Overview
Pages publish a wide variety of content across many topics, and the more information we have about who is most likely to be interested and engage with a post can help us deliver the right content to the right audience.
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.
How It Works
Audience Optimization consists of three related features:
Preferred audience
Add tags to describe the interests of people who are most likely to enjoy your post. For example, a sports post might include tags for the league, team and players in the story. Preferred Audience uses interest tags to help prioritize Page posts in News Feed for each unique reader based on the topics that are most likely to engage them. Interest tags do not limit reach.
Audience restrictions
Limit the visibility of your content to specific demographics and prevent a post from being seen by people anywhere on Facebook with this part of the tool. This is an existing feature that functions as a companion to preferred audience.
Audience insights
Learn more about how your audience is responding 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.
Once a post is published, insights for preferred audience help publishers understand how different subsets of people are responding by showing reach and engagement metrics for each interest tag that the publisher set. Publishers can keep their finger on the pulse of their audience's expanding interests on Facebook by watching how particular tags perform over time.
Read about some tips and tricks for tagging on our Best Practices Page .
Getting Started
Audience Optimization is available for all English language Pages, so Page admins should ensure that they have the tool enabled.
If your Page has more than 5,000 likes, the Audience Optimization features will be automatically turned on. You can begin adding tags to your posts.
To turn on the Audience Optimization tool, follow these steps:
- Go to your Page.
- Click 'Settings' in the top right hand corner.
- Click 'General' in the tab column on the left side of the page.
- Find the row labeled 'Audience Optimization for Posts' in the middle of the page and click 'Edit.'.
- Check off the box that that allows you to begin using the feature.
Getting started is easy. Audience Optimization is available to all English-language Pages and accessible through the following platforms:
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What are you launching?
Audience Optimization, a new organic targeting tool that help publishers reach and engage their audience on Facebook and better understand who their stories are resonating with. Includes three features: Preferred Audience, Audience Restrictions and new Audience Insights. Preferred Audience helps publishers get their posts seen by the people in their audience who are most likely to be interested in a particular topic, leading to increased engagement that benefits their Page as a whole. Audience Restrictions let publishers prevent a post from being seen by people who shouldn't see it (people outside of a particular location, age range, etc.).
Q: I have been using Interest Targeting. What is the difference?
Preferred Audience replaces Interest Targeting. The older feature prevented people who didn't match the interests assigned to a post from seeing it in News Feed, limiting its reach. With Preferred Audience, interest tags help prioritize posts that are most likely to be engaging for a person without limiting visibility for others. If your goal is to prevent a post from being seen by people for whom it isn't relevant, Audience Restrictions work across Facebook to limit by location (include or exclude locations), language, age or gender.Q: How do I turn on or access the new Audience Optimization features?
Pages with more than 5,000 fans automatically have the feature turned on; smaller pages can visit page Settings to activate it. Once activated, publishers can set Interest tags for individual posts in Composer, the API for posts or Instant Article feeds.
Q: What are Preferred Audience interest tags based on? Can I create my own custom interest tags?
Preferred Audience interest tags are created from popular Facebook open graph pages, Facebook Ads tags and other Facebook-specific data sets. No, you cannot create custom tags.
Q: Does Preferred Audience limit your reach? Does using it guarantee that the people in the subsets you tag are definitely going to see the post, or are they more likely to see the post?
Preferred audience does not stop posts from appearing anywhere on Facebook. Posts made to your Page with Preferred Audience will help improve visibility for the right segments of your Page's audience. These segments are more likely to see the post. Each person has different levels of interest in a topic -- from extremely high interest to moderate to zero. For example, the follower of a sports publisher might be a super-fan of a particular player, be quite interested in that player's team, be moderately interested in the overall league, and not at all interested in another sport. Together, interest tags and a person's level of interest in each topic can help determine how likely a person is to be interested in a particular post.
Q: How does this impact organic reach?
In tests, we've seen that organic reach stays about the same while engagement goes up. Interest tags help Facebook better match content with audiences, prioritizing posts on particular topics for the users who are most likely to be interested in those topics. Interest tags don't limit a post's distribution — they just help it reach the most relevant subset of an audience.
Q: How many interest tags should I apply to a story? What types of tags work best?
Six to 10 tags have worked best for most posts (the maximum is 16). Include tags that describe the content in both specific and broad terms. For example, a sports story might include tags for players in the story, and the tag for the sports league. Read our Best Practices page for many more tips.
Q: I have Smart Publishing turned on. How does Audience Targeting work with this?
Preferred Audience doesn't affect posts created through Smart Publishing.Q: Can I add interest tags when posting to my page from a mobile device?
No. Interest tags currently must be assigned through the desktop web site.Q:What happens if I want to boost a tagged post or advertise a tagged post? Do I have to use the post's interest tags?
No. The boosted post will be treated as a regular ad, and you can set up the targeting separately.Q: When will Audience Optimization be available for non-English Pages?
We do not have immediate plans to support interest tags in languages other than English at this time. If and when this changes, we will update publishers and page admins.
