Targeting and audience
Facebook can target very specific audiences. Detailed targeting includes:
- Demographics such as education level, schools, fields of study, as well as job titles and more.
- Interests including Business and industry, Entertainment, Family and relationships, Fitness and wellbeing, Food and drink, Hobbies and activities, Shopping and fashion, Sports and outdoors, Technology.
- Behaviours including Anniversary, Automotive, Charitable donations, Consumer classification, Digital activities, Ex-pats, Financial, Mobile device user, Mobile device user/device use time, Multicultural affinity, Purchase behaviour, Residential profiles, Soccer, Travel.
- More categories including Facebook categories.
Instagram is owned by Facebook, so to advertise on Instagram the campaigns are built through Facebook’s Business Manager. The same practice used in Facebook campaigns also applies to advertising through Instagram.
Remarketing on Facebook and Instagram
A really great way to ensure that you reach your target audience with advertising on Facebook and Instagram is through building a remarketing list. A remarketing list is built by using all of the URLs that you would expect your target audience to be visiting, so that we can then advertise to those users who visited those URLs afterwards. It is the tactic of serving targeted ads to people who have already visited or taken action on your website.
Although not as detailed in its targeting options as Facebook, Twitter also offers targeting beyond just demographic or location.
You can target other people’s followers – for example, if you had a message about public health or dentistry, you could target your advertising to those who follow the NHS’s Twitter account, @NHS. You can also target by keywords. This identifies your audience based on what terms they use in their tweets. You can set this list to: phrase, broad or exact, depending on preference but phrase is advised. As Twitter has a smaller audience cohort it is always worth researching if your audience can be reached through Twitter.
Campaigns around news and research stories, as well as postgraduate-focused campaigns, perform well on Twitter.
Whilst more expensive, targeting on LinkedIn is can be more detailed than other channels, as it is based on the user’s profile. You can target:
- location
- company name
- company industry
- company size
- job title
- job function
- job seniority
- member schools
- fields of study
- degrees
- member skills
- member groups
- member gender
- member interests
- member age (grouped 18-24, 25-34, 35-54, 55+)
- years of experience
- company followers
- company connections (targeting the first-degree connections of the employees at the company you select).
LinkedIn is a great channel for reaching organisations and prominent figures, so if research has been conducted in partnership with an organisation, for example, paid for can promote that to people who work for that business/industry.