Facebook has just begun to roll out their new feature of targeted posts for brand pages. Currently you can schedule, add a location and tag people in your posts, but now Facebook have followed the lead of LinkedIn by allowing you to control which fans of your page see your posts in their news feeds.

The filters you can use include gender, educational status, relationship status, interested in, age, location and language. These are similar filters to those already offered by Facebook advertising. The targeted posts will be able to reach the people most likely to be interested in the specific content you are sharing, meaning the appropriate users can be reached with relevant messages, and the users unlikely to be interested will not be put off by unrelated content.

Facebook says that by targeting your posts will ensure that ‘only the most relevant people will see them in their news feeds.’

The feature is already used on LinkedIn company profiles, and as with the Facebook targeting posts, the success can be determined by how large your audience on the platform already is, to see real value in segmenting your audience.

There is also the risk of missing users that do not have the specific types of information on their profiles included, which could mean they are missed from your targeted posts. It is also important to remember that the posts will also appear on your timeline, so if you do not want all your fans to be able to see the posts, you will need to hide them from your timeline.

However being able to target your posts can be a very powerful way of reaching your specific audience types with targeted messages, using the data Facebook users include in their profiles.

How to target your Facebook page posts