Experimenting with setting up an advert on Facebook today I noticed an interesting option, the practical application of which became apparent to me immediately.

You can target people who already have a connection to a page, group, event or application you administer. (The boxes auto-complete and only let you enter the names of entities that you’re an administrator of.
Have a think about that for a moment…
Mutually beneficial targeting
I set up a couple of Facebook pages for local businesses, they don’t compete with each other, nor do they particularly complement each other (a hair salon and a sports bar). But what if I was an admin for hundreds of pages/groups/apps/events? I could slice and dice the demographics and leverage what I know about people from that allegiance. Adverts would be better targeted because I would know a lot more about the users I was targeting than either advertiser can know on their own.
Of course any advertiser that outsources their advertising to an uber-admin would need to make clear that any campaigns should require their approval – after all it’s the first advertiser’s ‘fan base’ or audience that’s being specifically targeted, but that aside there are plenty of possibilities for both advertisers to win out of this.



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