So, How Does It Work?

Audience Optimization on Facebook provides two configuration features:

Preferred audience
Audience restrictions

Setup A Preferred Audience

Brands can add tags to describe the interests of people who are most likely to enjoy and engage with your post. For example, a sports post might include tags for the league, team, and players in the story. Preferred Audience uses interest tags to help prioritize Page posts in News Feed for each unique reader based on the topics that are most likely to engage them. Interest tags do not limit reach.

Preferred Audience interest tags are created from popular Facebook open graph pages, Facebook Ads tags and other Facebook-specific data sets.

Preferred audience enabling does not stop posts from appearing anywhere on Facebook. Posts made to your Page with Preferred Audience will help improve visibility for the right segments of your Page's audience. These segments are more likely to see the post. Each person has different levels of interest in a topic -- from extremely high interest to moderate to zero. For example, the follower of a sports publisher might be a super-fan of a particular player, be quite interested in that player's team, be moderately interested in the overall league, and not at all interested in another sport. Together, interest tags and a person's level of interest in each topic can help determine how likely a person is to be interested in a particular post.

In tests, conducted by Facebook, Facebook reports that organic reach stays about the same while engagement goes up. Interest tags help Facebook better match content with audiences, prioritizing posts on particular topics for the subscribers who are most likely to be interested in those topics. Interest tags don't limit a post's distribution — they just help it reach the most relevant subset of an audience.

Setup Audience Restrictions

Brands can limit the visibility of their content to specific demographics and prevent a post from being seen by people anywhere on Facebook with this part of the tool. This is an existing feature that functions as a companion to preferred audience building.

Let's Get Going

First, the Audience Optimization is available for all English language Pages only at this time, so Page admins need to ensure that they have the tool enabled in order to make use of the feature.

To turn on the Audience Optimization tool, follow these steps:
Go to your Page.

1. Click 'Settings' in the top right-hand corner.
2. Click 'General' in the tab column on the left side of the page.
3. Find the row labeled 'Audience Optimization for Posts' in the middle of the page and click 'Edit.'.
4. Check off the box that allows you to begin using the feature.

Where to find the tool

Page post composer – in your composer, use the targeting icon to add tags and restrictions.