Facebook Audience Development 

Preparation

• You will need to have already completed stage 1, outlined in this article.
• You will need to be familiar with creating a Facebook advert and should have considered the design of your advert to attract a wide audience. For example, the advert should have some longevity so should not be about a specific screening or event.
• You will need to be prepared to spend some money on this Facebook advert. The minimum spend per day for a Facebook advert (not a boosted post) is £5, you should run this for at least 4 days.

Implementation

• You are going to create a Lookalike Audience on Facebook: this helps you create new audiences based on similar characteristics or traits from your current customers.
• Go to the Facebook page you manage and from the drop-down menu on the right, go to Create Ads.
• Select from the objectives offered. Page Likes is now ‘Engagement’ for example, click on the Information symbol next to each option to understand more about each option and select the correct objective for you. You may want Page Likes, or you may want people to sign-up to your newsletter. Think about this upfront, and consider how you might design your advert to achieve your objective.

• Underneath the Custom Audiences field, select Create New, and select Lookalike Audience 

• Click in the box titled Source, and you will see your options in a dropdown menu. These are the options on which you can base your Lookalike Audience. There should be the Page Audience for your current page and there should also be the Customer Data you uploaded in stage 1. Select the Customer Data file.

• You can then also select a location: you may want to target in your geographic area.
• You then also need to select an Audience Size. The smaller the audience size (i.e. 1 or 2) the more in common they will have with your existing customers, but you will target less people overall. A larger audience size (i.e. 9 or 10) will be less precise, but will offer you more reach.
• You can go on and create your advertisement in the same way as you usually would. Remember; this advert will be seen by people who aren’t current customers, but are high likely to be interested, keep your objective in mind, do not try to communicate multiple messages, focus on getting your audience to do one thing: Like Your Page, Sign Up, Visit Your Website, whichever you decide, just keep it simple.
• It can take between 6 and 24 hours for Facebook to create your Lookalike Audience, don’t worry about this, simply create your advert and follow the whole advertising process through to the end.
• When Facebook has processed your data, it will set your advert live and you will be targeting everyone on Facebook who is a) in your geographic location and b) shares similar characteristics with your current customers. Statistics from Facebook say organisations can double their conversions by using this method, put simply, this means you may double the number of people currently engaging with your Page because you are targeting more intelligently.
• Your advert will run for however many days your budget allows, and over that time you will see your audience increase – as such, you will be reaching your customer database both on social media and via the e-newsletters or direct mail you send out.
• When you have completed this activity, the next step is engaging your new audience effectively so that you are creating a vibrant and interested community. Facebook wants your audience to be engaged, because it keeps them in the platform. You want your audience to be engaged, because they buy more tickets. The next article will cover simple tactics for getting started with improving engagement on Facebook.