Custom Audiences Craft Highly Targeted Ads on Facebook

Facebook’s new Custom Audiences is a powerful new tool that has been making waves in the social media community. It’s an easier way for businesses of any size to reach out to people that matter to them such as potential prospects.

Custom Audiences allows you to create lists of people you want to target your Facebook ads based on a list of unique Facebook IDs, email addresses, phone numbers, app user IDs, or Apple’s IDFA.

Range of Possibilities:

• Message existing customers with coupons or specials on Facebook. For example, a small restaurant can reach out to customers who dined with them over a year ago with an ad for a free appetizer.
• Reach out to new customers in a targeted area, but also exclude existing customers from the campaign. A shoe store might try to send out their information to new customers in its area by excluding people who are already signed up for its mailing list.

Getting started with Custom Audiences is relatively easy just upload your customer email lists. Once contacts have been uploaded, you can target matched users with ads for your site, Facebook Page or mobile app.

Check out Facebook instructions for creating a custom audience: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api#create

There is no max on the total number of users that can be added to an audience, but up to 10000 users can be added at a given time.

It is worthy to note that it may take up to 1 hour before the users are added to the audience. Don’t refresh that screen!

Additionally, for those concerned about their privacy, Facebook doesn’t share the personal info people put on Facebook without their approval. People will continue to have the same control over the ads they see on Facebook.