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~ Written by Thai Bui, read by… um… millions

Ramblings of a Short Man

Monthly Archives: July 2007

The Ninth Annual Homestead Talent Show

19 Thursday Jul 2007

Posted by Thai Bui in Homestead

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Talent Show, YouTube

It’s coming tonight!  I can’t wait!

Homestead has been buzzing (OK, maybe I’m exaggerating) about the Homestead Talent Show the past few weeks. I’ve gone around and harrassed a lot of people into doing something, anything silly on stage.  And tonight, the world will finally see that glorious, mind-boggling talents of otherwise humble Homestead employees.

It’s really open to anyone (all 1 of you who might read this blog but don’t already work at Homestead), so come on by:

Cubberley Community Theatre
4000 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, CA 94303
7:00 pm

Don’t be late…

Videos will be posted to YouTube sometime in the next few days.

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Yup, Facebook advertising isn’t terribly effective

12 Thursday Jul 2007

Posted by Thai Bui in Recruiting, Technology

≈ 3 Comments

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Facebook

There’s some buzz today about the ineffectiveness of Facebook flyer ads.

I wanted to chime in because Homestead has had some experience with it as well, and we found the similar issues, but it’s not all bad news.

We ran recruiting campaigns during the height of recruiting season to local colleges here (Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara), schools where a lot of our employees come from.  To keep things fresh, we ran different pictures to see which would capture the most clicks and resumes.  And to save money (of course), we bought the ads using alumni accounts from each of the schools (getting the rate of 10,000 impressions for $5).  And we did the most targeting that Facebook allows; we set the ads to be run to students (as opposed to “Everyone”, assuming that alum have jobs already).

We didn’t spend much on the test ($315 for 630,000 impressions), but that should be enough for a decent test. And the results weren’t great:

Our best return was from Stanford, where we got a whopping 207 clicks from 270,000 impressions, or 0.077%.  That’s almost twice as much as Valleywag is seeing, but it’s still not great.  Do the math, and you get a CPC of $0.65.

A CPC of $0.65 is really not that bad, in the grand scheme of things. There are a few things to keep in mind.

  • If you’re not a member of the school/community your advertising on, the price shoots up four-fold to $10/5,000 impressions, meaning your CPC would be a miserable $2.60.
  • Use a decent picture at the top of your Flyer, something that will stand out.  If you take a look at the Flyer board for your network, a lot of the Flyers are just text, or have bland images.

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