Facebook Audience Optimisation gives marketers the ability to choose from the following three features:

• Preferred audience – You can choose the people you’d like to reach on Facebook, by adding interest tags to your content. Facebook Audience Optimisation allows you to define the interests, activities and pages your target audience are interacting with on Facebook. Used correctly, you can ensure your content will show up in hashtag searches. Rather than limiting the audience that sees your post in News Feed, Facebook filters out those who aren’t likely to engage with your post, and shows your post to people who fit in with your preferred audience criteria. Sounds rather good, doesn’t it?

• Audience restrictions – You have the option to restrict the visibility of certain posts by specifying which audiences would not find your post useful, interesting or relevant, based on their location, language, age and gender. This is an existing feature that can be used alongside preferred audience options, to ensure you are not appearing in the news feeds of Facebook users who would just be irritated by your  very presence! Let’s face it, none of us want to be where we’re not wanted. When on Facebook , there aren’t many of us who enjoy being bombarded with ads or irrelevant content when we’re just being social. So… the key is content relevancy (as usual).

• Audience insights – As well as Facebook’s existing Page Insights, Facebook Audience Optimisation offers Audience insights. The new feature gives you detail on the performance of your content, and lets you see how people within your preferred audience actually interacted with your posts. You can review the performance of your content at post level, with breakdowns by interest tag. Again. in our opinion, this is only useful if you’re going to use it to test the strength of your content strategy, and adapt your content according to your findings!

The amount of online content available to your potential customers increases every day, hour, second… so having detailed information about who is likely to engage with your content can only be a good thing. We’re exploring the interest tags that Facebook Audience Optimisation offers at the moment, on a number of our Facebook marketing campaigns, and we’ll try different combinations of tags to understand how post engagement is affected, before we make final decisions on how to use this as part of the marketing mix for our clients.

Content strategy – what matters?

The key to delivering the right content to the right people is an intelligent content strategy. The starting point for that is identifying your customer personas – doing the hard work on this at the outset will get you in the right place for creating content that appeals to the right people, at the right time. We all know that what a potential prospect needs when they first discover a problem, may be very different to what they want once they’ve researched and decided – understanding that customer path to purchase is key to a great content strategy.

Facebook Audience Optimisation – is it worth a go?

So, does it work? The New York Times have tested it and here’s what they say,

“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.”

According to AndroidHeadlines.com, MTV have also given it a test drive and they said it “did a great job at picking apart the massive entertainment audience and identifying which segments were most responsive to which kinds of stories.”

So the signs are good – keep an eye on our blog and we’ll let you know what we find in the next few weeks…

Of course, lead acquisition is where it all starts – our free report on getting more leads with your social media marketing, looks at the steps you need to take to ensure you see results that make the resources you dedicate to social media activity all worthwhile.