Last week we looked at the top digital marketing trends for 2019 with many of those trends revolving around sprucing up your social media to ensure it works as hard as it possibly can at engaging with your audience. This week we’re looking at just one of many ways to help you do just that by utilising the Facebook Preferred Audience tool.
It’s hard not to notice that organic reach for Facebook posts has been in decline for a while now. The platform has morphed into urging users to invest hard cash in order to experience the reach figures they have become accustomed to. It just isn’t possible to reach all your followers with an organic post anymore-not among the hundreds of friends and liked pages.
Organic reach has more than halved for many businesses, some dropping to as low as 2%! However, rather than turning to paid advertising you should instead save yourself the money and instead utilise the ‘Preferred Audiences’ tool. It’s been around for a while, yet Facebook seem to have kept quiet about it and focused more on shouting about what paid ad’s are capable of-funny that!
In a nutshell, the tool allows you to specify interests within your audience to ensure your content reaches this group rather than throwing it out to your whole following and hoping it reaches those interested.
All you need to do is ensure the feature is enabled in your settings-you’ll find it in your general account settings under ‘Audience optimisation for posts’ and just turn it on!
When writing a post for your business page you’ll now have the option to choose your preferred audience so even if your content is likely to only reach under 10% of your audience at least it’ll be the right 10%.
Preferred audiences, as the name suggests, allows you to use interest-based targeting, similar to how you’d set up a Facebook advert. You could tailor this to an event you were promoting, the industry you work in or a field you would like to diversify into.
The audience restrictions tab then allows you to specify geographical areas and demographics that should see your content but remember that only these groups will see your posts so consider whether narrowing your audience down this far is really worth it. However, some content will suit this such as promoting a local event when your following covers a vast geographical area.
Still looking for a helping hand to get your social media game up to scratch? We’re armed with an abundance of knowledge to help you grow your online presence and improve your lead generation. Get in touch to see what digital marketing could do for your business this year.