Audience Optimization – What Do You Mean?

Audience Optimization, a new organic targeting tool from Facebook helps pages and publishers reach and engage the audience on Facebook and at the same time gain insights. With Audience Optimization on Facebook, Publishers can now increase the organic reach for their posts and publish content that the target group is most likely to engage with.

Facebook Audience optimization includes three features: Preferred Audience, Audience Restrictions and new Audience Insights.

Preferred Audience

Preferred Audience helps publishers get their posts seen by the audience segments that are most likely to be interested in a particular topic. With Preferred Audience, Publishers can reach audience segments beyond the organic reach as the tags prioritize, uniquely for each person, the topics that are most likely to interest them.

Audience Optimization is a step ahead of interest targeting as the publishers can now reach audiences who are most likely to engage with the posts around a topic. It differs from Interest targeting as interest targeting excluded audiences who didn’t match the interests assigned to a post. With Preferred Audience, interest tags will prioritize posts that are most likely to be engaging for a person without limiting visibility for other posts that are for the same topic.

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.

In tests conducted by Facebook, with preferred audience, the organic reach remains the same while the engagement increased. Six to Ten tags have worked best for most posts with the maximum at sixteen. According to Facebook Media, 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.

Takeaway

Stories that are of Interest to Audience are more likely to show in their News Feed making Publishers’ Stories seem more relevant.

Audience Restrictions

Audience Restrictions that works as a companion for Preferred Audience allows publishers to restrict the visibility of posts. The Audience Restrictions feature allows users to restrict visibility of posts, based on the location, language, age or gender. This is an existing feature that can be used alongside Preferred Audience options.

Takeaway

With Audience Restrictions, Publishers can prevent the stories from being seen by an audience segment.

Audience Insights

Audience Insights allows publishers to understand how the audience segments are engaging with the posts by viewing reach and engagement metrics.

Publishers can understand how different audience segments are responding by showing reach and engagement metrics for each interest tag. Publishers can see the interest tags that perform over-time making for a more relevant content experience for audiences.