Facebook launches new content targeting tool and it’s FREE
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2014/12/facebook-launches-new-content-targeting-tool-and-its-free.html
As we all know, just because you post something on Facebook doesn’t mean it’s being seen by your followers. That would be silly, right? To actually, automatically serve up your content to everyone who explicitly asked for it?
Since it is so hard to get your message past enemy lines, it’s important to make the most of each message you put out there. Facebook is ready to help with that.
Facebook just rolled out 3 new tools that could help increase your engagement.
The best one is Interest Targeting. This tool lets you send your post out to only a specific subset of followers. Facebook is already doing this – picking and choosing who sees your post. With this tool, you can beat them to it and pick your own people. The assumption here is that Facebook will actually deliver your post to that chosen few. Which makes me wonder. . . . what if I pick three key words that apply to 90% of my audience? Will Facebook serve my post to the full 90% or is this just another game designed to make us feel like we’re in control of our own destiny?
Here’s Facebook’s example:
Once you click Target Interests, the “Targeted to” number will change to show how many of your followers fall into that range. Remember, unlike the paid targeting tools, this tool only creates subsets of people who follow you. If you don’t have many followers, this won’t help at all.
Also, you have to activate the option in your settings. Look for it under the Targeting and Privacy tab.
If you do have a lot of followers and you discuss a range of topics, this tool should boost your engagement numbers. We’ll see.
This Post Will Self Destruct
Facebook also just added the ability to put an expiration date on a post. Post End Date only prevents the post from showing up in a person’s News Feed after the expiration. It does not delete the post from your Page. Again, this is about making the most of your limited time in the spotlight. It’s aimed mostly at people who don’t visit Facebook on a daily or hourly basis. Now, the follower who checks his page three days later won’t see contest that’s already over or the expired coupon in his feed. Not a game changer but it’s neat and clean.
Giving People What They Want
Finally, there’s Smart Publishing which, at the moment, is only available for the select few. It’s based on the idea that you the publisher have no idea what people want to see, so the tool examines your website to find the most popular posts then shares them with your Facebook followers without you having to do a thing. It’s both nifty and bothersome at the same time, especially since those auto posts won’t appear on your Facebook Page. The only way you’ll know they’re happening is by checking your analytics.
For a long time, it seemed like Facebook was intentionally discouraging free branded posting in order to encourage paid posts. So, these free tools are a real turnaround. Will they do any good? If you have a large number of followers on your Page, I think they will help you reach more people, more of the time.
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New Tools and Insights for Publishers
New Tools and Insights for Publishers
By Holly Ormseth, Product Manager
Over the past few months, we’ve listened to publishers around the world to better understand how we can help them connect with people on Facebook. As a result, we’ve created new tools for media publishers, made improvements to Insights, and have added more resources and communication channels for publishers.
New Publisher Tools
Today, we’re excited to respond to publishers’ requests by introducing ways to target posts, remove posts that are no longer relevant and identify popular links that you haven’t shared.
1. Interest Targeting – To help you reach precisely the right people, we now offer the ability to target posts to a subset of the people that like your Page. For example, a publisher can use Interest Targeting to post a story about a sports game that will only be shown to people that like the teams playing.
This is now available to all Pages that have enabled the Targeting and Privacy setting, and is currently only accessible on desktop.
2. Post End Date – Post End Date allows Page admins to specify a day and time to stop showing a post in News Feed. This tool prevents people from seeing out-of-date posts in News Feed, but posts will continue to appear on your Page. For instance, a publisher can use this to remove yesterday’s weather report from News Feed.
This is now available to all Pages that have enabled the Targeting and Privacy setting, and is currently only accessible on desktop.
3. Smart Publishing – Until now, it has been challenging for large publishers to predict which stories will resonate with their audience. Smart Publishing is a new, optional tool that identifies and publishes stories that are popular with people on Facebook.
Once you enable the setting, frequently shared links to your website can appear in News Feed for people who like your Page. Those posts will not appear on your Page, but you’ll have access a new dashboard in Insights to see analytics, moderate comments, and choose which you want to post to your Page.
Smart Publishing is currently available to a limited number of media organizations, but we hope to make it more broadly available in the coming months. Page admins can opt into Smart Publishing from the Publisher Tools section within Page settings.
Improvements to Insights
Accurate and actionable analytics are critical for media organizations to understand and optimize how their content is performing on Facebook. We’ve made a variety of improvements to Domain Insights to show how Pages and social plugins drive traffic to websites.
We’ve added a new Top URLs section, which displays URL-level reporting and shows when other Pages and influencers share a post you’ve made to Facebook. For example, if a celebrity shares one of your URLs, you’ll know why that URL may have reached more people than other URLs. We also made the interface more intuitive and provide a way to segment data for specific time ranges, including hourly.
We also recently fixed a bug that caused many third-party analytics tools to undercount the percentage of their organic traffic from Facebook. In the past, referrer data was missing from some of our outbound mobile clicks. This issue has been resolved for iOS, with a fix for Android coming soon. Publishers may see an increase in iOS mobile traffic from Facebook and a decrease in undefined sources or direct traffic.
More resources and communication
In addition to these product improvements, we also want to make sure publishers are making informed decisions on how they use Facebook. We regularly share announcements and tips on the Facebook Media blog, News Feed FYI, our industry group, and through industry events.
We’ve been listening to feedback from publishers and are excited to deliver on some of the most common requests today.
