Posting great content to your fan page should be the goal of every business on Facebook. But it isn’t enough if you really want to maximize the reach & impact of your posts. While Facebook offers many options to get more eyeballs on your posts — including paying for them with Promoted Posts — one of the most undervalued & underused options is post targeting.

Any fan page owner can target posts (by location, language, age, etc.) using the controls Facebook makes available for free.  But these controls are both cryptic & clunky — and thus go unused most the time. Luckily Facebook has made it easy for app developers to build targeting directly into their apps via Facebook’s API.  At Post Planner, we’ve taken full advantage of this and now offer some of the most powerful & easy-to-use targeting functionality on the web.

But whether you use our solution or Facebook’s or another app’s, post targeting will definitely help you maximize your reach & impact by letting you deliver relevant content to specific audiences at optimized times.  With fan bases becoming more global & diverse than ever, trying to publish content that’s relevant to everyone everywhere often results in posts that sound generic & distant.

Here are some ideas on how to avoid this problem by using post targeting:

  • Time Zones: Let’s say you’re announcing a line-up at midnight, a one-day sale an hour before it starts, or wishing happy holidays, but you’re worried because for UK fans, it’s long past the golden hour. Fear not! You can send the same post to multiple regions and leave your fears of being that annoying generic fan page behind. We explain how to do this in an in-depth post over at the Post Planner blog.
  • Speak to Cultures: your fans live in different countries, speak different languages, and yes, have different genders. This makes it next to impossible to craft a post that’s optimized for everyone. A sale on women’s clothing should be seen by women, right? Your customers in England want to know how much your product costs in pounds not dollars. Your Latin American fans speak Spanish not English. Using post targeting lets you compose the perfect message for each audience based on their gender, age, language & location and make members of each audience feel like you’re speaking directly to them.
  • Right Content, Right People: You can also use targeting to encourage & increase specific interactions with your content. Let’s say you want to increase views on a YouTube video but know the video’s content is directed toward married males. Solution: target your post to married males. Remember: ads are not the only way to get in front of a segmented audience.  With post targeting, you have the ability to focus your outreach and skip building, monitoring & paying for an ad campaign.
  • Take the Driver’s Seat: In addition to likes, shares & clicks, page managers also want to drive behaviors like purchases and downloads. Many B2C companies have market research & behavior pattern knowledge broken down by demographic. Post targeting offers the chance to use this data and get posts in front of the right people. For instance, if you’re running a fan page selling quilt-making kits and your newest kit is designed for grandmothers, you can target women from the ages of 45-65 and compose your post in a way that’s optimized for that demographic — even mentioning “grandkids” in the post content.

The key to post targeting is to know your audience — what segments are involved with your page by demographic, language & location and what types of content appeal to each segment. You can learn the former via the Insights that Facebook provides on your page. Learning the latter comes only via testing. So get out there, target and test!

And don’t forget to leverage any survey, focus group and/or advertising data you already have.  This kind of data will help you deliver relevant content to the right fans and hopefully result in a stratified & highly engaged fanbase on your page.

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Guest post written by  Joshua Parkinson, CEO Post Planner