Engage Audiences with Targeted Advertising on Social Media

As social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn become the daily haunts of millions of consumers; businesses are increasingly advertising on them to target audiences with specific demographics, social connections, interests and habits. According to Business Insider, “Social networks are an interesting advertising channel as they offer enormous user bases and deep databases. And they have high engagement and desirable demographics. Americans were spending an average of 12 hours per month on social networks as of July 2012, with 18-24 year olds averaging 20 hours."

Here is how marketers can use these three top social media channels to effectively reach potential customers and improve their social media marketing ROI.

Use targeting tactics to reach prospects on Facebook

Companies tailor their Facebook marketing campaigns to match users' interests and activities using data gleaned from their conversations, profiles and behavior. There are specific techniques that can be used to reach prospects on Facebook:

• Precise interest targeting lets you define your ideal audience by what they are interested in, using terms people have used in their Facebook timelines. These may be drawn from their listed interests, activities, education and job titles, pages they like or groups to which they belong.

• Broad category targeting allows you to more easily and accurately reach your intended audience. When you choose to target your ad or sponsored content using a broad category, it will be shown to people who’ve included information in their timelines relevant to that category.

Broad categories allow marketers to design extremely relevant ads with a new level of insight. Here are some broad categories that highlight the unique targeting opportunities available for Facebook advertisers:

1. Currently Traveling
2. Small Business Owners
3. Engaged (6 months)
4. Expecting Parents
5. Long-Distance Relationship
6. Parents (children 13 to 15 years old)
7. Blackberry Mobile Users

• Custom Audiences is another form of targeting on Facebook. It lets advertisers find their offline audiences among people who are on Facebook. Using email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or app user IDs to find matches, Custom Audiences let you find the exact people you want to reach. For example, people share their email addresses when buying products from e-commerce websites. The websites can send these details to Facebook and ask the social network to find those people and target them anonymously with ads on their news-feed, using knowledge about their purchases to upsell or cross-sell products.

• Action spec targeting allows marketers to target Facebook ads to users based on their app activity. This type of targeting is useful for any advertising campaign on Facebook. It leverages user actions to create highly-personalized advertising experiences, which is critical for maximizing user engagement. For example, with You can set up Facebook ads to trigger the specific actions you want from audiences.

Choose the page, place, app or event you want to promote and under ‘What would you like to do?' you can: