Digital agency Brolik spent $1K promoting job ads on social media. Here’s how it went

This spring, we were looking to hire three new positions at Brolik to grow our 10-person team. We’ve hired people in the past but not this many at once. We’ve had a history of grabbing interns and slowly bringing them up to a full-time basis, but that wasn’t exactly going to work in this case.

So we faced a hurdle: How do we quickly get the job openings out to as many of the “right” people as we can?

We decided to take the social media approach for a few reasons:

• It’s what we know. We manage social ad campaigns for many of our clients with great success. Why wouldn’t we use it for our own needs?
• The targeting is phenomenal. If you haven’t used Facebook’s ad platform yet, you’ll be surprised, and maybe a little creeped out, at how detailed the targeting is. Do you want to reach 35-45 year-old women with an interest in wine who live within 10 miles of your location? Easy. This sort of hyper-targeting is available on most social advertising platforms and provides a great way to reach the “right” people.
• You have to go where the people are. We wanted to find technically active people, so we certainly weren’t going to put a “wanted” ad in the Inquirer. If you want someone who is savvy with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, why not look for them in those places?

We put together job postings for Facebook, Twitter and the more obvious LinkedIn, and we launched each with a modest budget of $10-$20 per day. Being data-based digital marketers, we couldn’t resist digging in to see how each network compared and which was the most effective for our purposes.

Here’s what we found:

Facebook

Our Facebook ads ran for 47 days, from April 4 to May 20, with a budget of about $10 a day, spending just shy of $440. We targeted the ads to people within 10 miles of Philadelphia who had an interest in SEO, SEM and other digital marketing areas.

• The ads reached about 12,000 Facebook users and drove 173 clicks to our website at $2.54 per click.

Twitter

Our Twitter ads ran for 53 days, from April 4 to May 26 with a budget of $10 per day, spending a total of $505.69. The Twitter ad platform has a unique targeting approach called @username targeting, which allows you to reach users with interests similar to followers of selected accounts. We used this approaching to target industry specific accounts such as Google’s Matt Cutts, Moz’s CEO Rand Fishkin and the Google Analytics Twitter account. We also targeted similar users to individuals that work at digital marketing companies in the Philadelphia area. We also limited all ads to the Philadelphia DMA.

• The result was 57,400 impressions and 802 engagements. 230 people clicked through to our careers page at a cost of $2.19 per click.

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, we utilized the job posting platform rather than the advertising tool. With this tool, you pay to post a job for 30 days at a time, which costs $295 for one listing. In addition, we had a 50 percent off promotion, resulting in a total cost of $147.50. This campaign ran from April 4 to May 4, reaching 2,344 users.

• At the end of the campaign, we had accumulated a total of 56 applications from LinkedIn at a cost of $2.63 per application, which would have cost $5.26 without the promotional savings.

How it went

Overall, our careers page had about 1,500 unique visitors during this time, a 320 percent growth over the previous period.

We received 88 quality resumes (a few snuck in that were too unqualified to count) for a total cost of $1,093.19, which is a $12.42 cost per application. In the end, we sent out one offer to an applicant via Facebook and three offers to applicants via Twitter. We ended up hiring three staffers, though not all were tied to the social media outreach. Still, the promoted social media posts allowed us to get a larger volume of quality applicants.

When you consider the huge investment associated with staffing agencies and headhunters, we consider this a steal. Quantity aside, the quality of these resumes was very high overall. Even better, we’ve learned a lot about how to improve our efforts for our next hiring wave.