Reach and Targeting in Facebook Advertising
With more than 5,000,000,000 users online each month, it is important for you to define your targeted audience when advertising on Facebook. Facebook provides a platform from which people can express themselves by sharing information about their true selves. This information includes their gender, age, what they are doing at the moment, what they like to do, their interests, geographic location, occupation, nationality, favorite movies, bands, music and TV shows. All of this information is placed on their profiles and shared amongst friends, workmates and other people in their network. The information provided on the profiles of Facebook users provides advertisers with a unique opportunity to reach customers.
Facebook advertising is considered powerful because of the reach it allows. Both genders are evenly represented in Facebook and users are within all age groups. In fact, the fastest growing number of users on Facebook are 35 years and older. No matter what your targeted audience is, you will definitely find them on Facebook.
How can you reach your targeted audience? Facebook offers you various targeting filters to help you reach your specific target audience. The number of targeting filters you set for your ads is determined by the target or aim of your ad campaigns. A lot of thought is required in determining your target. You need to consider your advertising goals, what you want the advertisement to achieve. You also need to consider the product you are advertising and who would be interested in purchasing it. Other factors that ought to be considered in determining your target include the targeted occupation, interests of the audience and relationship status of the audience.
Having decided on the audience you are targeting you are ready to set the targeting filters. You can filter the audience in terms of geographic location e.g. country, state or province. You can even narrow it down to a radius within a city.
Facebook offers its services in over 70 languages. It is therefore possible to target an audience based on their preferred language. Other targeting filters include the demographic, education and interests and connection targeting.
Advertisements on Facebook are integrated seamlessly into the browsing experience. As users browse profiles of other users, Facebook pages, events and photo ads targeting users according to interests, demographic and connections will appear in the right-hand column of the page. Users are therefore able to view these ads and click on them if interested.
If you are not sure about the criteria to use for filtering your target audience, Facebook offers you some support. As you select your filtering criteria, an approximate number of users within the criteria selected will be displayed. Although this number is not exact, it will provide you with a general idea of how many people are likely to view your ad on Facebook. If you find that the feedback you are receiving from the ad is too low, it might be that the filtering criteria you selected was too restrictive. You can change your filtering criteria to include a larger audience.
Find out more about Advertising on Facebook:
Getting Started with Facebook Advertising