It won’t fit everyone!

Maybe you don’t want every post from your Facebook business page reach every single viewer.

A great feature has just come on stream with Facebook which gives you the ability to control exactly this scenario.

Why might you do this?

With a particular post you might want to limit it to fans of your page who live locally or who are in a particular age group. Sometimes you may want to just target your post at members of a particular sex or with a particular personal status.

A department store who are running a special promotion on bra fitting may not want to interrupt their male audience with such a message, running the risk of them deciding to unlike the page.

A restaurant may not want to annoy viewers who are single when they are promoting specials on Valentines day – it might just annoy them!

How does it work?

Who do you want to see this post?

When you are writing your post before you publish it you can choose to target the audience for this post be clicking on the “target” button, which can be seen on the bottom left corner of the post window alongside the timing button. (you must first enable this feature in your page settings – see below)

From here you can make your audience selection, which gives you a wide range of choices enabling you to limit the reach of your post.  Once you decide to publish, the post will only appear in the newsfeed of those fans that match your selected criteria.

The criteria includes gender, location, age, relationship status, education and interests.

If your fans choose to share that post it will only appear in the newsfeed of their friends that match that criteria.

The post will appear on your wall as normal visible to everyone who visits your page.

Enabling the Post Targeting feature

If your want to use this feature you must first enable the post privacy gating feature for your Facebook page – what a terrible name for the feature!

To do this you must go to the edit page menu that appears at the top of your admin panel. From here click into the manage permissions menu and you will see the “post privacy gating” option towards the end of the page, which you enable by just clicking the box.

Once you have done this the “target” feature\icon will appear as an option in the post comment window as already described.

Well done Facebook !! – its a great new feature.

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion offer Social Media Consultancy and Training from our offices in Cork and Dublin.