How Many Hires Can Facebook Provide?

It may be worth $100 Billion, but just how many hires will Facebook get you? Just this week, General Motors confirmed it was cancelling $10 Million worth of ads on the site because, said the Wall Street Journal, it found they “had little impact on consumers.”

The article arrived like a bombshell, coming just days before the IPO. It set off all sorts of debate in the marketing community — and beyond, of course — as experts weighed in on both sides. Rival carmaker Ford even jumped in, firing a shot on Twitter saying, “It’s all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.” Remember that part about “engaging content & innovation.”

For recruiters, this is more than just an interesting sidebar to the stock sale story; which, is opening (but won’t stay) at $38 a share, giving Facebook a market value of $108 Billion. Rather, the General Motors withdrawal raises anew the whole issue of the effectiveness of social media recruiting, and Facebook specifically.

How long is this social-networking site's lifespan expectancy? We have seen from past attempts such as MySpace, just how quickly a fad can grow and expire.  An AP-CNBC poll found 46 percent of respondents believe the site will fade away over time, replaced by something else. (43 percent believe it will survive.) Surprisingly, among its young adult users, while 51 percent say it will stay around, 35 percent say it won’t.) It only seems that it's a matter of time until some bored kid comes up with a new and improved way to hit the media and social networrk with a new and updated outlook on social networking.

The AP-CNBC poll found 57 percent of users never click on a Facebook ad. Employers haven’t much experimented with banner ads on Facebook, though they have spent on SEO and Google’s AdWords. An average click-through rate for an AdWords campaign is about 2 percent. Some rates can be considerably higher, depending on position and subject.

Recruiters who put at least some marketing dollars into improving their position on search engine results pages (SERP) can expect to get the highest click through rates of all. Slingshot, an SEO company, says getting the top position on a Google SERP gets you a click through rate averaging 18.2 percent.