Clap after clap. Tap after tap. Facebook is used to a bit by now when it comes to criticism. Yet time and again, the platform repackages. And not without results. Because even for a good social recruitment strategy, Facebook remains an important pillar. But why? And can we actually do without that big blue logo with the iconic letter F?
Learning and becoming stronger
Very simple. We still see in our social recruitment campaigns that most of the target audiences are active on Facebook. Not unimportantly, they are also easy to reach here. And besides: size does matter! Still. With more than 10 million users in the Netherlands, Facebook is, together with Whatsapp, a giant in social-land. In addition, the continued development of Zuckerberg's company also plays a big role. No social media platform is currently as developed as Facebook. The innovations and possibilities that the platform offers are again essential for the proper design of our social recruitment campaigns.
Where is our target audience?
We also noticed the doubt surrounding Facebook among our clients. Because of the fuss about the privacy of Facebook users, the primary reaction was: delete your account! A very logical question from companies fully committed to social recruitment was therefore "Will our target group still be on Facebook?". Fortunately, the answer is 'yes'. Once the storm had died down a bit, it soon became clear that people were not so quick to delete their Facebook accounts. After all, many users realize that by using Instagram and/or Whatsapp, they are still in Facebook's data stream.
What does your potential candidate do?
But what role does Facebook play in the perfect social recruiting strategy? Because Instagram is part of Facebook, every Facebook campaign includes Instagram directly. Based on data, Facebook "learns" and sees where your target audience is. Thus, campaigns are automatically adapted to the behavior of the potential candidate. So by excluding Facebook from a strategy, you are not only missing out on a large part of your target audience, but you are also missing out on the Facebook-optimized interpretation of your campaign.
An example
Now we talk several times here about missing out on a large part of the target audience. But what does that look like in numbers? A concrete example: in one of our latest campaigns, we target potential candidates between the ages of 20 and 35 for a year. Thanks to Facebook's self-learning ability, we noticed that this particular campaign was 70% delivered on Facebook. So the platform sees that 7 out of 10 potential candidates are on Facebook and immediately focuses on that. Very helpful. But then, for this particular campaign, that also means that if you didn't target on Facebook, you wouldn't be able to target 70% of your target audience! It immediately shows once again the importance of this platform.
Looking to the future
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg announced that the company's focus is shifting more than ever to user privacy. But what does Facebook's future vs. social recruiting look like? In addition to the focus on privacy, Zuckerberg also indicated that he sees that chats, stories and small groups are currently the fastest growing components. Therefore, I expect Facebook to focus more on chat features within Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. And this will also affect recruitment. Candidates will start chatting directly with recruiters within social channels. Consider Click to Messenger ads. Here someone gets an ad on his/her Facebook and/or Instagram timeline and as soon as you click on it you can chat with someone within Messenger. For example, do you have doubts about the feature and want to quickly ask? Then you can quickly and easily chat with the recruiter on your mobile. In our opinion, this direct line has great advantages for the ideal candidate journey. Facebook is here to stay.
