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You’ve spent months building up your Facebook Page followers and engaging with them. But did you know about the little-known feature within your Facebook Page that gives you the ability to target wall updates to a specific group of connections?
Here are some examples of why you may want to do this:
- You want to update certain fans about an event taking place in their geographic area. Who cares about a breast-cancer screening in Boston when they live 2,000 miles away?
- Your Page connections speak many languages. If you have multi-lingual page administrators, they can send out updates in any language they choose without making non-speakers feel alienated.
- You want to share news that’s relevant only to a specific geographic location. Information on how to prepare for impending wildfires is most important to those located in the affected area.
Why not just send a targeted message?
Facebook Pages also allow you to target private updates to fans. These show up in a user’s messages folders, under “Updates.”
The limitation of sending these type of messages is that some people never read them (I rarely do). And because Facebook users all have different preferences for how they consume content, it’s best to send wall posts as well.
How to target wall posts to specific fans
Here’s how to do it.
1. Click on the specific icon to send a wall update (status, video, photo, link) and then click on the tiny little down arrow as shown below.
2. A new window will appear showing you that you can target your update by location or language.
3. Select your geographic preferences.
4. Select your language preference.
5. Publish update.
That’s it! Was this useful?
Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.John Haydon delivers social web strategy solutions for “the quick, the smart, and the slightly manic.” Curious? Then visit the John Haydon blog, follow him on Twitter or leave a comment.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.
Very simple layout on how to do targeted updates, John!
I would add a word of caution. We had an event coming up in NYC – so instead of hitting all of our fans we doing mostly targeted updates.
But because not everyone designates their location – we were clearly not hitting all of the people in the area. We did another post to all fans and people a week out said they had no idea we were even doing the event.
Good learning lesson for us to make sure we aren't *always* targeting those updates!
Thanks for this helpful article. It drives me nuts how many announcements and invitations I get from ppl doing something in Boston or Chicago when I life in Northern California. This is especially true of stores and some teachers and musicians. I hope they start reading your suggestions.
Can you target by interests- this would be powerful so each users gets targeted posts not generic spam