LinkedIn or Facebook: Which is Better for Hiring Ads?

As a business owner, one of the first questions you should be asking yourself when planning a marketing campaign is, “Where does my target audience gather?” The answer to your question can help you decide which platform you should use for hiring ads. However, it is not always clear as to which one you need to use when searching for potential employees. Therefore, it is important to have a basic understanding of the available options. LinkedIn and Facebook ads are considered display networks, meaning users who view your ads are not looking for a solution like Google ads.

The following information will explain the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook and help you decide which is best for your business needs.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is mainly professional focused and was created primarily for job recruiters and job seekers. People who use LinkedIn are typically white-collar college graduates which makes the environment appealing to the business user. Since all businesses need employees and need to sell, LinkedIn is highly active with white-collar professionals, salespeople, job seekers, and corporate recruiters.

LinkedIn concentrates more on professional targeting, such as job titles, industry, and where someone works. It is also more suited to B2B (Business to Business) commerce. A B2B target audience is an imaginary group of individuals that a business wants to target with certain issues or needs, such as someone who is in search of a job. They are also made up of individuals with different cultures, backgrounds, preferences, and needs. These individuals are the ideal potential employees who match all your qualification criteria.

LinkedIn’s ad targeting tools have benefits that are different than Facebook, such as simply being on LinkedIn in the first place. LinkedIn has more than 700 million participants in their worldwide network, allowing them to advance their careers and connect based on who they are and what they do for a living. As a result, these participants have plenty of incentives to keep their profiles updated and accurate.

The unique power of LinkedIn’s ad targeting tools can be a complete game-changer by helping you always reach the most applicable audiences when they are more engaged. Some of the different targeting features include:

Location and Language: State the location and language of the audience you’d like to reach.

Job Title: As members revise their profile with a new role, job titles are categorized by LinkedIn’s algorithms and organized into standardized titles to help zone in on the most appropriate members to your content.

Job Function: These are based on the standardized categories of the job titles entered by members.

Seniority: Targeting by job seniority can be a successful way to reach those with influence over a hiring decision.

Skills: Skills are very important keywords found in a member’s profile and skills section that show knowledge in a certain area and include those clearly added by members in their skills section.

Facebook

Facebook is more of an actual social network that is designed to share and engage in conversations. Think of it as hanging out with your friends and family. It does, however, have the largest audience of all social media platforms, with over 1 billion users worldwide. This means Facebook has the highest job visibility, allowing you to get more potential candidates to view your jobs on this platform than anywhere else. In fact, when it comes to recruiting, 84 percent of job seekers have a Facebook profile, and 20 percent have included professional information in their profiles. Facebook also has LinkedIn beat regarding actual daily usage and sheer volume. It has been shown that 69 percent of adults use Facebook and 74 percent of those adults visit the site at least once a day. On the other hand, only 12 percent of LinkedIn users visit the site daily and 23 percent visit it several times a week.

Facebook is directed more toward B2C (Business to Consumer) commerce. This is where the company sells their products directly to the consumer, and it is followed by every small business. Many B2C companies have stated that Facebook has helped them meet their goals. As a business owner, you know that one goal you always have is to find potential candidates who are ideal for your job openings. Therefore, posting hiring ads on Facebook could help you attain that goal.

When deciding which social media platform to put your hiring ads on, your budget might be the deciding factor. Recruiting through Facebook is cost-effective and saves companies money. It is free for the first three job postings, and if your budget allows, you can pay extra to target specific demographics and to reach a wider audience by boosting your ads. If you decide to boost a job post, you will provide a budget to Facebook who then uses it toward impressions and clicks. You will be charged based on a per-click model, meaning you pay every time someone clicks on your job post that was boosted. When you decide how many days you want the job boost to be active, you can add how much you want to spend daily for it. Based on the budget and how long you want it to be posted, Facebook will provide an estimated amount of people that your post will reach. The standard amount to get one applicant to apply to your job is $12.

Final Thoughts

LinkedIn and Facebook have both been proven to be helpful when it comes to recruiting for your company, but for different reasons. With LinkedIn, you will get fewer but higher quality leads and it has deep, accurate targeting options. Facebook provides more leads but with lower quality and has a high usage with more personalized demographic options. In the end, the platform you choose to post your hiring ads on depends on what your audience interacts with more and what they prefer to use. Knowing where your targeted audience spends most of their time on social media will help you come up with a strategy and interact with them in that space.