Three weeks into the New Year and Facebook has announced another upgrade to its features (in addition to the new Sports Stadium and the new features added to Lead Ads). On January 21, they launched their new targeting tool, Audience Optimization.
Audience Optimization will help publishers “help publishers reach and engage their audiences on Facebook and better understand the interests of people clicking on their posts.” Peter Roybal, Product Manager at Facebook, announced in a blog update on Facebook Media.
Businesses can now improve how relevant their updates are by indicating the audience who will be most likely to engage with that update. This aims to increase engagement at the update and Page levels.
There are three features for Audience Optimization, as explained by Roybal:
- Preferred audience – Allows publishers to add interest tags to content to help Facebook connect people with the topics and subtopics that are most likely to engage them. Rather than limit the audience that sees a post in News Feed, these tags prioritize, uniquely for each person, the topics that are most likely to interest them.
- Audience restrictions– Gives publishers the option to limit the visibility of certain posts across Facebook by specifying which audiences would not find a post relevant, based on their location, language, age or gender. This is an existing feature that can be used alongside preferred audience options.
- Audience insights – Gives publishers visibility into the performance of their content, down to the post level with breakdowns by interest tag. This is in addition to the existing Page insights product. Once a post is published, insights for the preferred audience can help publishers understand how different subsets of people are responding by showing reach and engagement metrics for each interest tag.
Facebook monitored how the new tools worked. The New York Times had great success with Audience Optimization. “Our stories generally find a wide audience on Facebook, but some stories can take off thanks to especially strong engagement from niche Facebook communities such as TV show fans, sports fans, etc. The vibrant discussions taking place on some of these posts suggests that this new tagging feature is helping to attract the readers who are most passionate about specific topics.” (Facebook Media)
MTV was also part of the beta test and said that the new tags helped them pick apart their massive audience and they were able to identify “which segments were most responsive to which kinds of stories.” (Facebook Media)
The feature will be rolled out to English-Language Pages over the next week and can be accessed through Page Post Composter, Graph API, third party publishing tools and Instant Article.
To see more visit the Get Started page.
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