CareerBuilder touted its ad deal with Facebook with a high level of enthusiasm in March 2008, telling recruitment ad agencies via e-mail, “We are launching an extensive advertising campaign on Facebook over the next twelve months. CareerBuilder.com will have a very large presence through custom Facebook pages, applications, advertising and more.”
For the month of April, I probably saw CareerBuilder ads on Facebook every time I logged on. You probably did too. Since then, the ads have tapered off a bit, but I still see them semi-regularly. Regardless, there’s no doubt, in my mind at least, that CareerBuilder spent a lot of money during that initial flood of ads, sending users to their fan site on Facebook.
And for what? Less than 3,000 fans to date.
Yep, after all that exposure, brand awareness and marketing muscle, just 3,000 fans. Keep in mind, they’re only into month three or so in this deal, but it may be time to consider this thing a serious flop. If they spent $100K for the initial push, that comes out to about $35-per-fan. At $500K, about $167-per-fan. You can keep doing the math from there. Specifics of the deal were not disclosed, but costs north of the above wouldn’t be a shock.
It may also further underscore the lack of success job-related sites can expect to have on Facebook and other social networking Goliaths in the future. Any job board owner with a Facebook application, for example, will likely tell you it’s a pointless exercise in futility. Adverting may be its equal.
Maybe CareerBuilder is simply moving cautiously into the deal. Testing. Maybe they’ll turn it up to 11 in the months to come. Maybe they’re making a mint from the banner ads on the fan site and aren’t that concerned about immediate job seeker traffic.
For their marketing team’s sake, at least, I hope that’s the case.
Popularity: 6% [?]
May 27th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I’ve had pretty good success acquiring users through Facebook. It’s been very small scale, but the users I get through advertising are highly engaged and often become repeat visitors or subscribers. I have 4% of CareerBuilder’s Facebook Fan numbers, and I sent the ads to my site, not my Facebook Page. Oh yeah, and I’v probably spent less than .1% of what CB spent on Facebook Ads. I don’t know if my successes would translate to a larger scale, but I can definitely think of a few things that CB could do differently.
May 28th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Hey Joel. Maybe you can dig a little deeper for us souls who are getting pitched by CB on the real meat of their big ad deal. I certainly don’t think it’s all about the number of fan. Although that’s some of the value they are pitching when they resell the ad space (left sidebar and Newsfeed) to their clients alongside building out our profile pages, pushing our job postings to that page, featured employer, etc. There’s a variety of package levels for these services, and you can see Technisource is already in the fold http://www.facebook.com/pages/Technisource/13034404297.
I’m just not convinced yet that people really want to do a lot of job search and apply related activities from within Facebook, especially with a conduit like CareerBuilder. Everyone wants to jump on the Facebook bandwagon, just like the MySpace profiles and Second Life islands.
Maybe we should start reselling Twitter profiles to every employee in the Fortune 500 to get ahead of the next social media quick fix?