Facebook has started rolling out powerful new post targeting options called 'Page Post Targeting Enhanced'. The new targeting options will allow page admins to send posts to the News Feeds of specific followers based on a variety of characteristics in addition to the basic location and language targeting options admins are already used to.

Page Post Targeting Enhanced

The roll out of “Page Post Targeting Enhanced” will give Facebook page admins the ability to target posts by age, gender, interests, relationship status, education information and workplace. Just as with targeting by language or location, all updates a page publishes — even if it's targeted in one way or another — will still appear on the business' Facebook page timeline. However, targeted updates will get displayed in the news feeds of only the appropriate users being targeted.

According to a post from a page admin who is a member of the closed Social Marketers Facebook Group, a Facebook rep has indicated that the new, 'enhanced' targeting options are available to a select number of pages at the moment and will be rolling out to all Facebook pages over the next few weeks.

On Target Marketing

Page Post Targeting Enhanced will become a powerful tool for marketers, allowing brands to publish different content to different fans, or word their marketing messages differently to maximise relevance. A Facebook rep gave the following example of how a marketer might use the new option: “Say you want to target an audience for a back-to-school campaign. You can drill down to college kids 18 to 21, so your post will be seen more by that age group.” Coupled with the service's existing geo-targeting tools and page admins' new-found ability to schedule posts, running a highly targeted, partially automated engagement campaign is soon to become fairly easy with Facebook.

The new capability comes a few weeks after Twitter made it possible for marketers to send targeted tweets based on location, devices and platform.