Facebook has more than two billion active users every month Instagram and Messenger each have more than one billion monthly active users. With so many active users across social platforms, it means there is something for everyone. Facebook owns Instagram and Messenger, so the targeting capabilities are very similar, and brands can run fairly seamlessly across both.
However, to truly get traction with your social marketing plan, you'll need to understand how to best leverage the targeting options and ad formats available.
What are the audience targeting capabilities?
- Core Audiences: Reach people based on gender, location, interests, language, device and more. Serving ads based on these criteria is a great way for new businesses (or those new to digital advertising) to get started because of the large number of attributes available.
- Custom audiences: Target your current customers or people who have engaged with your website or social accounts. You can use multiple sources to build custom audiences including customer lists, website/mobile app activity and engagement with your Facebook and Instagram accounts.
- Lookalike audiences: Reach people who are similar to your current customers. You can take the custom audience you created and allow Facebook to find people similar to your customers. This lets you serve ads to a new but qualified audience. We consistently see campaigns perform 20-50% better when we leverage a custom audience or lookalike audience.
What ad formats are offered?
- Brand Awareness: Reach people more likely to recall your ads and increase awareness for your brand.
- Reach: Show your ad to the maximum number of people within your target audience.
- Traffic: Increase the number of visits to your website.
- App Installs: Send people to an app store where they can download your app.
- Engagement (Facebook and Instagram only): Get more people to see and engage with your post.
- Video Views: Promote videos that raise awareness about your brand.
- Lead Generation: Collect lead information, such as email addresses, from people interested in your business.
- Messages: Get more people to have conversations with your business to generate leads, drive transactions, answer questions or offer support.
- Conversion: Encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service.
- Catalog Sales: Show products from your catalog based on your target audience.
- Store Visits (Facebook only): Promote multiple business locations to people who are nearby.
If you are looking for one social ad platform with the most audience, variety of ad types and robust targeting options, Facebook's family of apps is your best option. Its many options allow you to find the right audience for your business across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
Check back tomorrow, and the rest of this week, as we continue to dive in to the audience targeting options for the major social platforms.
