Facebook is Ideal for Targeted Surveys

By Angélica Flores Briceño, WageIndicator Central America manager

The Request

WageIndicator was contacted by the biggest private university in Mexico to collect salary information on the position of their graduates, compared with others. In the first days of June Misalario.org launched an ads campaign to increase the number of completed surveys. The target was set: a minimum of 2,127 graduates during 2009 to the end of 2013, from 70 Mexican colleges must complete the long version of the survey in two months’ time.

The Challenge

How to reach that many people and make them spend 15 minutes completing a survey? How to do it in only two months? How, when the profile is so specific and without a database of the graduates? Especially, how to do that with a budget that isn’t enough to do field work? Internet is the answer! But it is necessary to achieve a good deal more than usual with our old friend, because even though Misalario.org exists already for 9 years, its monthly average of 223 surveys collected from graduates of all years and all universities in the country amounts to nothing, really, when compared to the client’s wishes.

The Strategy

Would you think Google Adwords is the best option? Forget it! First, buying the catchwords like: ‘job’, ‘salary’ or ‘employment’ is expensive in Mexico (where the official unemployment rate is 4.4%); second, we would be paying for each hit and not just per individual in our target group. So, we had to ask ourselves: who knows where and when did anybody graduate? Of course, Facebook should know! And the best thing is that when you launch a Facebook ads campaign you have access to a segmentation tool, where it is possible to show the ads only to those people who match the specific characteristics and, once you get them - yes, you guessed correctly! - their friends and partners too, even if they (say they) didn’t attend college.

Time to Be Popular

Next a good lure was needed. Therefore, two messages were developed for the campaign. To understand why we chose what we did, you have to know that each year the ranking of the best universities in Latin America turns into a fierce competition between public and private colleges. It is a popular topic among students and graduates in Mexico too. So we offered them the opportunity to be part of that contest through a mini-survey.

‘Public or Private? We want to know who has the best graduates. Let us know about your job and we will tell you which colleges prepare their students for a better career and working life. Let´s do the ranking together! Your opinion counts.’

Nobody knows who is part of the official statistics and focus groups, why can’t you be?

This was an invitation to be part of a research and make the visitants feel special: we didn’t want just anybody, we wanted them!

‘Are you a graduate from 2009 or 2013? We are looking for you… We want to know about you! Help us to build the profile of those who graduated between 2009 and 2013.  We count on your participation!’

Apart from ads, the banner was published at MiSalario’s fan page and it was a surprise when it reached more than 1,400 views in one week, a historical record. Also, the number of posts was increased, linking not only to our site but also to news and information about wages, career and labor law. In this way, people who saw the fan page for the first time came to know a site focused on these topics and not just another fraud who is only after their wages. We are not only about money, or after your money.

After a precise research of Facebook’s groups, we became part of those which related to the colleges from the target group. From within we invited them to fill in our mini-survey.

The Results

Starting from 10 different images and a short text for each message to evaluate the popularity among the viewers, the four banners above were selected as the most interactive (the other six were eliminated). These banners were shown to 330,697 people, a total of 425,072 times. As you can see the most popular by far was the girl posing in profile, with 323 likes, 28 comments and 57 shares!

Lesson: The more focused the message, the more response you get.

As shown in the graph, before the project only 349 of 3,515 people completed the survey: a mere 9.9%. The last month of the project 3,712 out of 4,048 did so: a great score of 91.79%.

Lesson: The more accurate you are in segmentation, the less drop outs you have.

Back to the requested target of 2,217 graduates/participants in the survey. We got a total of 5,565 surveys completed by graduates from the period 2009 to 2013 in only 2 months: i.e. 250% percent instead of 100% -  but really huge when compared with the 349 we got in first 4 months of 2015 through the regular survey.

Lesson: A good campaign reaches not only more people but, most importantly, the right people.

Apart from beefing up our database with completed surveys, we increased our popularity at Facebook: the day before the campaign was launched we had 415 likes, the last day of campaign 1,876. The challenge now is not to let them go!

Lesson: Is not sharing wage and labor information alone, but to make them part of something bigger and more meaningful.

 

In Conclusion

Do I have to, really? I’ve shared the most important figures with you already! Well, what I can tell you is that you must know your site, your information and your audience in order to give them what they want. You must like Facebook because you’ll spend hours studying the development of your campaign. And, the most important, you must love WageIndicator and colleagues because, even at the age of 15, each project is new and all who are involved have to invest a lot of time in communicating, figuring things out, calculating and solving all the challenges that pop up inevitably. But, when you realize the job is done well, you want to start doing it over and over again.