Facebook Ads for your job search

In a recent tweet from Dan Schawbel he included a link to a blog post about using Facebook Ads to promote yourself to try to find a job. It sounded like an interesting idea so I tried it out for 4 weeks.

Setting up the ad was easy to do. I set my limit at spending $1.00 a day (this was research after all) and would pay $0.50 every time a person clicked on my ad. Then I selected 9 companies in my area to target and limited it to within 25 miles of my city, which gave me 2780 Facebook users who may see my ad. If you want to, you can further filter for keywords in Facebook users accounts.

I linked it to my personal webpage (alternatives could be your Linkedin page, blog or your resume online). In the first 2 weeks I had over 13,000 impressions; yet this only yielded 5 clicks.

The next 2 weeks I changed my ad to include the header: UW Health, and then only selected Facebook users who work at UW Health (270 users possible) within 10 miles of my city. Here is my second ad:

During this 2 week period I had over 12,000 impressions; yet this only yielded 5 clicks.

So out of the 10 clicks, I didn’t receive any emails or phone calls, but it does seem like an excellent cheap way (my test cost me 5 bucks for the month) to market oneself.

For local companies this may be an excellent way to try to select just the right Facebook users who may be interested in your product, website, event or restaurant. Give it a try and see what happens!

A link to another blogger who tried this out

Get my files into SharePoint!

This past week I attended the Madison PMO Managers Forum where two members showed their live project SharePoint sites. It was great to see a behind the scenes look at others SharePoint sites. One member of the group vented his frustration about moving existing files into a document library within SharePoint. I too had issues with this since it seems you can only upload 1 file at a time, but there is a solution to this!

Open your file library and click on Actions, select "open with Windows Explorer" and like magic you have a file browser that looks like the one you are use to using in Windows. Now you can create folders or drag and drop (or copy and paste) files from the old location to the new location.



The advantages to using the document library in SharePoint 2007 are:
1. You can turn on versioning; so every time you update a document the old one is still accessible.

2. Easy editable permissions. No more asking IS to lock down folders when you can do it yourself!

3. It treats it as a database that you can add columns of data to it, like a description (that is searchable).

4. Document checkout; you can have a team work on a document, by having one person “checkout” the document to work on it.

5. Email notification if someone adds or edits a document.