If you’ve ever ran a paid Facebook campaign before, then you should be familiar with the targeting options they provide. But, did you know you can also target your organic posts on Facebook by audience? Facebook refers to the option as preferred audience targeting. Facebook targeting organic posts allows you to narrow down the audience for your post by interests, age, gender, location, and/or language.

This in effect allows you to optimize your organic reach by putting your organic posts in front of the right subset of people, and increases the chances of engagement for the post. What this does is limit the people who will see your post in their news feeds, but people who directly visit your Facebook page or perform a search will still see the post, regardless of the preferred audience targeting you’ve set up.

Here is how you can set up preferred audience targeting on Facebook for your organic posts:

1. If you have never used preferred audience targeting on Facebook before, you will need to first enable it. This can be done by navigating to your Facebook page, and clicking on Settings in the upper right hand corner. Make sure you have the General tab open on the left hand side of the Settings screen, and click Edit next to Audience Optimization for Posts. You will then check off the box next to “Allow preferred audience selection and the ability to restrict the audience for your posts.” and click Save Changes.