On Target: Facebook Unveils a New Way to Reach Your Customers

01 Aug 2012

On Target: Facebook Unveils a New Way to Reach Your Customers

Facebook offers a new way to target posts to specific fans. Photo courtesy HikingArtist.com (Flikr)

Facebook’s Woes and Worries

The last few months have been hard on Facebook’s image. In May, GM decided that Facebook ads were not an effective way for them to promote their business, and pulled their ads. Recently, a number of other voices have been accusing the site of harboring hackers who create fake accounts in order to raise companies’ Facebook ad expenditures. Following this, Facebook’s share price recently took a deep dive on the markets, as investors expressed concern regarding the company’s declining revenues.

On top of the criticism of its ads, Facebook faces yet another dilemma. A larger and larger proportion of its users are now accessing the site from mobile devices, an area where Facebook has not yet effectively implemented a way to make money off of its services.

Image courtesy Facebook Pages

Enhanced Post Targeting

So now, perhaps in order to improve their credibility as a marketing tool, Facebook has decided to unveil a new way for fan page administrators to target specific groups within their fan base. The new Enhanced Post Targeting allows page administrators to target posts to the news feeds of particular users, based on the demographic data contained in their profiles. (This demographic targeting will only control which posts are visible in a particular fan’s news feed, and all fan page posts will be displayed on the fan page timeline.)

Fan page administrators will now be able to target posts to subgroups of fans based on a variety factors including:

- age
- gender
- interested in
- relationship status
- language
- education
- workplace
- location (country, state, city)]

Image courtesy InsideFacebook.com

Enhanced targeting has numerous advantages. As InsideFacebook notes:

The change will benefit page owners who want additional controls to tailor messages to different subsets of their audience. If pages take advantage of the feature, users will see more relevant content. This will likely reduce the number of fans who unsubscribe to posts or unlike pages. It could also help pages increase the Talking About This metric by allowing admins to create multiple posts per day without overwhelming fans. Targeting posts by additional criteria will reduce the number of impressions per post, but feedback should increase if content is more relevant to the fans who see it.

As a page administrator for a used English bookstore in Japan with almost 700 domestic and international fans, I can see a number of useful applications for this post targeting system. We might target female fans with offers for romance novels, married fans with offers for children’s books, Japanese customers with offers of ESL materials, etc.

Such a system may be of great use to any business currently selling a range of products to different market sectors under the same brand. Best of all, unlike Facebook ads, these targeted posts are free. (Of course, without sponsoring them, it is hard to determine just how many fans’ news feeds they will appear in).

Keep your eye out for this new feature as it rolls out over the coming weeks. Do you think this feature will be useful for your business? How are you planning to use it? Feel free to leave a comment below.

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media and tagged demographics, Facebook, fan page, Internet, marketing, social media, targeting

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Musings on the internet. Cool tools and more. A Mondo Media Networks Blog.

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Curiously Enough

Musings on the internet. Cool tools and more. A Mondo Media Networks Blog.