Estimated reading time: 6 mins
By combining your LinkedIn profile with Facebook ads, you’ll discover an effective way of getting yourself in front of potential employers who use Facebook (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) It’s a guerrilla job-hunting tactic that enables you to search the hidden job market and find or even create the best jobs before they hit the job sites.
How? Here’s how – create an ad on Facebook that targets potential employers in specific countries, cities or organizations that leads them to your LinkedIn profile page.
Here’s how to do it:
1) Go to Facebook.com and make sure you’re logged in.
2) Click ‘Profile’
3) On the right-side of the page, select ‘Advertise’
4) Click the ‘Create an Advert’ button
5) You’re now going to create your advert: In the box labeled ‘What do you want to advertise?’ leave http:// selected and enter the URL of your LinkedIn profile – this will look something like ‘www.linkedin.com/in/<yourname>’ If you’re not sure of the exact URL, login to LinkedIn and choose ‘View My Profile’ and then note down the URL next to ‘Public Profile’
6) Then hit ‘Continue’
7) Now you’re going to create the text for your ad. This needs to stand out and grab the attention of your target audience. You’ll do this by entering a title for your ad and a brief summary.
I suggest for the title for your ad, you use a call to action. A call to action works best in the title for small ads, particularly as the title must stay within 25 characters. In the context of advertising yourself as available for work, I find that ‘Hire Me’ or something very similar works best (note: you cannot use an exclamation mark in the title of Facebook ads).
In the ‘body’ of your ad you have more room to play with – 135 characters in total. Here I recommend this mentions your desired role and provides a very brief synopsis about your key strengths and characteristics. I’ve discovered that it is a great idea to use the summary statement you used on your LinkedIn profile if it will fit, as this preserves continuity between the ad and the target of your ad – your LinkedIn profile. Look on your LinkedIn profile in the summary information to cut and paste it in.
8 ) In my opinion, it’s vital that you add a photograph or yourself – if you don’t then recruiters will wonder what you’re hiding. It doesn’t need to be a studio-grade photograph but it should be a clear photograph of your face and make sure you’re smiling! Recruiters don’t want to hire miserable people. Regardless of the size of your original image, the photo will be resized to fit inside a 110×80 pixel box, so a standard size original image in landscape works best.
9) Ignore ‘Social Interactions’ unless you personally started a Facebook group that fits your professional image, and one where the ‘interactions’ (updates) are also professional. I don’t advise using this option.
10) Now, you’re coming onto targeting your ad. You can specify to target people in specific locations, either by country or specific cities. So if you’re looking for work in a particular city, then choose the ‘by city’ option and then enter the name of the city.
You can also specify other demographical information, such as gender, age, education and relationship goals – I wouldn’t bother for this purpose, unless you really need to. The two fields to consider are ‘Workplaces’ and ‘Keywords’. ‘Workplaces’ is a powerful option to specify as you can target your ad to people who work in specific organizations. Keywords is less useful for this purpose, but you can be specific about who to target the ad at based on personal interests. I can’t think of many real benefits of using this option unless you’re looking for a job based on stricter personal criteria.
11) So now you have targeted your ad, at the bottom of the page is a number – this tells you the approximate size of the audience who will see this ad, and this is relevant because a) a large number means your ad will be seen by many people, but also b) you’re likely to have to pay more for the ad to be displayed. A large number (over 5 figures) suggests you haven’t targeted your ad enough.
12) Now the next step is to set select your pricing option and your budget. You have two options; 1) pay per click – this means you only pay when people actually click you ad, or 2) pay for views – this means you pay a price for every 1,000 times your ad is displayed. My advice – use the pay per click model as you’ll really only want to pay when people take your call to action.
13) Next you need to set your budget – you can set an maximum amount you want to spend each day. The default is $25, but that’s a steep price unless you’re really pursuing work hard, whatever the cost. Then you need to set the maximum amount you’ll pay per click. This is a bidding war with other advertisers. If you’re targeting the ad at a large audience, chances are you’ll have to pay more. The ‘Suggested Bid’ Facebook uses the size of the audience and other factors to work out a range to bid within for your ad to stand a chance of being displayed. Bidding below the minimum suggested amount will mean your ad is very unlikely to be seen at all.
14) You’ve also got the option of specifying which dates your ad campaign is active. This is really a question of your target audience – you may want to limit your ad to weekdays only.
15) Once you’ve set the budget, then double-check everything on the form. Check all the details of the ad for accuracy. Hit continue once you’re happy.
16) On the next page, you’ll add your billing information such as your address and credit card information so Facebook can collect payment. Once you’re done, hit ‘Place Order’ and then your ad is live!
17) Now you need to track the results and make sure you’re getting your ad seen and clicked – at a price you can afford. Use ‘Ad Manager’ to review the stats of your ad.
- ‘Imp.’ shows the number of times your ad has been seen.
- ‘Clicks’ shows the number of times someone has actually taken your call to action and looked at your LinkedIn profile.
- ‘CTR’ is your Click-Through-Rate. It’s the percentage of views of your ad that turned into clicks.
- ‘Avg. CPC’ is the average cost to you of each click. It should always equal or be lower than the maximum bid you specified when you setup the ad.
- ‘Avg. CMP’ is the average cost to you for every thousand viewers of your ad. This figure isn’t so important as you’re only interested in clicks.
- ‘Spent’ is the total amount od money you have spent on the ad.
If your ‘Spent’ is ramping up to high, then I suggest you don’t lower your maximum bid first, but instead check that you’re not targeting too wide. If your targeting is just right, then consider lowering your maximum bid, but take note that this may reduce the number of people viewing your LinkedIn profile significantly. The trick is to continually assess and adapt the ad settings. Unfortunately for us, Facebook ad manager lets us change the maximum bid easily, but if we want to change the targeting, we have to setup another ad!
