Facebook has just announced a set of new features to help publishers better connect with their Facebook audience.
Rolling out over the next couple of weeks, these new features are exciting for Page owners who may have been discouraged or disappointed by Facebook’s other recent announcements regarding their News Feed algorithm that will greatly reduce the organic reach of most if not all posts.
Here is an overview of the four new features. After, we will look at the interest targeting (organic post targeting) in depth:
- Interest Targeting – target posts on your page to a subset of your fans that have particular interests
- Post End Date – specify a time and date to stop showing your post in News Feeds to prevent people from seeing out of date posts
- Smart Publishing – enabling this feature will automatically display links to the most popular content on your website in the News Feeds of people who like your page
- Improvements to Insights – Facebook has made some improvements to their analytics section, including adding a Top URLs section. This section will allow you to see if other Pages have shared a URL and its impact.
You can read the full announcement here: New Tools and Insights For Publishers
Facebook Interest Targeting
Facebook will now let you target posts on your Page to a more specific audience. Previously a feature reserved for advertisers, targeting will allow you to reach the people you care about the most based on their interests.
Interests is a feature of Facebook advertising that we have always loved. We have seen some of the best results on our work for clients when using interest targeting over other features.
Previously, you could only target organic posts based on:
- Gender
- Relationship Status
- Educational Status
- Age
- Location
- Language
How many of you have ever used these when targeting a post? In the example below, an a Buzzfeed article about Girl Meets World is targeted to interests related to the show instead of all fans, who may not be interested in the show (or where Corey and Topanga’s relationship will go from here)
How Do I Use Facebook Interest Targeting?
Interest targeting is now available to all Pages that have enabled the Targeting and Privacy setting, and is currently only accessible on desktop.
To turn on interest targeting, go to the settings for your Page. On the general tab you should see the targeting and privacy for posts options. Click edit. Click allow. And then save your changes.
Stay tuned for the other features announced by Facebook, they will be rolling out over the next couple of weeks. Facebook also recently announced call-to-action-buttons and Facebook Fundraisers.
