As we all know, Facebook is one of the few unavoidable social channels for any business, whether up-and-coming or well-established. As a society, we have reached a point where companies that don’t have an official Facebook page are deemed to be somewhat shady or out-of-touch. So how can you get your company’s Facebook page off the ground and thriving? Let’s take a closer look at one of the social networking giant’s severely under-utilized features: post targeting.
Post targeting can be accomplished organically, which is great for those organizations looking to boost engagement without expensive advertising. This kind of targeting is typically tied to advertising, but Facebook allows targeting on any post.
For example, you can target a post to reach users with particular interests and also set a specific time of day for the post to stop showing up organically in their newsfeed. This last part is relevant because while only the targeted demographic sees the post on their own feed, it still shows up to anyone who views your page directly. The only catch to all this is that the group targeted must be more than 20 people.
Social Media Examiner took it upon themselves to test the feature extensively and see how everything performed. The main questions they were focused on were:
- Does targeting page posts lead to more engagement?
- Does one target group respond better than another?
- Is targeting more successful for a larger page or a smaller page?
They got their results using two Facebook pages, one large one and one small, to see when targeting was most effective. So what were the results? While the reach for targeted posts was obviously smaller, the engagement was considerably higher when compared with posts that weren’t targeted.