Facebook has begun rolling out improved ‘Page post targeting’ allowing Pages to publish their posts to particular groups of fans using new criteria such as age and gender – see full list below. At present Page admins can only target using Location and Language.
This improvement brings Facebook closer to Google+ where Pages can target messages to specific audiences using Circles. The advantage of Google+ is that Circles are totally customisable – for example, a Page have a Circle of suppliers and Circle for clients. However, these have to be manually created. The advantage of Facebook is that they are using existing data so specific audiences according the the following criteria just need to be selected:
- Age
- Gender
- Interested In
- Relationship Status
- Education
- College Graduate: College Name, Major
- In College: College Name, Major, Years
- In High School
- Workplace
- Existing options — Language and Location: Country, State, City
Those Fans of a Page that don’t meed the target criteria will still be able to see posts on the Page itself.
Currently being tested with a few Facebook Pages, this is a valuable improvement to which will roll out over the next few weeks.