Do you have a Facebook Page for your massage practice and want to get more exposure for your page and posts? Have you been disappointed by a lack of engagement from your posts? Think the only way to improve this is by paying for a “boost”? Don’t be so quick to pay for exposure!
Facebook has recently introduced two features that allow you to attract more followers and create more engagement by targeting your audience. These simple changes to your page settings could easily help you get more likes and shares.
1. Facebook Preferred Page Audience
This first of these, Preferred Page Audience, works to target your preferred audience on the Page level. To set your Preferred Page Audience, go to “Your Page >> Settings >> Preferred Page Audience”.
You will then be presented with the following options to edit:
- Locations: Enter the countries, states, cities or ZIP codes where the people you most want to connect with are located. Please note that city and ZIP locations aren’t available in all countries.
- Age: Select the minimum and maximum age of the people who will find your Page relevant.
- Gender: Choose the gender of the people you most want to connect with, or choose “All”.
- Interests: Add the interests of the audience you most want to connect with. Facebook can help you connect with specific audiences by looking at their interests, activities, the Pages they have liked and closely related topics.
- Languages: Leave this blank unless the audience you are targeting uses a language that is not common to the location you have chosen above.
Most massage therapists and private practices will want to target local clients that live in their area. If you have a mobile massage practice that caters to tourists, you may choose to target those traveling in a designated area. Or perhaps you specialize in pregnancy massage and choose to target women. You can further target your ideal clients by editing the remaining options.
2. Facebook Audience Optimization for Posts
Audience Optimization is an organic targeting tool to help publishers reach and engage their audience on Facebook and better understand the interests of people clicking on their posts.
Audience Optimization is similar to Preferred Page Audience, but it works on the ‘post’ level. For pages with more than 5000 followers this feature is automatically enabled, but for the rest of us you can enable it by going to “Your Page >> Settings >> General >> Audience Optimization for Posts”.
Now with Audience Optimization, enabled you will be given a new ‘target’ icon when drafting new posts.
Target your post audience on Facebook.
Clicking this icon will bring up a new menu for the “Preferred Audience” and “Audience Restrictions” settings. These work in tandem to place emphasis on certain demographics and completely omit others.
- Preferred Audience – Allows you to add tags to describe the interests of those most likely to engage with your post. So a post about sports massage could include tags such as ‘running’ and ‘cycling’. It’s important to note that interest tags do not limit reach.
- Audience Restrictions – Limit the exposure of your content to specific populations and prevent a post from being seen by certain people anywhere on Facebook. This feature serves as a companion to Preferred Audience.
A third component of Audience Optimization is “Audience Insights”, which is located within the main Insights area for your page. Click on a post that used Preferred Audience interest tagging. Then click on “Preferred Audience” to get insights into how people within those tags interacted with your post. This feature can be invaluable further targeting future posts and campaigns.
- Audience Insights – Learn more about how your custom audience is reacting to a post with interest tags. Audience insights show you how each interest tag you set contributed to a post’s reach, clicks, shares and likes.
While many business owners still think paying for ‘boosted’ posts is the only way to get more engagement out of their content, using these free and simple features can help to get more mileage out of your existing content. Facebook has added these features in an attempt to connect the right viewers with content relevant to them. Hopefully this will lead to a better experience for both users and marketers on Facebook. Audience optimization may not get you the same reach that a paid campaign will, but the viewers that do see your posts will be more likely to engage.
