Facebook can feel like a new frontier at times. Being active on your fan page can help build a bridge between your brand and potential customers. But what if your Facebook posts aren’t quite reaching the people you want to reach?
Here we provide some simple-to-use tips on how to use Facebook advertising options to promote your posts.
1. Power up with Power Editor
A hidden gem within Facebook is the Power Editor. While you can ‘boost posts’ directly from your fan page, this form of promotion has limitations.
The Power Editor gives you more advanced options to build target audiences and promote posts. As its name suggests, the Editor gives you more power.
For example, you can exclude people from a target group, helping to narrow down your audience. What’s more, when building a group, you can select people based on two (or more) options. Here I’d choose to show an ad to people interested in sports but who must also match having their relationship status set to ‘married’. As shown in the graphic below, my promoted post would reach 12million men between 22-45 in the US.
2. Define by using Ad Sets
In my opinion, creating a single worldwide audience is not a good idea. I find it more effective to put countries, cities or regions into separate Ad Sets, especially if you want people from different places to engage.
The reason for this is based on how Facebook works. It will seek the best price/clicks ratio and will show your post accordingly. So, if people in Argentina were to engage more with your post, the ad would be shown mostly to people in this country. You still might want people in France or Italy to see your ad, but because it did not perform well in these countries it will be omitted if the audience is ‘worldwide’.
I’d suggest duplicating your Ad Set and changing the location of each new one you create. You may find that some sets deliver worse results and/or become more expensive. However, you will be certain that people are seeing your posts in the countries, cities and regions you want to target.
3. Exclude people and narrow down audiences
Facebook is full of fake profiles. You don’t want your promoted post to show in a fake profile’s feed. You want it to be promoted to real people: your current and future fans.
It’s important to be smart when excluding and narrowing people to avoid fake profiles. Education level setting will help you achieve that since a lot of those profiles will not have that set up. For sports, I’d maybe start with ‘high school leaver’, since the target audience is likely to be a younger demographic.
Excluding is trickier. It needs to be specific to each group, location, gender etc. When targeting ‘sports’ I would exclude those connected somehow with ‘laziness’ or ‘doing nothing’, whatever is hiding behind that. As you can see in the graphic below, with these two exclusions my initial group has dropped from 12 to 7.6 million.
4. Be specific, but broaden if results aren’t coming
While my target group is still big (7million+), this is because ‘sports’ is very broad topic. A promoted post would reach anyone with a connection to any Facebook page about sport in general.
I would need to be more specific. If I was marketing a basketball club, I would change ‘sports’ to ‘basketball’. In doing so my group reduces to 3million.
I might also look at whether targeting the US is too generic. For starters, I may choose to target a few states only but including the state my team is from. In the example used throughout this post, if I pick California (go Lakers!) then my target group drops to 290,000. This feel like a more manageable number to start with, enabling me to target a specific audience and get more meaningful results.
The above are some simple tips to help you promote your Facebook posts more effectively. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to us on Twitter @TellyoTV. Or you can drop me an email at matt@tellyo.com
