General consensus in advertising today is usually that the most effective advertising is specifically targeted to a narrow field of people that you want to reach. For years this has been accomplished with complicated technology and it has definitely shown performance improvements from non-targeted to targeted ads. This level of targeting has never been available for Social Media Marketing before, but now Facebook is offering a brand new feature for pages called “enhanced post targeting.”
Before this update page managers had no way of specifically targeting certain demographics beyond region and language. Now you can create multiple content and posting strategies based on who you are marketing to. This will obviously make content creation and management a much more difficult job but it will also be much more effective.
The new options include gender, relationship status, education, workplace, language and geography. They have also changed up the Geography option. Before no one could see your post unless they were in the region you had selected to target. Now all users can see your post on your page timeline but it will only be pushed to users news feeds if they fall within the targeted area.
This is great news for Social media marketing, it gives us the ability to greatly increase social engagement by catering your content specifically for a targeted segment of the population. If done correctly you should be able to appeal more to your target demographic, increasing engagement and eventually increasing sales. Brands who market to a wide range of people will probably benefit the most from this update, because they will be able to create multiple strategies that will cater specifically to each segment of their target audience.
I also want to repeat that all your content regardless of its targeting will remain visible to everyone on your timeline so be careful what you post. You also obviously have the option of hiding things from your timeline. Facebook is only just rolling out this update and currently only 1% of pages have the update at this point. For this of you lucky enough to have these options available to you, make good use of them.
Need help crafting a content strategy for your social media marketing? Overwhelmed now that you have to create 3 or 4 different content strategies based on their demographics? Contact Wikimotive for a free evaluation of your content strategies and advice on how to improve.