Hawaii Twentyten

Finding a job in times of Social Media

Last Monday I posted a special “job advertisement” on my website. Normally a company offers a position for people looking for a job. This time I turned the tables and offered the “position” as employer for a Social Media Manager - for me.

Social Media Manager / Online PR-Manager (in German)
(quite good translation with Google)

After my years in the air force and my studies I am now in my fourth job. In twenty years I was in jobs related to IT, controlling and Intranet / Internet.

In high school I got to know these strange things that are programmed with punch cards. In my military time I got my first one C64 and then a no-name-XT from Taiwan. Later I bought an AT, a 386 and many more. Eventually I became a Onliner with FidoNet, CompuServe and the Internet. In 2005 I started blogging.

The world has changed. I have changed. I became a Digital Inhabitant. Therefore I want to bring together these two spheres - my online world and my job world - and I am looking for a new habitat as a Social Media Manager / Online PR Manager.

I’d like to share my experience I made so far with my Social Media “campaign”.

I posted my job advertistement on my website on Monday, June 14. I wrote a blog article and tweeted about it. In the beginning nothing really exciting happened. Some followers retweeted it, some clicked on the link. But on Tuesday noon Facebook activated my Facebook ad:

Are you looking for a Social Media Manager / Online PR-Manager? Maybe I’m looking for you. Check our opportunities and apply.

• 278,704 impressions (the ad was shown)
• 521 clicks (someone clicked on the link to my job advertisement)
• 0.11 % CTR (Click-Through Rate, calculated as the number of clicks received divided by the number of impressions)
• 0.13 Euro Cent (approx. 0.16 USD Cent) average CPC (average cost per click, calculated as the amount spent divided by the the number of clicks)
• I payed 67.84 Euro (approx. 84.06 USD) for that Facebook campaign.

Here are some Facebook charts to visualize how the campaign performed in the four days:

• clicks decreased steadily after a “brilliant” start
• impressions were still quite good through all days
• CTR (click-through rate) decreased very quickly

I had a very sharp targeting for people

• who live in Germany
• age 27 and older
• who like corporate communications, pr manager, public relations, public relations coordinator, public relations intern, public relations manager, social media or social media club

On the one hand this ensured that I very quickly reached many of them but on the other hand interest in the ad quickly decreased.

After all I believe that the time frame and the targeting for my ad were well choosen.

When creating the ad Facebook showed me that I would reach about 8500 people. I decided to stick to my specific selection. I deliberately choosed those who are already in social media (in particular on Facebook) and have a certain affinity. In this respect I targeted some of my close network. Nevertheless, I also reached a lot of other people who were not part of my network (but some of them now are). But by targeting people with an unusual kind of job advertisement I experienced an amazing response.

I wanted to reach people from companies (HR people and PR people) who have already embarked on a path to social media or Enterprise 2.0. Or people who might know of such a company. This includes personnel people and PR agency people.

When looking at retweets, likes, new followers and contacts, links and screenshots of my ad taken etc. it seems that I succeeded. (although I won’t write or talk about specific contacts).

Now finally let’s have a look to the job advertistement page’s impressions:

The peek was on Wednesday when many people tweeted, retweeted, blogged about it. Even without a job that may or may not result out of that campaign, I consider the campaign a success.