Is Facebook’s New Post Targeting Functionality The Key To Social ROI?

‘Big data’, relevancy and personalisation have been all the talk in the digital marketing world over the past year. But while marketers by and large have acknowledged the rising demand for content and services specifically tailored to the individual, the actual implementation has been seen as near impossible, mostly due to the segmentation limitations of existing social websites. This is now starting to change. Guess who is leading the way?

In what is seen as one of the most important developments in Facebook’s history, the social giant recently introduced new enhanced post targeting, allowing businesses to fine-tune their socially shared content to the nuances of different segments of their target audience.

Page owners, who have so far been able to target page posts by language and location, will soon be able to select the following targeting criteria when distributing updates in their news feeds:

– Age

– Gender

– Relationship status

– Education

– Workplace

– Language

– Location

Business Page managers can harness the new post targeting function to craft bespoke messages to different segments of their audience. The enhanced functionality has the potential benefits of reducing unsubscribes and ‘unlikes’ while increasing reach and engagement.

A move towards hyper-relevancy

With the change, it is clear Facebook is providing the opportunity for micro-targeting and hyper-relevancy, which more closely reflect social consumer reality and demands. “As brands seek to determine ROI and address social media fatigue, being able to deliver more relevant content as opposed to one-size-fits-all messaging could be very helpful,” points out Patricio Robles of Econsultancy, while in the same breath warning businesses that enhanced post targeting can create a false sense of increased effectiveness.

This is where marketing analytics comes into place as the indispensable part of the equation. It makes sense. To know exactly what you are getting out of the increased resource investment that the new Facebook capability requires, you need to have a sound performance measurement process in place.

This means making sure you track the right mix of behavioural and demographic social metrics which match your business and campaign objectives. A marketing automation tool, for instance, allows the integration of social media APIs so tracking, measuring and analysing social media performance directly within the tool is a quick, time-saving and cost effective way to measure return on investment.

This applies to any social network but particularly to Facebook, whose new granular targeting functionality, combined with the deep analytical capabilities of marketing automation, has the potential to solve the social media ROI conundrum, at least for this social channel.

What do you think about Facebook’s enhanced targeting functionality? Share your thoughts in the comments.