Impressions - January 2015 - 53

Figure 1
still-developing journey. Fortunately, Facebook has been doing some pretty amazing
things in this area as well.
Facebook currently is the best place for
niche targeting, which is the process of
identifying and connecting with audiences
precisely targeted to your specialty niche
interests. This is one of the fastest ways to
connect with people who are most interested in what you have to sell.
After all, people wear printed T-shirts
as an expression or personal statement. It
may be about expressing their beliefs or
their pride in being a member of a group.
They may be making political or lifestyle
statements, advertising a brand like Nike
or adidas, or championing a cause, like
ﬁghting cancer. Regardless of the motivation, the better your audience connection,
the more you'll sell.
This isn't about selling designs directly
to the consumer, even though that's an
excellent market. My intention is to show
you how to create sizable targeted audiences that you can not only leverage for
your beneﬁt, but also for that of your customers. It's like bringing all your friends
to the party. For this demonstration, I'll be
creating an audience of runners interested
in 5K and 10K fun runs.

WHERE DO YOU BEGIN?
First, create a fan page for your business or for the speciﬁc niche you'll target.
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Figure 2
This easily is done by choosing "Create
Page" from the main drop-down menu.
You have a choice of Local Business or
Place; Company Organization or Institution; Brand or Product; Artist Band or
Public Figure; Entertainment; or Cause
or Community. I usually choose one the
ﬁrst three.
It will take a few minutes to ﬁll out
the necessary information. Upload proﬁle and timeline cover images. Like your
page and choose whether you will be
commenting on it as yourself or as the
page administrator.
The next order of business is creating
your ﬁrst ad. I won't go into the design of
the actual ad; that will be for a later article. Creating it, however, is simple; it's located right below where you just ﬁnished
creating your fan page (Figure 1).
Just as you had several choices for creating fan pages, you have multiple options
for your ad objective (Figure 2). For your
purposes, the most common choices are:
* "Send people to your website"
* "Increase conversions on your
website"
* "Promote your page"
* "Raise attendance at your event"

I usually avoid paying to increase or
drive likes to my pages. I let the content
and community do that organically (nonpaid.) For this demonstration, we'll choose
"Send people to your website."

NARROWING THINGS DOWN
Now, it's time to start building your
audience. The goal here is to align your
audience with your targeted niche. The
search is based on people's interests,
which inherently can be broad. However,
the targeting-selection process narrows
them down quickly. Typically, I'll start
with broad interests, looking for audiences
in the millions. Here, we will be targeting
runners for a speciﬁc fun-run audience.
We'll start with a little research using FB
Graph Search. This is the search bar at the
top of every Facebook page, and you can
use it to search for people, places and things.
I started my search by typing "People who
like running." These are people who have
listed running as an interest in their proﬁles,
and it returned 9,748,350 results.
This is great starting potential, as it
shows a large general audience. I followed this with "groups about running"
and found dozens of existing groups. This
January 2015 | Impressions

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Impressions - January 2015

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