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Facebook Makes News Feed More Relevant Again With Organic Audience Optimization

Facebook is helping publishers improve their organic reach and relevancy by offering a tool for targeting posts to interests, demographics and geography.

Tamar Weinberg on January 21, 2016 at 4:27 pm

In past years, organic reach on Facebook has been making very little impact, with marketers of late arguing that visibility is more of a “pay to play” phenomenon. Today, there’s promise for change on the horizon.

Until now, publishers on Facebook have had quite a tough time being the signal through the noise, finding that social posts have had very little reach. The reason, many argue, quite simply comes down to Facebook’s algorithm. There are more interesting stories that are of interest to a visitor at any given time.

With Facebook’s Audience Optimization tool, launched today, Facebook is rolling out an organic targeting feature that will help publishers reach specific subsets of audiences to better understand post engagement. Relevancy is increased when posts are tailored for a target audience. For example, post updates can be targeted to interests, such as “U2” or “basketball.” As Facebook’s announcement states, “… these tags prioritize, uniquely for each person, the topics that are most likely to interest them.”

Similarly, posts can be restricted from being viewed by other demographics. Got a product catering to the 21+ crowd? Make sure your 13–20 year old audience cannot see it. Have an offer that is not valid in the state of Maine? Block it from that update.

Both options are not mutually exclusive. Targeting and restrictions can be added for each post.

After a post is live, publishers can tell how well their content has performed. The example illustration below was targeted to several interests, and it is evident which ones performed best. This information can support marketers’ activity by showing them how well — or how poorly–their content is performing across the board.

Courtesy of Facebook

For more information on the feature, visit the Facebook Get Started page and Best Practices.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg is a professional hustler and author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on The Social Web. She blogs about all things tech, productivity, and social media customer success at Techipedia. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among other sites.