Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition
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The Facebook segmentation tool, part of its ads platform, is a great research tool to focus your web marketing campaign. Facebook’s ad creation tool lets you test different segments — potential members of your audience grouped by interest or trait — and see how many people fit into each one. That lets you see which segments you should speak to through social media.

To use the segmentation tool, follow these steps:

  1. Sign in to your Facebook account.

  2. Click the Advertising link at the bottom of the page.

  3. Click the Create an Ad button in the upper-right corner.

    Skip the Design Your Ad section. For the purpose of these steps, you’re just using the segmentation tool and won’t be building an actual ad.

  4. Scroll to section 2, Targeting.

  5. Select the attributes that you think match your audience.

    • Demographics: Segment your research by gender and age range.

    • Location: Geo-target your research.

    • Connections on Facebook: Target people who are already fans of pages you manage, or are not fans of pages you manage. That lets you further segment your research to avoid double-targeting or missing people.

    • Interests: Match activities and things folks say they like or follow.

  6. Look at the Estimated Reach number on the right side of the page.

    That tells you the size of your prospective audience.

Voila! Instant audience membership. Try different combinations of interests and demographics to find the “sweet spot”: targeted topics that are big enough to provide useful information and potential followers.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

John Arnold is the author of E-Mail Marketing For Dummies and coauthor of Mobile Marketing For Dummies.

Ian Lurie is President of Portent, Inc.

Marty Dickinson is President of HereNextYear.

Elizabeth Marsten is Director of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc.

Michael Becker is the Managing Director of North America at the Mobile Marketing Association.

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