Today Facebook begins the roll out of “Page Post Targeting Enhanced” allowing Pages to target their posts to segments of fans with certain genders, ages, Likes, and other characteristics so they can tailor market messages to specific audiences. For example, a business could tell teens they’ve got “swag” while telling adults they’re “reputable”.
Until now, Facebook Pages could only target posts to fans of certain locations and languages, but the social network just told some admins that the new targeting options are opening to a select number of Pages today and will roll out to all Pages over the next few weeks. The tool could make Pages even more useful to marketers and convince them to pay for ads to buy additional fans.
The news comes from a member of a closed Facebook group for social marketers, who wrote that he received the following info from Facebook:
“Page Post Targeting Enhanced
Today, we will start rolling out an enhanced version of Page Post Targeting to a small percentage of Page Admins. Over the next few weeks, this will become available to all pages. With this new feature, Pages can now target their posts to certain fans in the news feed who meet specific criteria such as age, gender, location, language, etc.
All content will still remain on the Page since this is the only way to allow friends of engaged fans who don’t meet the targeting criteria to see viral stories (i.e. David likes a post.. )”
Despite formally announcing the new feature to Page admins, Facebook gave me its standard “We are always testing new features across the site. We have nothing further to share at this time. However, we’ve learned the full set of characteristics that can now be targeted include:
- Age
- Gender
- Interested In
- Relationship Status
- Education
- College Grad: College Name, Major
- In College: College Name, Major, Years
- In High School
- Workplace
- Plus the old options — Language, and Location: Country, State, City
Page Post Targeting Enhanced will let Pages publish different content to different fans, or word their marketing messages differently to maximize relevance. For example, Ford could target posts about economical hybrids to 20-year olds while pushing discounts on SUVs to 40-year olds.
That could translate into more traffic and awareness driven, and lead marketers to become even more dependent on Facebook. And marketers, get your thinking caps on. These new options mean if you’ve got a smart strategy, you could publish a non-stop stream of posts all tailored to different audiences. You’re no longer have to wait until your last post falls off the news feed, you’re only limited by your imagination.
You can check out the whole deck from Facebook detailing the new feature below.
Facebook’s VP of Engineering for ads Greg Badros and other power-players of social advertising will be joining me on stage at the TechCrunch Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp in the Bay Area this Friday. Get your tickets to learn if Facebook’s ad model can make it worth its IPO price, and how they can work for your business.
