
Facebook Interest Targeting
Reading Time ~ 8 minutes
Facebook is a attractive platform for any marketing specialist. With a tone of data collected from approximately 2 billion active users, Facebook has the resources to target us in detail for preferences, behaviors and habits etc. But if the facebook interest dates are really true?
Facebook Interest bases its model on information from our Timelines, keywords from pages we liked, apps we use, and each ads we clicked on. It looks useful and correct, but how accurate is the data? I think that it has happened to all of us to mislead Facebook with our online interactions during the years.
Have you ever clicked on an article with an opposing political position (BC) that you disagreed with? Or have you watched any of these quick-cooking videos even though you are not kidding on the microwave? And how many times you have returned and updated pages that you liked in high school or university? Yes, Facebook still believes these are your interests.

How well does Facebook know the interests of your target users? How do we use Facebook’s interests to effectively target our customers when we start a campaign?
These are the questions that we will try to answer in this article. Each advertiser don’t want to waste time and money targeting budgets and messages to disinterested and inappropriate users. Let’s see how exactly Facebook understands our interests.
What Facebook Knows About Our Preferences, Behaviors and Habits?
You may not have come across or heard, but there is a place on Facebook where you can find out what the platform thinks and knows about you. You can check it out here.
Let’s have a look what we like, how we interact with content etc.
As you can see, Facebook is not doing so well. Facebook thought I liked and interested in 10 people in my list. But in fact only 3 were the ones I would call “real interests”. For example, Cage The Elephant is my favorite Rock ‘n’ roll band and Roger Federer is my favorite tennis player.
After looked at all Facebook interest categories, about 30% of all interest covered my preferences. Facebook is not so great in understanding real interests, but it may be helpful in organizing information for a future campaigns.
How You Can Use Facebook Interest Targeting?
Be careful when you take a decision for creating user interests. You need to think a little bit about who you are targeting, and perhaps more importantly, who you do not want to include. What I mean is that you need to find out who is interested in your target market and vice versa who might not be interested.
Often Facebook thinks that most of my interests are similar like many Facebook accounts, because I have interacted with content with popular people. That’s why you should think it over if it is necessary to include these types of interests when targeting audiences, because this will lead to unwanted clicks.
Let’s set one up together. Let’s say we are the organizer of a music event for The Rock ‘n’ roll band Kings of Lion. We would like to promote the event as launching Facebook campaign. You can see bellow limited targeting with the interest of people who liked the Kings of Lion. We use the narrow further option for Alternative rock and the exclusion option for hard rock, heavy metal music, trash metal. By exploring in detail the product or service you have, it’s easy to narrow or increase the audience.

Let’s follow one more example. This time we will be promoting a PPC conference event. I will target users who are interested in related topics on websites but should also be interested in the Google Ads PPC platform:

If you want, you can add even more criteria. In addition, there is an added AdWords interest that should help you more accurately target and reach your goal.
If we wish, we could continue to narrow the audience if we think the reach is wide.
Some Ideas For Brainstorming
If you wish to make a systemic model for targeting audiences in your future Facebook campaigns, you can use these questions when starting a brainstorming process.
- Which are the most visited favorite websites?
- What technologies and tools do they use?
- What are the formal leaders in the industry?
- What books / magazines / blogs do they read?
- What kind of events does your target attend?
- Which celebrities, athletes, musicians, etc. would be less familiar to the masses?
When you start discussing different ideas, always ask yourself: Is there another audience who is interested in our product / service. If yes, try adding one.
Once you’ve formulated your ideas, be sure to combine them with other targeting options on Facebook (location, demographics, behaviors, language, etc.)
Good luck!
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14 November, 2019 #Interesting Funny Settings 1 Like
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