Facebook’s New Game Changing Targeting Tool

Facebook has just announced the addition of a game changing new tool. This new post-specific audience targeting tool allows your brand to reach specific segments of your audience with each individual post, in order to collect even more in-depth and specific data.

The audience optimization is broken down into three different features:

– Preferred Audience
– Audience Restrictions
– Audience Insights

If your account has under 5,000 likes, you will not have this feature automatically turned on. To turn on the feature, click the “settings” link in the top right corner of your Facebook page. Once there, you will go to the “general” tab. Under this tab, you will see a section for “ Audience Optimization for Posts.”
Click the “edit” button and check the box next to this section to activate the tool.

When creating a post, you will now see a crosshairs icon button:

Preferred Audience
The preferred audience tab allows you to add tags that describe the interests of people you believe are most likely to enjoy the post. For example, Stellar Blue posts might include tags for web, mobile, and marketing that is included in the post. These tags help Facebook prioritize your posts in the News Feed for each unique reader based on the topics that will most likely get them engaged. Keep in mind that these tags do not create a limit on the amount of people you are able to reach.

When you click on the icon, you will be prompted with something that looks like this:

Audience Restrictions
This tab is one that does allow you to limit the reach of your post. Here you can limit your posts to specific demographics from being seen by just anybody. This feature is one that was previously existing, but has been paired with the new tools to create a companion to the preferred audience.

The Audience Restrictions tab will look like this:

Audience Insights
The last feature that was added to the audience optimization tool is the audience insights. Here you are able to learn more about how your preferred audience is responding to a post with interest tags. It shows you how each tag that you inserted has contributed to the post’s reach, clicks, shares, and likes.

Due to the already astonishing size of Facebook’s audience, and the significance and impacts that it has a part in, in people’s lives, there is little reason why any company should ignore the great opportunity that is being presented to them. What is even better is that the tagging tool does not limit the reach you are able to get for your posts, so experimenting won’t hinder your posts at all.

Are you interested in learning more about how you can best use Facebook for your brand? Contact the team at Stellar Blue to see how we can help!