Improve Your Organic Reach with Facebook's Audience Optimization Tool

Your Facebook marketing strategy just got better. Facebook just added a new Publisher tool called "Audience Optimization." If you're a brand or organization that has a Facebook Page, you cannot afford to sleep on this tool. Although Facebook states that the tool doesn't necessarily extend your reach, but rather improves enagement. Here's how.

This blog post is part of "Your Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation" blog series.

Main features

Preferred Audience

Brands can add interest tags to target people who are more likely to engage with a post. As opposed to Facebook's "Interest Targeting" feature, Audience Optimization does not restrict your post's reach. Instead, tags serve to prioritize people's News Feed. 

Audience Restrictions

Although this isn't a new feature, you can now use it in conjunction with Audience Optimization. Restrict visibility to certain audiences that wouldn't find the content relevant. Restrict based on language, location, age or gender.

Audience Insights

"Insights" literally gives you an insight into how your audience responds to specific posts and tags. A horizontal bar graph indicates how well each interest tag contributed to your post's reach and overall engagement (clicks, shares, likes).

enabling the tool

If your Page has more than 5,000 likes, the tool automatically turns on. If you run a Page with less than 5,000 likes, you'll have to manually turn on this feature.

Simply go to your main Page, click on "Settings," then "General," and find the "Audience Optimization for Posts" row. Check the box off and you're good to go.

Now everytime you compose a post, you'll be able to incorporate the tool into your Facebook marketing strategy.

Best Practices

Now that you're excited to try the tool and use different tags, here's a short guide on Audience Optimization best practices.

1. Relevancy: You aren't solely restricted to choosing tags mentioned in your post. If you own an HVAC company and post about home maintenance you can also tag relevant items like El Nino, Green Living, etc.

2. Broad and Narrow: Incorporate a mix of general tags and niche tags. If you're posting about the X-Files revival comeback you can use tags like "TV Shows," "Sci-Fi," "X-Files," and "David Duchovney."

3. Brand Awareness: Include organizations and brands that are relevant to your post. For example, if you're posting about fashion, include tags on designer names, brands, etc.

4. Location: Although location tagging isn't helpful for national stories, certain local posts benefit from tagging a region or location. 

5. Tags: Beta-testing has shown that 6-10 tags are the sweet spot. The maximum amount of tags you can use is 16, though.

Facebook really seems to have hit it out of the ballpark with this tool. I myself am very excited to try it out with a small-scale page I run. 

Are you familiar with this tool? Are you excited to try it out? What's your experience been like using it? We'd love to know what you think in the comments box below.

Looking for more ways to generate leads? Check out our 30 Lead Generation Tips, Tricks, and Ideas.