5 Reactions to Facebook’s “Page Post Targeting Enhanced”

By Bob Fetter, SVP of Pluris Marketing

Facebook creates so much news that it’s easy to miss a new set of features aimed at marketers- even when those very changes can have big implications on how brands speak to you on the social platform.  Last week, nestled between the social buzz of the Olympics and ups and downs of its stock price, the social network rolled out a bevy of new ways for marketers to take advantage of  things such as your age, interests, gender, relationship status and more to inform how they ‘speak’ to you.

In what some inside marketer types have called “overdue” and “a defining moment in social media marketing history”, Facebook is now exposing important elements of an individual’s personal and social graph and giving marketers the ability to post in your timeline based on that information.

As a long time marketer and one that has started and led loyalty programs for some of America’s largest businesses, I had a few instant reactions to this.

1)     Facebook has to be careful not to scare off authentic personal sharing and people need to be mindful that everything is or could be exposed to 3^rd party marketers. I am not sure what the public backlash will be should this become widely known.  To me, it’s one more reason to be completely vanilla in how I use Facebook.  I already refuse to use my Facebook ID as a log-in to any 3^rd party app or brand.  If asked, I just ignore it.  And, what I do on Facebook I do with complete awareness that it will eventually be exposed to 3^rd parties.

2)     This kind of targeting is already happening, it just moves timelines into the fold.  With exception of friends of connections, the new Page Post Targeting capabilities are almost identical to already available ad targeting, so this is really a catch up.  In some ways, providing the same capabilities for newsfeed targeting and ad targeting may sway marketers to test post targeting and move away from ad targeting if it works, as newsfeed targeting is “free” (with obvious exceptions like Sponsored Stories).  As marketers can try many different posts with many different targets, it can actually move marketers away from paying for ads if it works.

3)     More relevance still doesn’t mean actual targeting.  These new features allow for much better crafting of messaging in the news feed. Anything that allows marketers to be more relevant helps the personal experience. While the elements of the social graph that can be used now are all useful for messaging, they are only slightly better than nothing for product targeting.  Things like age and gender only hint at product-type targeting.  These are more gates than triggers.  Marketers have moved long past basic demographics for targeting.  “Interested in” could be a good step in that direction.  However, the full social graph needs to be mined to support true targeting.

4)     Facebook is providing brands tools for a potential mess. I am not sure how the new features will translate in real life.  I can’t imagine that clicking on a link in a highly targeted message in a post will bring me to similarly highly targeted content. In fact, I am pretty sure it won’t as Facebook states “all content will still remain on the Page since this is the only way to allow friends of who don’t meet the targeting criteria to see viral stories”.  So the Page itself will end up either being a jumble of messages, or a generic, untargeted Page.  This is similar to clicking on a highly targeted email and being taken to a generic landing page, or perhaps worse.  So in the end, I am not sure if Facebook is doing more harm than good.

5)     Setting the stage for mobile. Given the fast growth in the number of Facebook users who only access Facebook through their mobile device, this kind of targeting sets the stage nicely for location-based sponsored posts. It is not only essential from a revenue perspective, it opens up entirely new ways for brands to connect with consumers. You think web-targeted posts are a bit big brother-ish with these changes, wait until you post a break up from a bar and see a post from a dating site that says “singles are available near you”.

The new Page Post Targeting Enhanced certainly gives marketers more tools to use to drive traffic and potentially sales and revenue from Facebook and should definitely be tested.  As to whether it is a “defining moment in social media marketing history”, I certainly hope not.  Until Facebook can figure out a way to use the full power of the social graph, in a way that does not cross privacy boundaries and includes mobile, then that moment is still a long way off.