It sounds crazy, right? Getting enough eyeballs on your Facebook posts without paying to boost it, is a struggle enough as it is. Why would you want to limit your reach even further?
Here’s the thing – if you aim all your content at all of your fans, you’ll be lucky to reach maybe 10% of them. But if you tell Facebook which of your fans exactly might be interested in your new post – well, that puts you at an advantage. If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one.
I have found that if I target a post at specific audiences, instead of just publishing to all, I get a much broader reach. Did you know that Facebook gives you the option to target each of your updates according to gender, relationship status, age, interests, education and age? Just this small change is enough to double your reach.
But how do you do that?
While some business pages have this function enabled automatically, most page owners need to activate it manually – and here’s how:
On your Facebook page settings tab click on Audience Optimisation For Posts, it’s just under Reviews.
Once enabled, with every post you publish, you will have the option to optimise the audience. It’s the little compass icon there at the bottom.
What’s really cool (well, for marketers, anyway) is that you can choose to show your post to your audience depending on their interests, but also gender, age or location. So, for example, if your page is dedicated to animal lovers but your post is specifically about cats, you can choose to target cat lovers exclusively – and reach more of them than if you had spread the message across your entire following.
So here’s how you can specify who to show your post to. Select audience by interest…
Or demographics…
It doesn’t always work (because Facebook like to mix things up a little every now and then) but when it does, you’ll see a great boost in your reach. I got best results with location targeting for my posts and was able to reach a lot of my audience without paying a penny for ads!
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