Facebook advertising – who’s tried it? Probably many business owners have at least dipped a toe into the social media platform in one form or another, often with rather unsatisfactory results. Not too long ago, Facebook rolled out some changes to its newsfeed algorithm (known as EdgeRank) that saw a lot of the organic reach for page posts plummet. So, many business owners threw up their hands up and abandoned their Facebook marketing strategies.

Not so fast.

While organic reach has certainly dropped from its previous heights (posts now reach on average about 10-16% of your total fan base), Facebook’s Paid component (via the Ads Manager) has been revving up to make up the difference, tapping into Facebook’s enormous wealth of personalized information. The result? Highly targeted display advertising within the Facebook experience.  The advantage for businesses is the ability to be more deliberate in their ad placement and audience reach, higher conversion rates and better ROI.

Here are 4 revolutionary new things you can do with Facebook Advertising:

Advanced Demographic targeting – forget age, gender and location. Facebook lets you delve much deeper into your audience demographics to almost pinpoint accuracy. For example, under work, you can select industry type, job title, even enter a specific employer! You can also target parents of children of a particular age range, political views and more.

You can find all of these options in the ‘More Demographics’ dropdown under the ‘Audience’ section of your ad builder.
 
Target other businesses (like your competitors!) – that’s right. You can narrow your audience down by the pages and businesses that they have expressed an interest in, including those of your competitors! However, remember that if your target customer is willing to openly profess their ‘like’ for a company, they tend to be more loyal to that brand. Instead, try to think of a list of businesses that complement your offering, rather than competing directly. An easy example is targeting Facebook users that have expressed an interest in ‘Apple products’ and presenting them with ads for deals on iPhone cases.

To do this, specify the ‘Interests’ of your target audience and select from the dropdown list.

Online behaviors – Facebook also allows to you to optimise your ads for specific online behaviour, for example ‘gamers’, ‘online spenders’, ‘business travelers’ and more - so you don’t have to throw your money at users that aren’t likely to make a purchase or install your app. This is also where you can target specific mobile devices and platforms.
The same as with ‘Interests’, you can specify ‘Behaviors’ by performing a search and then selecting from the dropdown list.

Specify audiences – finally, you can create and save custom Audience groups that you can revisit with multiple ad campaigns. And with audiences, you can do even more than just specify interests, behaviors and demographics. With custom audiences, you can upload your existing email lists (you can import directly from MailChimp) so they’ll see your ads on Facebook. (Facebook keeps the exact list of users private so you won’t be able to know exactly which part of your list is being targeted.) You can also build custom audiences using tracking pixels and cookies to retarget visitors that have come to website and not converted or if they’ve visited a particular section of your website (eg women’s fashion). This powerful feature allows you to serve up better creative and specific offers that are more relevant and speak directly to your groups.

Custom audiences can be found on the left hand column of your Ads Manager.

Have you tried any of these Advanced Facebook Targeting abilities?