How to Target Great Facebook Posts | Part 1 - Getting Started

Welcome to part three in our series on Writing Great Facebooks posts! Now that you understand the basics of how to identify great Facebook posts, it's time to add to your knowledge by learning how to target your posts effectively. 

Why Should I Target My Great Facebook Posts?

That's a great question! Targeting is important for three reasons:

1. Writing great Facebook posts for your Facebook Page is all about delivering useful content when it is needed, to the right person. Different personas in your community are going to have their own unique problems that need to be solved, so every piece of content you write isn't necessarily useful for everyone in your community.
2. Targeted content gets more positive feedback because it's reaching more people who need it and fewer who don't. We've already covered how important positive interactions are for great Facebook posts. More positive interactions on your posts will help your content appear in the Facebook News Feed more often, and if you're producing your own content, it also helps your blog posts rank higher for search engines.
3. Targeted content also recieves less negative feedback. Negative feedback can hurt your post reach, preventing you from showing up in the News Feed as often. We covered which negative feedback you should look out for and where to find it in Facebook Insights in part two of our series on writing great Facebook posts.

Now that you understand the benefits of targeting your Facebook posts, let's talk about how you can get started.

How Do I Target a Great Facebook Post?

As with just about anything, it all starts with a good plan. In this case your plan is to develop one or more personas who embody a subgroup of similar people in your community. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal community members and customers, they're not real people, but they do represent them. HubSpot has made a great tool that can help you when you're creating a buyer persona. 

Ideally you want a persona to have a mix of personal information, for example anything from what their daily routine looks like to how many kids they have and what their annual salary might be, professional information, like their job title, responsibilities, and pain points, and of course you'll want to understand the problems that each of your personas face and what motivates them, so you can understand how to solve their problems in a way that makes sense for them.

Do I Really Need All of Those Details for My Persona?

Yes! Targeting is all about the little details. For example, two personas, one in a junior position and one in a senior position might both face a very similar or even the exact same problem, however it probably doesn't make sense for them to both attempt to solve their problem in the same way. Though their goals are the same, their paths to reaching them will probably both be completely different!

Say that these two personas both are both responsibile for pushing forward new ideas in their organizations. 

• For the more senior employee, advice on approaching this problem could be very straightforward, with strategies for leveraging their connections with other managers, getting their own direct reports excited and onboard, and otherwise leveraging their authority and expansive network within the company to push forward their latest and greatest ideas.
• For the junior employee with this same problem, the solution actually looks very different. This junior person hasn't been with the company as long. He doesn't know as many people in the organization, and those that he works with most are other junior employees. He also has very little or no authority over other employees, so to solve the same problem he might instead need to focus on strategies for selling the idea to his own manager, as well as how to improve his presentation skills and create a great pitch. Since he's not as experienced these skills won't be as developed as a senior employee in the same industry, but improving them will make him more capable of selling his idea to people with the authority and connections to turn his idea into a new product.

Personas are an effective way to make sure you take these differences into account, so that rather than pushing out one size fits all advice, you're instead getting useful, actionable advice that is uniquely positioned to solve the problem in a way that makes sense for them, in front of a prospect.

Content that is more useful and immediately actionable sets you apart from other sources and will help you build an engaged community of people who you can actually turn into customers.