Over the past years, Facebook has made us accustomed to constantly innovate and push the segmentation potential and personalization of their platform. 2016 appears no different.
Audience Optimization
In January 2016, Facebook launched a new feature Audience Optimization that allows content publishers and agencies to connect with their audiences more easily and organically (without paying). This feature helps owners of Facebook Pages to manage the visibility of their content in their fans’ News Feeds. The tool allows sending more relevant posts by telling Facebook which posts according to you are most likely to be loved. Specifically, it is now possible to:
- Add tags (range of interests) on your content to help Facebook identify what would be the best audience for your posts.
- Limit the visibility of your posts by geography, language or gender.
- Measure the performance of your posts by tags.
So what’s the big deal?
This new tool allows you to target a very specific audience and connect with them through your content. By being able to target your posts better, engagement, relevance and sharing thereof will increase. This contributes directly to increase the reach of your message as well as your marketing performance.
Thanks to measurement tools, which are now more accurate, you will be able to better assess the scope and the relevance of your content for your target audiences.
This change is in line with a major industry trend that revolves around personalization and building one-on-one rrelationships. In a world where people are bombarded with messages, it is increasingly critical for companies to maintain real relationships with their customers. They have more and more control over the content and the messages which they consume and share. With a tool like this, it becomes much easier to connect with the right audience.
How to start?
The fastest and easiest way to start would be to reuse the customer segments that you currently use. For example, you could use the segmentation from your sent emails (if you do not segment your emails, we will be glad to assist you). Transfer this one to Facebook audiences and refine it using the new Facebook audience tools. Make some posts and measure their impact. Change your criteria and so on. After a few changes, you should have substantially increased the engagement and reach of your posts.
Remember that those may not be the most innovative companies which will win. Victory will go to those companies which will take the time to understand their customers and will be able to engage them.
