Would You Advertise Yourself on Facebook?
Aug 6th, 2009 | By Josh Camson | Category: Facebook, Featured, Law School, Social Media
Willy Franzen of One Day One Job wrote an article last year that I just stumbled onto. In it, he discusses an experiment to have job-seeking college students and recent grads advertise on Facebook.
Five different people underwent the experiment with mixed results.
Facebook advertising is a great way to grab the attention of employers. Landing a job is all about standing out, and these 5 students certainly made themselves stand apart from the competition. Although none of them has landed a job directly from his or her participation in our experiment, each has had overwhelmingly positive results from the ad campaigns. In fact, we were so impressed by the results that we decided to share them publicly before running another set of experiments. Here are some key takeaways from the experiment:
1. The most successful students were those who targeted a single company with a very specific ad that mentioned the company’s name in the text.
2. Targeting by location draws too many extraneous clicks and seems to have a low return on investment.
3. Spending more on ads leads to more responses.
4. This method is best suited for targeting larger employers with significant populations of Facebook users.
5. Most people are too lazy to take the initiative to do something like this. We told 40+ people about the experiment, 16 said that they would take part, and only 5 actually went through with it. Just because the method is now public doesn’t mean that it won’t continue to be effective.
6. Closing the deal is still important. A technique like the one that we have described will start a conversation with employers, but you need to be able to sell yourself in both informal and formal communications to actually land the job. Nobody is going to hire you just because they saw your ad.
This seems like it might be a little too out of the box for law students. Would you advertise yourself on Facebook to an AmLaw 100 firm? A government organization? Let us know in the comments.
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- Facebook in the Courts
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- Social Media Best Practices for Law Schools (Part 1)
- A Lawyer Can Have a Facebook Page
- How Cyber-Stalking Can Get You a Job
There seems to be room for a professional profile on various social networks for law students or those recent graduates seeking employment.
Which social network will prevail in the legal profession? MH Connected? ABA Legally Minded? Facebook? Legal On Ramp? LinkedIN…and the list goes on and on.
Once new graduates become licensed attorneys the “advertising” would probably be a concern for various bar associations and their ethical rules of conduct. Law firms are struggling with this question as they try to strike a balance between social networking sites and their attorneys. This is especially true with firms serving multiple states with differing rules on advertising.
The modern law student needs a professional online profile. Finding the best place for that profile will be the trick.
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