How to Improve Your Marketing Accuracy with Facebook Hyper Targeting

One of the golden rules of marketing is “know your target market”.

So when crafting brand messages the more relevant the communication the higher the chance of engagement and hence increased sales. Facebook has an advantage over almost any other social network because on sign up you hand over a full suite of demographic information that is a marketers goldmine. Knowing who your audience is and also where they are is an important part of the marketing puzzle that before the invention of the social web was expensive and slow to collect and curate.

Facebook now has the largest database of accurate information to reach a targeted audience that wants or view your content and is starting to use that muscle to help brand marketers become more effective .

There is a  new Facebook feature that uses that information to help marketers.  It is called “Page Post Targeting Enhanced” but we like to call it “News feed Hyper Targeting“.

What is Facebook News Feed Hyper Targeting?

Facebook’s “News feed hyper targeting” is a relatively new Facebook feature (officially referred to as “Page Post Targeting Enhanced”) that enables Pages to deliver more relevant messaging to their Facebook fans.

In short, Facebook news feed Hyper Targeting increases the targeting accuracy of posts by increasing the types of posts segments a community manager can target. Previously, pages could only deliver “one-size-fits-all” posts, or segment posts against locations or languages.

The more robust segmentation criteria allows Pages to segment their posts to their audience’s news feed using additional criteria, including:

• Age
• Education
• Gender
• Workplace
• Interests
• Language and Location
• Relationship Status

What are the Marketing Implications?

The low barrier to development and deployment of segmented messaging using this tool allows for micro-segmented, personalized message deployment at scale. This has the potential to dramatically increase your Page engagement rate. As such, Facebook news feed hyper targeting lends itself naturally to integration within your Social Media Optimization (SMO) initiatives, as follows:

1. Identify (and size) your micro-segments

A great feature of the tool is that as you segment your fan base, the platform will adjust market size of the segment on the fly. Note that the segments you should choose will vary by vertical and company. For example, a sports interest based segmentation might be ideal for a sports camp, whereas an age-based segmentation would be more effective for a financial services company.

2. Monitor, test, and report on engagement levels in each of your micro-segments

Monitoring engagement levels by segment will lead to an always-on planning scenario of continually evolving messaging and segmentation strategy.

3. Evolve your monthly content calendar strategy accordingly

Additional calendars should be developed with these pre-identified micro-segments in mind. This will of course require additional planning and development time.

4. Supercharge engagement levels by supplementing posts (organic social listings) with sponsored stories

At the end of the day, the benefit of this tool will be to increase the engagement with your audience by delivering more relevant messaging. Keep in mind that on average only approximately 16% of your audience will ever see any given post, and only 1% of that group will ever engage (defined as sharing, commenting, or liking). Sponsored stories will increase your level of engagement by increasing the number of your fans that see your posts which then naturally increases the volume of sharing, commenting and likes.

5. Keep an eye on your timeline brand experience

A media analogy would be to think of your Timeline as your TV commercial and your segmented posts as your direct (one-to-one) mail. As a marketer, you typically don’t want the highly targeted messaging you’re deploying to direct mail segments as you might for your general brand target in a TV commercial. If you’re doing a lot of segmented messaging, all stories you post will still show up on your wall to your entire fan base. Consider deleting highly niche posts as needed if the overall message you’re trying to convey on your Page becomes diluted to your general target.

What About You?

Could you take advantage of this Facebook feature to closely target your market? Have you been using it and what have been the results?

Look forward to hearing your stories in the comments below

Guest Author: Sunny Rodriguez from ZOG Digital, a search and social marketing technology company. 

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