Facebook’s New Location Targeting within a Mile of a Business

Facebook’s mobile omnipresence and drive for location sharing abilities has manifested with their new launch of super-targeted local advertising and virtual location targeting that’s geared towards getting consumers to visit nearby brick-and-mortar stores. Before long, physical businesses will have the capability to target ads to potential customers that are within a certain distance of their store’s location, which is essentially known as location targeting. Advertisers can predetermine a radius of their location as small as a mile if they wish and their ads will display on consumer’s web browsers or mobile phones. These new and innovative Local Awareness advertisements will be ready for business owners in the U.S. shortly and worldwide over the upcoming months.

Facebook’s hyper-targeted local advertising has been in the works for a while now. It obtained Rel8tion back in January 2011, which already implemented this type of ad targeting. Then, VP Carolyn Everson had the notion in June 2012 that location-conscious mobile phones could possibly one day facilitate hyper-targeted local Facebook ads, and so the plan took root and moved forward. Although the ads are in real-time, ultimately brick-and-mortar businesses could have the ability to pre-bid to hyper located audiences and reveal them to potential customers as they enter the targeted area.

Today, with more than 1 billion mobile phone users, several of which provide Facebook complete access to their specific location along with laptop users who volunteer key information including their location through their IP address and the city they currently live in, has easily provided Facebook all the information it needs to turn hyper local advertising into a reality. Thanks to its latest launch of its ‘Nearby Friends’ feature, Facebook advertising also has real-time location access on people using that particular tool.

Businesses can select an address from their Facebook page or simply key in their address, set up their radius, age range, gender, add a message and photo, and Facebook advertising will route the targeted ads to people close by. They can even choose to add directions in their ad through a unique button that will automatically launch a map app on the user’s mobile phone.

How easy would it be to simply walk down the block and receive an ad for a nearby clothing store or bar-and-grill that’s located right around the corner from where you are? Undoubtedly the ads wouldn’t be as effective if they included the whole city. But by focusing on consumers within just a mile, Facebook advertising can literally drive people to nearby brick-and-mortar businesses leading to actual sales. That’s cutting-edge marketing and something that local businesses are very interested in and currently can’t get anywhere else.

Ultimately, Facebook could potentially combine its ad network and retargeting capabilities with hyper location targeting so that virtually any business you frequent could target you with a relative ad in Facebook or even another kind of app when you’re close by. But for now, that’s in the future. As always, Facebook continues to seek new and better ways to make money.

It’s crucial to stay on top of the latest social media changes in order to successfully stay in the game. Facebook and other social media platforms are constantly changing. Therefore, if you need help effectively managing your social media platform, let Bright Age help.