Last week, Facebook added another targeting opportunity for its advertisers: Friends of Connection. According the Facebook Ads:
“Friends of connection” targeting is now available for Facebook Ads. Expand your audience reach by delivering your ads to the friends of people already connected with your Page, Application, Group or Event. In addition to harnessing the social graph by targeting your connections’ friends, every “Friends of connection” targeted ad promoting a Page or Event includes social content about a friend’s interaction with your business, amplifying the relevancy of your ad.
This means that advertisers can reach potential customers or highly relevant users (since birds of the same feather flock together, and it is likely that you and your friends have similar interests) and gain free impressions/brand presence through viral propagation.
For the advertiser: this option is only available though if you are the admin of a Facebook Page. So for instance, I am an admin of the Overdrive Facebook Page. When I create a Facebook ad (ASU = ad space unit) using the self-serve platform/ad interface, I can target users whose friends are already connected to Overdrive Interactive:
For the Facebook user: Facebook will then show those ads to the appropriate users and include a blurb about their friends. So for instance, Harry is a Fan of Overdrive and he is friends with with Barb. Facebook will show an Overdrive ad to Barb with the sentence “Harry Gold is a fan of this Page.” Now the Facebook ad is more relevant to Barb; it has more “pull” because her friend Harry’s connection/interaction with Overdrive is directly showcased.
And remember that there are other brilliant ways that Facebook lets advertisers target. Here’s a quick list:
- Geo-targeting (location by country, state or city)
- Demographics (age, gender)
- Birthday (useful for promo-based campaigns)
- Education
- Workplace
- Relationship status
- Languages
- Connections (users who are or are not yet connected to your Pages, Events, Group, or Application) – and now we can add Friends of Connection
- Keywords (any keyword that shows up in the user’s profile i.e. interests, favorite books/movies/TV shows, etc)
Facebook is definitely working to improve its advertising platform and capabilities and as a media planner, I am very happy to be presented with all these targeting opportunities. Now we can really hone in to our desired users and micro-target our social media campaigns. I am looking forward to more exciting developments in the future!
