We've been running a big ad campaign on Facebook targeting software developers in the UK (for our developer job board), however one of the problems we've found in targeting our ads is that most software developers don't list terms like "programming" or "software development" in their interests (only about 5% of developers do). So naturally we started thinking about other ways we could reach developers on Facebook.
Then it hit us, why not target developers by the TV shows they watch, so following a quick survey of our developer friends we made a short-list of the TV shows that came up most frequently removing those shows which have near universal popularity (i.e "Family Guy" which is listed by 22.5 million users on Facebook).
We then ran our ad campaign against all of these TV shows narrowing our demographics to only target males over the age of 21 in the UK. We also ran the same advert against a user base that is made up completely of developers (same demographics), this gave us a benchmark click-through-rate (CTR). By dividing the CTR on the TV show ads by our benchmark rate we got an estimate of the percentage of a shows viewers who were developers.
The TV shows we tested were Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, The IT Crowd, Firefly, Babylon 5, Monty Python, and the Big Bang Theory. We also tested Mystery Science Theatre 3000 but due to not getting enough page impressions to draw a meaningful conclusion we've dropped it from our results.
Without further ado the results of our testing:
- Battlestar Galactica (18.9%)
- Star Trek (13.1%)
- The IT Crowd (12.7%)
- Firefly (10%)
- Babylon 5 (9.6%)
- Monty Python (9.4%)
- Big Bang Theory (6%)
All of these shows clearly have sizable fan-bases among software developers (we'd expect a show chosen at random to have a result of approximately 1% given the demographics we're targeting), but we were surprised at the outliers. We neither expected to see the Big Bang Theory at the bottom of the pack, nor Battlestar Galactica at the top with almost 20% of the fan-base being software developers (within our target demographics).
Disclaimer: Obviously you should take this data with a pinch of salt, fans who list a TV show on their Facebook page may not be representative of the typical fan, and the demographic targeting we did on our ads filters out females and under-21s both groups which are much less likely to be software developers.
If you have any comments (or suggestions how to target developers) feel free to drop us a tweet @coderstack - if you've enjoyed this post please share it on Facebook or Tweet it !
Edit: In response to some of the comments we've received we'd like to clarify that we also ran adverts targeting female developers but these were run separately. We didn't use the data from these ads as the CTR was too low to be statistically meaningful.