3 Things for B2B Marketers to Know about Facebook’s Audience Optimization

Last week, Facebook unveiled an upgrade to their organic search algorithm. Known as Audience Optimization, it’s meant to improve the organic reach and engagement of your posts. But do you know how to use Facebook’s Audience Optimization.

Before, it was difficult to tell if posts were reaching your audience’s News Feed. At any one time, something else might have been more interesting to each member of your audience. Now you can create messages more focused towards your audience.

1. Target people who will enjoy your posts most

The new organic search algorithm lets you prioritize who sees your posts. Target specific groups based on their interests. Each post you create can have up to 16 interest tags added to it.

According to Facebook’s tips, it’s best to use a mix of broad and specific interest tags. For example, you’re a B2B company selling corporate training programs to hospitality companies. General interest tags, such as ‘hospitality’ or ‘training’ are great to improve your reach. Specific interest tags such as ‘Hilton’ or ‘employee retention’ are great to improve engagement. People interested in those specific topics are more likely to see the post and interact with it.

The only negative part to interest targeting with Audience Optimization is the tags must already exist. You can’t create a custom tag for your post.

2. Limit those who won’t enjoy your post

You can restrict who sees a post as well. Guarantee posts that aren’t relevant to certain parts of your audience won’t be published to their News Feed.

Restrict your audience based on age, gender, location, and language. The most useful of these for B2B companies is most likely location.

With Audience Optimization, B2B companies can restrict their post from reaching anyone not in a specific area. This can be general, such as the state of Maine, or specific, such as Kennebunk, Maine.

This is great for B2B companies targeting local businesses. This works at an international level, too. If a company has clients in Canada and the USA, but a post is only relevant to one country, the other country can be restricted.

3. Quick analysis of what your audience is interested in

Another change in Facebook’s algorithm allows you to see what’s working quickly.

After you publish a post, Facebook shows you the reach. Each interests you keyed is broken down. Find out which interests performed best for reach, click-through, like and share.

After studying a few posts, companies see which interests perform best with their audience. Use that tag in future posts and test others.

With this change in Facebook’s algorithm, it’s more important than ever to integrate Facebook into your company’s social media content strategy.

The new algorithm behind Audience Optimization allows you to target specific subsets of your audience. No longer guess what will interest your audience. The new algorithm allows you to quickly see what is and isn’t working. Then you can make the appropriate changes.

It’s easy to learn how to use Facebook’s Audience Optimization. Once you use these tips, Facebook can be a valuable part of any marketing plan. It’s now more important than ever to integrate Facebook into your social media content strategy.

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