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.
2. Now you can click on Page to be taken back to the timeline for your Facebook page. Click on “Write something…” to open the post creator to construct your post, and then click on the button directly below that says “Choose the preferred audiences for this post” to set up the targeting for this organic post.
3. Your first option is Preferred Audience. This enables you to limit the people who will see your post based on interests. You can choose up to 16 interests to target this post by. Available options range from business and industry to family and relationships to hobbies and activities to sports and outdoors. If you have a product or service in the animal industry, you may choose to use the hobbies and activities category, scroll down to the pets option, and limit the audience based on the type of animal your product or service is related to, such as birds, cats, dogs, or horses.
Or if you’re in the restaurant industry, you may choose to click on the food and drink category and target your audience based on the type of food your restaurant is focused on, such as barbecue, pizza, or seafood, and/or click on restaurants and target your audience based on the type of restaurant you have, such as a diner, fast food, or casual restaurants. The options are pretty much endless when it comes to interests, thus enabling you to narrow your posts down to the exact subset of people who are interested in what you have to say.
4. Your second option is Audience Restrictions. You are able to target your audience down using the Preferred Audience and/or Audience Restrictions options, allowing you to first choose an interest your post is related to, and then narrow the audience down even further based on age, gender, locations, and/or languages. You are able to limit the age from 13 to 65+, limit location based on countries, states, cities, or zip codes, and limit language, but only if the audience you are trying to reach uses a language that is not common to the location targeting you have set.
Facebook’s guidelines on audience targeting may be helpful to you as well – check them out to ensure that you’re using best practices.
From within Fanbooster, you can also set up preferred audience targeting for organic posts by clicking on Advanced Options after you’ve constructed your post and clicking Next until you get to step 5, where you will be presented with similar options to if you were posting directly on Facebook.
Use this article on Advanced Audience Targeting within Fanbooster to get it done.
