Facebook ads – target by connections

Facebook is chalk full of groups and pages – you can join groups to support your love of campfires, your passion for sex on the beach or if you live in BC, your concerns about BC Harmonized Sales Tax. It’s easy to create groups, and for the right business, it can be a powerful marketing tool. One of Facebook’s three new targeting tools is “target by connections”, which allows an admin or owner of a Facebook group/event to create an ad targeting only members of a specific group, or to exclude members of a specific group.

This is an important feature for a number of reasons. Say you’re promoting an event in your town with a Facebook Ad. You set it up as a cost per click campaign, meaning you’re going to be spending 30-50 cents on every person that clicks on the ad. To get the most out of your advertising dollars, you don’t want to be spending that money on someone who has already RSVP’d to the event that clicks on the ad simply because they forgot what time the event starts. No, you want to focus on those who haven’t converted yet, and that’s exactly where this targeting feature comes into play.

Targeting by connections does present some complications by placing more power in the hands of people that are group admins or officers. For example, if I was a competitor of Nike and wanted to get an ad in front of people that had joined a particular Nike group, all you have to do is wiggle your way into an officer position of that group. Volunteer your time by removing inappropriate posts and posting pictures of your vintage Nike shoes and suddenly your trusted by the Nike group. Maybe you sell knock-off Nike products – now you have a targeted audience for your ad, and there’s over 2.5 million Facebook members that have joined a Nike group!

I’m sure it’s already going on for other reasons, but Facebook group administrators will be selling officer & admin positions within their groups simply for the sake of this ad targeting feature. Now the administrator of that silly I love campfires group with 250,000+ members can potentially generate a revenue stream for himself by selling access to his group to outdoor gear stores. The perfect ad headline would read Do You Love Campfires?…