In January 2016, Facebook Audience Optimization tools were released as a tool to organically help publishers better reach their target audiences. Facebook Audience Optimization tools help publishers by providing the following features:
- Publishers are able to add interest tags to their content so Facebook can connect that content with interested parties
- Publishers can limit post visibility by location, language, and gender
- Publishers can monitor the performance of each post based on the interest tags specified
Facebook is seeking to help publishers with the ever-shortening attention spans of their followers by providing the tools to build better relationships with their customers. This, coupled with the recent additions to Facebook Messenger for business, and there’s no question why Facebook stays at the top of social media updates all the time.
Why Facebook Audience Optimization Tools Are Important
Facebook has 1.59 billion active users in any given month. The Facebook Audience Optimization tools are aiming to target engagement rather than reach. That is a much more SEO-like approach. So when you hear the experts talk about social media and SEO going hand in hand, it is ringing more true than ever in Facebook news.
Anything that helps you know, focus on, and target your Facebook audience more effectively is worth your attention. You may not always use such tools, but you should stay on top of social media updates for this type of news to see if it is useful to you. When we are talking about being able to target your audience based on filtered criteria like interest, location, language, and gender, that is huge. That means that Facebook is only going to show that specific post to people who meet criteria that you control.
How to Access Facebook Audience Optimization Tools
The only other place I’ve managed to find this information is on Facebook’s blog on this topic, so let’s get to how this whole thing works. They tried the tool initially with a few big media players, like The New York Times and MTV, who actually saw more engagement than normal.
- Go to your business Facebook Page.
- In the top-right corner, click Settings.
- Click the General tab in the left navigation.
- Click Edit beside Audience Optimization for Posts.
- Click the checkbox and the Save Changes button to being using Facebook Audience Optimization tools.
Now you will see the tool added to the following areas of Facebook:
- Page post composer
- Graph API
- Third party publishing tools
- Instant Articles
Additional Information On The New Facebook Audience Tools
These new Facebook Audience Optimization tools replace the old Interest Targeting tool from before. In tests, the tool has proven to drive engagement upward while the organic reach of a post stays about the same, so it’s a limited boost to the previous limits on organic results.
When using interest tags with your content, the maximum number is 16, but Facebook suggests only utilizing between 6 and 10. The new Facebook Audience tools aren’t currently available on mobile. They must be accessed using the desktop website. It is also not currently available in languages other than English and Facebook has no plan to expand it linguistically at this time. Should you decide to boost a post where you’ve used the Facebook Audience Optimization Tools, this will work as a regular ad and your settings and interest tags will not affect it.
If you want to learn more about how to best use the Facebook Audience Optimization tools, check out their Best Practices page.
Wrap Up
I really like to hit the source for information about new features like this and Facebook always does a nice job of explaining things and providing customer support. I recommend that you try pretty much anything Facebook puts out to help businesses because it’s usually really great stuff. Let me hear from you in the comments about how you’re using these new Facebook Audience tools with your pages.