Want to advertise to the friends of the people who are already fans of your company on Facebook? Now you can, thanks to the “friends of connections” targeting feature that was just rolled out by the social networking site.
According to a note posted to the Facebook Ads Page, the functionality allows you to “expand your audience reach by delivering your ads to the friends of people already connected with your Page, Application, Group or Event.” When those people see the ad, they’ll see that their friends are fans.
It’s not hard to see why this has potential to expand your audience. Although Facebook Page ads already note when your friends are fans, by being able to target these users, you’re talking about instantly being able to reach hundreds if not thousands or millions (depending on the size of your fan base and budget) of new people who will then be exposed to your brand by way of the powerful endorsement of a friend.
Currently, you can only target fans of Pages (or Groups, Apps, or Events) where you’re an admin. It would be interesting for that to be expanded to target fans of any Page (like Mashable (
) for instance), though it’s also easy to see how that could be abused in competitive areas. Nonetheless, if you have money to invest in growing your Facebook (
) audience, this could be an option worth considering.
What do you think about this type of targeting? Let us know in the comments.
