The Guardian

The Pioneering Facebook App

The Challenge?

Can a job board be engaging and convert applications in the social environment? Can a job board create a social identity which will create additional revenue making opportunities? Guardian Jobs provides the ultimate in professional career services, sharing insider top tips and industry intelligence with its network of job hunters. Guardian Jobs is one of the UK’s largest job boards, but has a diverse user base segmented across various networks on Facebook. They knew they needed to take their excellent work into the social media spectrum – and who better to help them get there than Net Natives?

What did Net Natives do?

www.facebook.com/guardianjobs

Using our unique Social CMS, we built a Facebook job application that operates with “parent and child” functionality. What this means is that through the SCMS, Guardian can control the “parent” site – www.facebook.com/guardianjobs and then each sector-specific Facebook network has its own “child” job board app (e.g. www.facebook.com/mediaguardian has the app appended to show only media roles). Everything has been designed with respect for the social environment, with a unique design focusing on the right actions.

The common question of delivering return on investment is answered through the SCMS. Beyond insights, we enabled full tracking on all actions, to provide return for advertisers. Placing the control with The Guardian’s analytics team.

We then delivered a multi-dimensional social advertising campaign to create interest and engagement from day 1.

Oh, and we provided strategy and consultancy on best practice for ongoing engagement.

The Result?

It worked! The Guardian Jobs’ Facebook app is now a fully-branded portal, bringing their fantastic career services well and truly into the social networking arena. With our brilliant CMS, Guardian Jobs can manage all content on the app with one single log-in through its parent/child functionality, keeping it clean and simple.

Within a month of launch, The Guardian job app was already the most used job board application on Facebook. Delivering return for The Guardian, the clients and their users.

If you need any more convincing of our brilliance, check out the Guardian’s lovely press release:

“Guardian Jobs have launched an app on Facebook that enables users to search jobs published on the Guardian Jobs site. It’s an interesting move in the social media recruitment space, as Guardian Jobs are able to leverage a high Guardian Faceboook fan base (collectively around 300k Facebook fans across all pages), and jobs app functionality. Sophie Relf, Head of Marketing for Guardian Jobs, said: 'We're very excited about the Guardian Jobs Facebook app and the opportunity to leverage the equity in the Guardian brand.

“Guardian Jobs has been keen to respond to increased client demand for Social Media recruitment advertising opportunities. The app has been developed complete with a Content Management System meaning that advertisers have the opportunity to appear in jobs search pages specific to industry sectors as featured advertisers.”

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