A recent announcement from Facebook has confirmed that there are some new tools being released to help provide more information to media publishers. While Facebook is pushing these features toward media publishers only, they will also be a gold mine of information for all marketers. These tools are set up to allow people to more precisely target those who they want to advertise to. It can also help them to find potential audiences that they may have overlooked, and perhaps most importantly, choose which segment of their followers will see a specific post.
In order to use these new features, you must turn on the Targeting and Privacy setting for your page account.
Here are some of the most important new features, what they can do and some pictures of them in action. This information is from the official Facebook announcement.
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.
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 This tool prevents people from seeing out-of-date posts in News Feed, but posts will continue to appear on your Page.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.
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.
There are additional options, but they don’t apply to marketers as much as these do. If you are interested in reading the full announcement from Facebook, you can go to their page HERE.
