Facebook Targeting

Credit: @glencarrie

According to Facebook, the social giant recorded over 1.73 billion daily active users, counting about 67% active monthly users, totaling over 2.6 billion. Those numbers are only continuing to increase year over year, encompassing a variety of individuals from all over the world. If you’re a business owner not currently on Facebook, why aren’t you taking advantage of the potentially endless possibilities? Without an account, not only is your business unsearchable on the platform, but it also affects your searchability on the internet as well.

“To get a head start on gaining followers, take the time to invite those on your friends list to like your page.”

To get started, Facebook requires precisely $0 and poses no risks or investments to open an account. Once you’ve set up a profile and filled out all the required fields such as location, hours, and contact information, among others, you’re ready to be discovered! To get a head start on gaining followers, take the time to invite those on your friend list to like your page. From there, you can even ask your employees to do the same thing. While not everyone asked will like the page, it does get a small following for your business. (Which is important prior to exploring targeting efforts.) Next steps could also include asking a trusted customer to write a review about your business. All of these things are completely free, and each endeavor gets you another step closer to being discovered by the surrounding community and beyond.

Once you’ve posted a few items and set up a base for your business, it might be a good idea to put some money into the platform. I know investments can be scary, but luckily Facebook gives you the power to choose your own budget, timeline, and more! How it works is: Say you want to “boost” an offering made by your business—this could be a big sales weekend or public event—in order to get more people responding to the offer or event page. To mitigate the issue and expand your audience reach outside of your current followers, you can use Facebook Ad targeting. Through the post management system, not only are you able to promote your business, but you can gear your message to the specific region and demographic of who you’d like to target to attend your sale or event.

In choosing your target audience, I will say that owners should be looking at customers within a 20-mile radius in relation to small- or medium-sized business. Outside of selecting a business range, the owner can also choose specified age ranges, genders, and even languages that they believe are the best fit for ideal customers. For more detailed targeting, owners can even select targeting options based on what Facebook users are interested in, which could also be in specific relation to their business. After curating a post, selecting an advertising method, and targeting the audience, owners will be able to later review post results such as views, likes, reach, and more. All this information can then be utilized to expand targeting efforts that best works for the business.

“In practice, owners will be able to eventually see what targeting seems to work best and can save audiences that show a healthy following and even create custom audiences.”

The end result? Not only are owners able to learn more about the potential customers viewing their business, but with the collected information, they can focus more on what content gets posted, as well as what deals or company products they’ll want to bring to the table. In practice, owners will be able to eventually see what targeting seems to work best and can save audiences that show a healthy following and even create custom audiences. In running a business, owners envision who they want to shop there, who they want to represent the brand, correct? Facebook targeting does just that and why it’s so important to utilize, especially in times of COVID-19 where businesses might not be open to the public yet, or consumers may only want to shop from home.

If you’re interested in an in-depth tutorial on how to use Facebook Ads to promote your business, reach out for a free consultation!