them with each post.

“How do I get people to my site?” Try good old personal emails to you friends and members of your organization.

I was talking with an NGO in Peru last week and the president of the organization asked me how many donations I thought they might receive once their new site is registered on Google. I smiled and then explained (again) how the organization needs to publicize the site on their own and not rely on people stumbling upon it from a search engine. Development Seed does not just build sites for organizations, our team spends a considerable amount of time working with organizations on outreach methods, educating our clients on how to use their site afflictively to communicate with people. Our latest focus has been in pushing the good old use of emails.

If there is one sure place a user is going to go when they get online it is going to be to check their mail. Email is the still primary connection most users have with the Internet and non-profits need to take this form of communication seriously. To help our clients effectively use emails we did some research on how organizations are (or could) communicate better via emails.