How Some Business are Able to Sell on Facebook Better than Others – Social Media Advanced Targeting

TLTR – Social Media Advanced Targeting (made easy)

Social media has tools that can predict your current and future needs, sucks for privacy but great for business, the sad part is that most businesses are not using them. These are relatively new technologies and but as soon as most people catch up to them it will be too late to get ahead.

If you are interested in what else people are missing out, please read my article on Voice Search SEO.

There is always a fear of the unknown when starting social media ads, and to be honest, we hear it a lot.

1. Social media doesn’t work in my niche
2. This is for kids
3. People are not buying on social media
4. Where is my ROI
5. I don’t go to social media
6. My clients aren’t on Facebook

Yes, social media is a straight forward process when your business sells makeup, funny t-shirts but what about the rest?

For the rest, there are social media advanced targeting strategies that can’t go wrong.

[Here is a simple case study review]

Real estate company looking to identify people that are house hunting. Traditionally you would go to google and bid $2 per click for people looking for something like:

“3 bedroom house [area]\[city]\[street]\[zip code]”

and then maybe find another 10.000 keywords.

That’s great if you do that, but what else can you do? Because there is only a set number of people searching on Google, and it’s maybe it’s not the only way to get targeted people to your site.

Here comes the Facebook and the cookie

Facebook, Instagram and other platforms allow you to build what is called a lookalike audience, which is great for social media advanced targeting.

Which means that you can feed into Facebook, live data from your website and even email database and Facebook will go out and identify all people that have similar behaviour patterns and buyer intent. The built avatars of people that behave in a certain way, for a set time period.

“A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers.” from facebook.com

There is an advance AI that does the actual groundwork but the oversimplified principles are as follow:

1. Facebook can see that you have accessed several real estate sites
2. Facebook will know when is the best time to show you ads based on things like first interaction to real estate sites, visited these 4 real estate sites, and you are 2 weeks in the search
3. Facebook will also know when, if and what properties you like (time spent on site
4. Facebook will know if you called that company or if you filled the website form
5. Facebook will know if you bought the property
6. Facebook will also know things like, specific interest (pool, big backyard, and many more)

and many other things, that WE can’t imagine.

(If you haven’t watched the social dilemma on Netflix we recommend it)

This is just the tip of the iceberg I believe that Facebook knows our future actions and exact time frame, so please make a mental note and next time you search for something online and future ads.

It won’t be hard for Facebook to know that you have bought a house, and when spring comes you brand new pool will need cleaning services, that you might be looking for a gardener, maybe some work around the house, new kitchen accessories, or just maybe will try a random add with a jacuzzi or a bigger fridge.

Conclusion:

To be honest, we don’t know if this is good or bad.

Is this moral – or are we still deciding, a lot of people will argue that this should be stopped on the other hand some will say that it enhances their lives. But all have to agree that they have the option to stop using these technologies.

If you really want privacy there are solutions, so if you are still complaining but are using Facebook and Google that’s on you.

For the time being, if you are running a business make sure your team is using these tools to maximize your conversions. We call this “social media advanced targeting” however it’s not something that hard to implement. At the end of the day, all people will agree, that without these tools we are just serving marketing campaigns to people that aren’t at all interested in our product or service, is that better?

I don’t think so.