Are you ready to jump on the social marketing bandwagon but you’re wondering how to target your market on social platforms? Today we’re going to discuss the Facebook platform and what tools it offers to help you target your market. There are three ways to build your target market on Facebook that will cost you nothing except time.
First of all, once you create your Facebook page as a business, be sure that you link the Facebook like button to your website. This makes it easier for a person to like your page on Facebook without leaving your site.
Next, start building your fan base directly on the platform. Start with the list of friends on your personal profile by recommending your business page through your personal page. Start posting valuable and insightful information about your business and ask your friends to share it with their friends, and ask them to ask their friends to share it. This will begin to build your fan base through the network of friends.
Now, find people who are already interested in what you’re offering. You find them by doing the following: Use the search function to enter what you’re looking for (for example, authors) this will bring you to a list of people who are your target market. Now enter the same search criteria and select groups, these are the groups you want to join as they are also your target market (for example writing groups).
Don’t start spamming them with sales posts, just start conversations with them or comment on their posts. Start your own conversations by posting informational information. As you get more interaction with these groups, you can begin a slow marketing campaign. While you’re building up this target market, you can also use other options available on the platform.
Other options to target your market using the Facebook analytics system, require you to purchase Facebook Ads. The platform continues to evolve their advertising tools to allow you to target your market more effectively. You can target Facebook ads based on people’s purchase history, job roles and other external insights provided by major data miners. The platform allows you to target customers based on their likes, gender, school, location, and employer. Over the last year Facebook added these features: Custom Audiences, Conversion Tracking, Sponsored Results, Lookalike Audiences, and Partner Categories.
Custom Audiences allows you to combine your offline customer list with your Facebook advertising campaigns. Conversion tracking lets you know how many of your followers converted to a sale. Sponsored results allows you to place sponsored links in the search results so users see your ads in their search results. The Lookalike Audience feature allows you to target markets that mirror your target market.
Facebook in partnership with Acxiom, Datalogix, and Empsilon allow you to use partner categories to more specifically target your market.
You will find over 500 Partner Categories to select from. For purposes of this article, we will give you 10 examples of Partner Categories:
- Household size of 6 (8,842,800 users)
- Upscale department store credit card user (34,618,400 users)
- Home office supply purchases (2,638,300 users)
- Aftermarket vehicle purchase over 48 months ago (11,952,800 users)
- Baby food & products buyers (10,497,100 users)
- Casino vacations (4,242,000 users)
- Dog owner (12,643,500 users)
- Fitness buyers—runners (5,950,600 users)
- Teacher/educator (223,000 users)
- Donate to veteran causes (7,016,400)
As you can see, these partners provide Facebook with a significant amount of data. You won’t get a list of users, though. You select your categories based on what your business needs as targets and Facebook does the rest for you. However, you can only select one category per ad.
Source: www.socialmediaexaminer.com
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