Facebook recently launched an entire arsenal of tools that is focused on helping page owners make sure their posts are being viewed by the users with the highest chances of engaging with them.
The organic targeting tool for audience optimization was announced and launched by Peter Roybal, product manager, and the new features of this tool are available for every English-language page on Facebook. This tool will be turned on automatically for all pages which have more than 5,000 likes.
The 3 main features of this tool are as follows:
- Preferred audience: Publishers will be able to add various interest tags on their content. These tags will help Facebook prioritize the content towards Internet users with similar interests and ensure it appears in relevant News Feeds.
- Audience optimization: Publishers will now be able to determine the users who do not find their content relevant depending on age, gender, language, and location.
- Audience insights: Apart from the Facebook Insights page, this page will provided analytics for every post and break them down using the interest tags to help publishers determine the tactics which work and the ones which have to be changed.
Audience optimization will initially be available through the platforms mentioned below:
- Page post composer: Use targeting icons for adding restrictions and tags.
- Graph API: This can also be used to add interest tags to every post.
- Third-party publishing tools: You can also add tags as well as restrictions to posts directly using 3rd party publisher platforms like Sprinklr and SocialFlow.
- Instant articles: When you add instant articles to RSS feeds, you can add tags to the stories directly.
The variety as well as the amount of content that is available is only growing, and having more information regarding who is most likely to be interested in the content you are serving will help pages get content to the people that matter the most. Unlike interest targeting, audience optimization will help posts reach the relevant subset of audiences without restricting its reach.
Here are the answers to a few questions users may have about this new feature:
- Q: How does Facebook benefit from this?
A: This is one of the latest steps that Facebook has taken to help connect people with unique content that will entertain and inform them.
- Q: What are the interest tags based on?
A: The interest tags are created using popular Open Graph pages on Facebook, ads tags, and other data sets specific to Facebook.
- Q: Does it limit reach?
A: No, it doesn’t stop posts from showing up all over Facebook.
- Q: What about organic reach?
A: Organic reach remains the same but engagement will go up. Interest tags just make it easier to match content with the correct audience and prioritize posts on certain topics for users who are interested in them. They do not limit the distribution of a post. They just help a post reach a relevant subset of audiences.
- Q: Can you target users who aren’t fans?
A: No. Posts made using preferred audience is going to help improve the visibility of a particular segment of your page for its audience only.
- Q: News Feed targeting or page post gating? Maybe both?
A: It doesn’t prevent posts from appearing in News Feeds of people who do not have that particular interest, unlike interest targeting which removed posts from News Feeds completely and limited their reach. What it does instead, is prioritize posts for users who share the same interests. Audience restrictions (gating) has been designed for limiting visibility of posts on Facebook. So if publishers restrict posts to ages 18 and above, younger users won’t be able to see it.
- Q: Custom interest tags?
A: Right now, there is no option to create custom interest tags.
- Q: Interest tags when posting from mobile devices?
A: No, they can only be added when using the desktop version of website.
- Q: Boosting or advertising tagged posts?
A: Boosted posts will be treated just as a regular advertisement and targeting can separately be set up too.
Facebook has even provided a best practices guide to help you add interest tags and some of the most prominent takeaways from it include:
√ Target audiences using relevant tags.
√ Tag using a mix of narrow and broad terms.
√ Think about related interests associatively.
√ Considering including brands and organizations.
√ Use tags strategically for small audiences.
√ Save relevant stories locations.
√ Use trending hashtags and memes.