Preferred audience
The Preferred Audience feature replaces Interest Targeting and uses user interest tags to prioritise a post on a newsfeed. By using the tool, you are able to promote your post to people who are most likely to enjoy the content. For example, if your post is about the upcoming release of Captain America: Civil War, then recommended tags could include Marvel, Comic books, or Superheroes. Facebook believe that the optimum number of tags is between 6 and 10, though you do have up to sixteen to play with.
It differs to the previous Interest Targeting feature in that it will still show to subsets of people even if they do not match the interest tags. Previously, a post would only show to people that match the tags attached to a post, which heavily limited its reach. With the new feature any extended user will be able to see a share or a like regardless of their interest tags. This will effectively extend the organic reach of a publisher’s post through likes and shares.
Audience restrictions
This can be used alongside Audience Restrictions to focus your posts further. This allows publishers to limit and restrict who will see a post based on location, which can be included or excluded, as well as age, gender, and language. By limiting content to specific demographics across Facebook, you can really optimise the targeting of your post. Read more.
Audience insights
Whilst using these features to their full potential, you may want to learn more about how your audience responds to a post with interest tags. The Audience Insights feature shows you how each interest tag you set contributed to a post’s reach, clicks, shares, and likes. Once you have published a post using Preferred Audiences, insights help publishers understand how different subsets of people are responding by showing metrics for reach and engagement. This will enable publishers to stay attuned to their audiences’ evolving interests on Facebook by monitoring the performance of specific tags over a specified timeframe. Why bother?
As mentioned earlier, Audience Optimisation is available to all English-language pages. If your page has more than 15,000 likes, the features will be automatically enabled. If not, the tool can be activated via the settings tab, where you can also start adding tags. This feature can only be activated via the desktop site at the moment.
- Overall, this is a valuable feature that enables publishers to expand the organic reach of their Facebook posts while focusing on initial targeting using interest tags. More here, folks.