How does Facebook see you?

Micro-Targeting

It's not that big of a secret, but Facebook's dominance in the social media marketing world is because of the vast amount of data and insights they have collected on you. This allows them to offer marketers to get through all of the fluff and start targeting the demographics that they are trying to reach.

The problem is that for most social media marketers, while they understand that Facebook can do this, they don't understand how to actually do it.

What Does Facebook Think of You?

The first step is to see how Facebook views your personal profile. Did you know that Facebook is fairly transparent to what they know about you and how they focus their ads towards you? You can see how Facebook sees you by checking out your ad preferences.

Facebook breaks down your ad preferences into several categories:

• Business and Industry
• Education
• Family and Relationships
• Fitness and Wellness
• Food and Drink
• Hobbies and Activities
• Lifestyle and Culture
• News and Entertainment
• People
• Shopping and Fashion
• Sports and Outdoors
• Technology
• Travel, Places and Events

How accurate are they?

They are surprisingly accurate, but then again, it also depends on the category.

When it come to the business category, they were remarkably accurate for the brands and categories I interact with a lot on Facebook. Here's a screenshot of my preferences when it comes to the business category.

Out of the 100 businesses and topics listed under the "Business and Industry" category, only 17 of them were off based. However, when you look at another category such as "People", they were much less accurate in terms of personalities that I have interests in or have interacted with. Out of the 107 people listed, I would only classify 47 of them as being relevant.

Why is this important

There are obvious pitfalls of using "interest" based focus when putting together your Facebook ads. Marketers usually swing too far one way or another. Either they rely too heavily on interest based targeting (which is much less efficient than targeting those who have connected to you via liking your page), or don't' utilize interest based targeting at all.

It's important to understand how Facebook views you currently and how they are making massive improvements for the future. One example of their improvements when it comes to more accurately targeting customers on Facebook can be seen with their new announcement of Deep Text, Facebook’s text understanding language. According to Facebook, Deep Text can understand textual content with near-human accuracy, accounting for slang, similar or identical words, and context.

This technology is one way that they will utilize textual content and better serve ads that are more relevant to those interests that are applicable to you. This is vitally important because as marketers and social media gurus, you need to understand how Facebook currently view individuals, how accurate they are when it comes to targeting (and understanding their current limitations) and the new technologies that are going to help them better target ads to the relevant customers.

With the increase in technology, Facebook ads strategies will continue to evolve into better and better forms of understanding what works and how best to reach your intended customers and provide them a great advertising experience.

Woodrow's Academy

This is just one very basic example of something that you probably didn't know and/or didn't consider when it comes to Facebook marketing and understanding how Facebook views you as an individual. This is just a simple example of concepts we help you learn and understand when it comes to social media marketing at Woodrow's Academy. Our goal is very simple, to help empower you to take control of your company’s message on social and start crushing it!

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