When it comes to targeted advertising on Facebook, it’s becoming all too easy these days for marketers (like myself) to target advertising to very direct groups of people. You see, you’re empowering us to do what we need to do in order to get our message out there and unfortunately, some dirty marketers out their exploit this for bad.

You remember when the elections of 2016 were found to have targeted misleading information and fake news scattered and shared at mass across the internet? Do you know how they were likely able to do this? It’s a little known marketing tactic out there – and it works!

I’ll give you a scenario that I’m literally asked all the time when it comes to advertising. Say I want to target a specific Facebook Group for my ads. Can I do that?

In short, if we follow the normal route of Facebook advertising, the answer is no. 😕

That’s restricted due to their marketing setup. BUT there are ways around pretty much anything in tech; so pay attention. 😜

You see, you can target people that like a specific page but let’s be honest (and I say this with personal experience administering a group of almost 30,000 people – Suicide Prevention Rocks), if you could target a group you could get much more targeted and fruitful results. The thing is, most groups are able to grow at a much quicker rate than that of a page – simply because of the person to person (albeit digital) engagement factors; and social influence is literally everything in the online world.

BUT how do we do this?!

Break out the notepad and be prepared to change your advertising life, because THIS IS HOW TO TARGET YOUR FACEBOOK ADVERTISING TO GROUPS!

WITH VIDEO:

Step One: Post a relevant video on your Facebook business page as your Business page.

Step Two: HIDE the video from your timeline (Trust me). We don’t want to get mixed up data from page viewers vs the group audience.

Step Three: Share that individual post into the group! You have to do this from your personal profile, since Facebook Pages cannot share in groups.

Now, we wait…

While we wait, we want to make sure we are engaging with everyone on the post. The more engagements and views the better – all of this becomes our new target audience for advertising. This is exactly why we hid the lost from our timeline earlier – we only want the group people to become a part of that audience.

Step Four: Now we create a Custom Audience for targeting based on the data we have collected.

1. Open Ads Manager
2. Navigate to Audiences
3. Create custom audience based on video engagement
4. Choose the specific video you shared within the groups.

I highly recommend to further segment the audience to people that watched at least 50% of the video, because they would be most likely to engage with the ad in a meaningful way.

EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT!

You can also target ads via a photo share. This one works a little differently by utilizing a Facebook Pixel. (If you don’t already have one installed on your site – you should do that immediately. I can also assist with that.)

We have all seen (and many engaged with) text photos or gifs that aren’t shared directly on Facebook.

They look like this:

But the trick with them is when you click it, instead of it being native on Facebook and opening as an image, it opens a pop up because the image is hosted on an advertisers site, like this:

You see, this is a simple way to bring traffic into your Facebook Pixel on your own site. All you have to do is upload an image to your media library on your site, and share the DIRECT image address to Facebook. When people click it, they then get captured into your Facebook Pixel, allowing you to create retargeting ads to those exact people. These ones are easier to target and reach a wide audience as they often get more shares.

Good luck and happy advertising!

If you have any questions or still need a little help with your advertising, feel free to reach out. I also am accepting new clients with all this Coronavirus stuff going on. I understand many businesses are in dire need to expand their online capabilities, so reach out!