Meta has announced a new Instagram audience targeting feature that many social media marketers will love.

You can now run ads across Facebook and Instagram targeting your account’s followers specifically. Announced towards the end of 2022, the updated Meta ad targeting is still in testing and may not be available to all accounts.

Previously, you’ve been able to create a custom audience of your Facebook followers but not your Instagram audience.

Instagram engagement targeting has been available within Meta Ads for some time for Instagram business accounts. However, you’ve been unable to isolate followers until this latest test.

Until now, Instagram engagement retargeting has focused on:

• Everyone who engaged with your professional Instagram account
• Anyone who visited your professional Instagram account’s profile
• People who engaged with any post or ad of yours on Instagram
• People who sent a message to your Instagram profile
• People who saved any post or ad of your business account on Instagram

This new option will improve your ability to show ads to people who have shown an interest in your products, offers and promotions, and you’ll be able to use your Instagram followers as a source for a Lookalike audience.

Easy to set up

To set it up, advertisers need to make sure they’re running an Instagram business account. Your account will also need to be added to your Business Manager.

Once that’s been done, click on Instagram Accounts, under the Accounts section. Once you’ve added your account, you’re good to go.

1. Create your audience and click on Custom Audience.
2. Select Instagram Account.
3. Click on Events and then select People who started following this professional account.

Part of the Custom Audiences family

The new targeting sits within customer audiences. A custom audience is an ad targeting option that lets you find your existing audience amount people across Meta, says the platform.

Marketers can leverage sources like customer lists, engagement across Meta or website and app traffic to create Custom Audiences. You can also use Custom Audience to create a Lookalike Audience, which is a list of people you can advertise to who are similar to the people who engage with you.

The new targeting is classed as an engagement custom audience, which is a custom audience made up of people who have engaged with your content across Meta.

Meta

“Engagement refers to actions that people can take across Meta technologies, such as viewing videos, following a Facebook Page or opening a form in a lead generation ad.”

There are a bunch of custom audience types available:

• Video
• Lead form
• Instant Experience
• AR experience
• Shopping
• Instagram account
• Events
• Facebook Page

As Engagement Custom Audiences help you show ads to people who’ve taken action on your content, you can be sure that your adverts will be shown to people who are already interested in your brand or account.

Make sure to check out Advantage Custom Audiences

Another recently introduced feature is Advantage custom audiences.

“We’re rolling out Advantage custom audience, a new targeting automation product that leverages an advertiser’s Custom Audience to reach new and existing customers.

“This is similar to Lookalike audiences that find people who are likely to be interested in your business, except that Advantage custom audience goes beyond the 1%, 5% or 10% similarity ranges you are used to, while also prioritizing delivery of ads to people in your Custom Audience.”

It will help expand the depth of custom audiences to maximise campaigns with a minimum of fuss. Meta’s automated targeting has improved recently, so this could be an excellent way to improve the reach and effectiveness of your campaigns.

With Apple’s ATT data privacy update changing the game for Meta and forcing it to rethink the way it earns those advertising dollars, we’re seeing more and more ways for marketers to target audiences more effectively and for less money.

The fresh option to target Instagram followers is another string to Meta’s bow and one that marketers should appreciate.