Tod Maffin shows how to geo-target Facebook Page posts using the CBC Fan Club's 87,000 fans as an example. You pick specific cities like Toronto or Mississauga, stack demographic filters, and watch your audience shrink. Once you post, you can't edit targeting—you have to delete and repost.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to 30 Days to Social Media Marketing Awesomeness. I'm Tod Maffin. Over the next 30 days, I hope you'll get some really good tactical information on how to use social media. Don't worry, it won't be every day. It'll be every 3 or 4 days. So you'll get about 10 lessons in all. This is the first lesson. It's about geo-targeting your Facebook posts. Very short but very powerful. Let's use this page as an example. This is the CBC Fan Club, the This is an unofficial fan page for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Canada, of which I'm the moderator. About 87,000 people, as I record this, who like it right now. That's why I like to test on these things. Let's say that I wanted to post something to people in this fan club, but it's only for a specific audience. Let's say there's tickets available in the city of Toronto only. Well, there's no point in me sending that message out to everyone on the page. It'll just clutter it up, and eventually people will learn to ignore it if I'm posting stuff that's not in their region. So here's what to do instead: geotarget it if it's specific to a particular region. Here's how to do that. Let's first type in something. I have tickets for the Debaters on Friday in Toronto. Email me if you want them. Now most of the time what you do is just click post, and if you did that, it would go up on the wall, but everybody who likes this page would see it. But we want to restrict this so that only people in the Toronto area can see it. To do that, you'll notice that there are 3 little icons down here. You want the one with the target. It's usually in the middle. Now, I should say Facebook changes its user interface all the time, so if you're not seeing this particular, uh, icon, just search for geo-targeting and you'll probably find it. But as I record it, it's this little target icon right here. One more thing: if you still don't see it and you think you should be seeing that icon, it's because you don't have enough fans on your page yet. Facebook changes the number. Sometimes it's 100 fans you have to have, sometimes it's more, but generally speaking, you have to have at least a, a few people on your page before you can use this targeting. Otherwise, of course, if you only have 100 fans or 50 fans on it, you might only have 2 or 3 people in Toronto, and it's kind of pointless to target. In this case, of course, because there's 87,000 fans,, it gives me that option. So once I've clicked that, you simply click the Add Targeting link. Now, keep your eye on this area right here. It's going to count down. As I restrict the content, it's going to show me that it's targeting fewer and fewer people, but that's what we want, right? We don't want to clutter it up to everyone else. So Add Targeting, and it's asking me what kind of targeting I want. Now, you could do any of these targeting. You could say, I want people who are female, who are engaged, who have a master's degree, who are interested in women, who are of a certain age, and so on. But we're just gonna do a couple of these things. So location is the one we're after. And to begin targeting, pull down this little menu that says "All Locations." Facebook will pop this window open. Now just start typing in the area you want to target. Well, in this case we want to target a city, so it's gonna ask me what country to start in. Canada. And what city? Toronto, Ontario. It's already said that there are 9,600 people in Toronto. Now remember, of course, there's many more than that, but that's 9,600 people who are fans of this page. And one thing you should do is broaden this out a little bit. Toronto has a number of different outlying areas, people who could go see this show, but are just slightly outside the actual Toronto area. Mississauga is one, for instance. Kingston, Ontario. And as we do that, you'll notice this targeted number increases slightly. So let's say that you broaden that out to as many cities as you want. Unfortunately, when you're doing this for this geo-targeting for free— this is all free, it's just a post on your page— Facebook will make you do this manually. If you were to place this as an ad, as an advertisement instead of just a post, you'd be able to say Toronto and x number of kilometers around Toronto. So it's a little bit easy. But let's start with that. Choose locations. It's now showing us that it's targeting to Toronto, Mississauga, and a number of other people. It's targeted to 70— 10,000 people. Hit post and away we go. You can always check to see what your target looks like by checking it once it's posted on the wall. And to do that, just hover over this little gear icon and you'll see it's telling you it's targeting anyone who can see this page, that is to say, anyone who likes the page, plus these areas. You cannot edit the targeting once you've done it. The only way to really edit it is to come up here and delete the post and do it all over again. As I mentioned, there's lots of other ways to target as well. Uh, let's just do this. Go down to the targeting icon. Again, we can say we want people who are women, and let's add another targeting piece onto it, who are only engaged or married. Now we're down to 13,000 people who fall into that category, who have an education status of being a college graduate, who are interested in women, so this is romantically, so now we're down to 100, so basically if we wanted to, we could send this post out and it would only reach women who are college graduates, engaged and married, and are lesbian. This is, of course, an extreme targeting. You're only down to 160 people. You probably wouldn't go that far, but just to show you, you can pile these things on. And that is geo-targeting in Facebook. Well, that's it for this lesson, but keep your eye out for your email because in just 3 days I'm gonna email you a new tutorial video, this one on how to locate and target high influencers on Twitter. These are the people who can make or break your business, who can bring all sorts of business to your organization. It's a great one. Keep your eye on it. Of course, don't hesitate if you want to reach me directly. Just hit reply to any of these emails that you're getting. And if my company can help you, we're at EngageQ.com.
