The Power of Social Media Targeting with Custom Audiences for Businesses

Businesses can execute their social media advertising campaigns more efficiently when they create and target custom audiences. Social media platforms offer your business various features to build a custom target audience that is a result of your specific filters and preferences.

Facebook and Instagram Custom Audience: Facebook and Instagram offer custom audience features that use a combination of user profile information and your business’ customer base information to locate and reach your desired target audience. Your business can create a Customer File Custom Audience by simply uploading its customer database information onto Facebook, such as email, phone number, address, first and last name, purchase history, etc. Your company’s social media advertising campaign can also target users based on Video Engagement. With this option, your company can distinguish its target audience based on how long a user watched a specific video your company posted, or how much of the video they watched overall. Your business can create a target audience based on Website Traffic. This feature allows you to create a custom audience based on how frequently the users visit your website, whether a purchase was made, and how recently they visited the website. Facebook also offers your company a Remarketing feature. With this feature, your company can choose to remarket a campaign that targets a specific type of customer. This target audience can be chosen from recent website visitors, company email lists, other customer data, and platform data from those who have interacted with your social media pages.

Google AdWords Target Custom Ad Groups: Google AdWords offers businesses the option for custom au­­dience targeting with ad groups. Your business can use social media advertising to reach people based on their interest in products or services like yours. Target audiences created with this feature are a called Custom Affinity Audiences, which are mostly used by companies going from TV to online marketing. These custom ads are based on specific interests from a wide range of categories within a user’s search and browse history on all Google Platforms and YouTube.  Your company’s Custom Affinity Audience can be based on keywords regarding specific interests that apply to your product or service, URLs from your company or competition’s website content, the types of places users are interested in, and different apps that users are interested in or using. Google also has Custom Ad Groups that allow your business to reach its target audience based on life events, how actively users are searching in your market, and customer intent, such as how much research a user is doing your company on sites and apps.

Twitter Custom Audience Demographics: Twitter offers businesses a variety of filters to reach their target audience that focus less on user profile data, and more on conversations happening within the network, user handles, and keywords. Your business can select the demographics, countries, languages, genders, and more of their target audience for each post. Twitter also allows your business to target specific users who recently visited your website, who left your website without making a purchase, and who downloaded your app but have not engaged with it recently. If your company wants to target an audience who uses specific technology, Twitter has a feature for that as well. Your business can choose to specifically target users that are accessing the site via iOS devices, Android devices, Blackberry devices, laptops and desktop computers, mobile devices, and new devices.  Your business can also assign keywords to reach their target audience that are broad, specific phrases, and negative matches.  In assigning keywords, your company can customize the target audience by regulating which searches it will appear in.

LinkedIn Matched Audience: LinkedIn’s custom audience strategy also focuses more on user handles, keywords, and conversations happening within its network, and less on profile data. Last year, LinkedIn added a new custom audience feature which made it more competitive with the social media advertising features already available on other social media platforms. LinkedIn’s “Matched Audiences” feature enabled business profiles to target users through matching their business and personal email addresses. This feature offered Business-To-Business advertisers an extremely advanced email match strategy that enables them to narrow in on a more specific email targeting list. This feature requires the finalized list length to be a minimum of 300 matched emails, so your business may have to upload over 500 emails to produce the minimum requirement of 300 matches. Although the list may take up to 48 hours to generate, it is extremely useful for a business’ social media advertising strategy.