Many Facebook users will have noticed the changes to the Facebook’s home page look and how you interact with it. Some of the biggest changes have been the Lists functionality which (similar to the Google+ Circles) allows you to share status updates, photos and links with different groups of people and exclude others. The second change is integration between your Facebook and the other apps and media softwares that you use. This is going to be great (click through to watch the video). The third big change (and the one which seems to have ruffled the most feathers) is the way that Facebook has started recommending what news is important to you.
People don’t want Facebook to tell them who or what is important. What people don’t realise is that for a long time Facebook has used an intuitive algorithm to decide who’s status updates, photos and links you would be most interested in. With 50% of Facebook’s active users logging on at least once a day and having an average of 130 friends (most active users have over 300) Facebook has filtered what you see for a long time. This actually improves the user experience. Do you really want to see what EVERYONE is doing? Even that boring guy you went to Uni with? And that person you haven’t spoken to since school? No you don’t... but you don’t want to be told that, you want to be given the choice.
It is the same psychology that dictates click through rates between PPC and organic search listings. If you rank number one in Google’s organic search engine rankings you are likely to get 42.3% of clicks, compared with around 10% for being in the paid listings. People prefer to decide for themselves where to click and they believe organic search to be the un-biased and true results. What they are forgetting is that Google, like Facebook, has some of the best user experience and tech guys working to produce these results for you. They dictate what you see. Often, the sites that rank highest in organic searches have SEO agencies working for them to get them there, so in effect they have paid for their rankings in the same way you pay Google for AdWords.
Bringing these changes back round to recruitment and what it means for recruitment marketing; the most interesting change for you and I will be surrounding the List functionality. One of the first self populating lists that Facebook sets up is based on your workplace. Once people get the hang of using these lists they will be able to share content with colleagues or share information excluding their colleague list. It will therefore become easier for candidates to share the fact that they are looking for work with their connections. It will also be easier for candidates to share job roles with their connections without raising the suspicions of their current employers or colleagues.
This is another great reason for recruitment agencies and corporate recruiters to have a presence on Facebook.
And if you are wondering about getting that 42.3% of traffic for your keywords that I mentioned earlier, then get in touch about recruitment SEO and we can discuss how we can help with that too.
