People that like, comment or share your messaging are your advocates. It’s word of mouth advertising in the digital age, and with engagement audiences you can connect with them. 

The Facebook platform goes through innumerable iterations, upgrades and algorithm tweaks over a year. Most of them are by-the-by, but occasionally there is an update of material importance to our ability to generate revenue. The ability to target people that have liked, commented or shared your material is a biggie.

Word of Mouth Advertising

Think about it, this is word of mouth advertising. These people are literally bringing their friends into a conversation about your messaging. They are advocating for you and are one of the best audiences you could possibly target.

Creating Engagement Audiences

In order to create engagement audiences, you need to have a Facebook page linked to your ad account. Once this is there you can literally create audiences of people that have engaged with your posts/ads over the previous 365 days.

Imagine running a series of messaging on your page and then being able to re-target anyone that engaged with this messaging.

It’s a gold mine and a refinement to the digital advertising approach that is simply not available on other digital platforms.

Drawbacks

For reasons unknown to us, an engagement audience also includes people that expressed ‘anger’ towards your ad. Perhaps Facebook will provide the opportunity to exclude these people in the future but for now they will be added to any audience you create with engagement audiences.

Additionally, the ability to segment engagement audiences isn’t quite as sophisticated as website re-targeting audiences (but oddly the time period is longer).

Double additionally, audiences need to be over 1,000 people which may account for the 365 day time period ie many smaller businesses may simply not have the engagement (ironically because Facebook killed organic reach!).

Engagement Audience Lookalikes

We have also found that creating lookalike audiences from engagement audiences is a good way to find new customers. The Facebook platform is insanely powerful at generating larger audiences. When it knows that people are ‘interested’ in a certain type of messaging find 10,000s more people with similar interests is its forte. If you start creating engagement audiences maybe try an ad or two using it’s lookalike as well.

– Rukmal
Co-founder of The Plus Ones, Rukmal lives and breathes digital marketing.