As Facebook tightens the reins on organic reach, every dollar spent toward boosting your page’s content is important. Custom audiences are a great way to target your community, but they could also be used to exclude your Facebook detractors. There’s no sense paying to promote a post to someone who’d rather not see it.
Knowing who your detractors are is important — almost as important as maintaining a healthy targeted audience. With your detractors known, you can not only exclude them from future promoted content, but you can exclude people like them.
The premise here is to create two custom audiences: one of your known detractors, and then a lookalike audience of your detractors. You’ll then exclude both of those audiences from your paid promotion, theoretically decreasing the likelihood that a detractor will see your paid content.
1) This is theoretical — I’ve not yet tested this process to analyze its efficacy on sentiment related to promoted content. This is as much an exercise in learning to analyze Facebook data as it is an optimization of ad spend.
2) I’m no OpenGraph expert; it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there’s a much easier way to extract this data.
3) I work cheap. Everything described here is freely available. I’m sure there’s a wonderful tool that optimizes your Facebook ad spend to do this stuff. I’m not buying it, please don’t pitch me.
Part 1: Know Your Haters
To create the an audience of detractors, download and install the Power Query add-on for Microsoft Excel. I won’t walk you through that. You’re smart.
1) From the Power Query tab, choose From Other Sources > From Facebook.
2) Enter your NUMERIC Facebook Page ID (you can try your username, but it’s been hit-and-miss for me). Choose Feed, click OK.
3) To authenticate Power Query to Facebook, click Sign In.
4) Enter your Facebook credentials and accept any defaults. To avoid any conflicts, use the Facebook account with the highest-level Page admin privileges you have access to.
6) Once authenticated, Power Query will return your request (in this case, the Page Feed). Use column filters to remove anything posted by your page — you’re looking for rows of wall posts from Facebook users.
This method involves isolating the Facebook IDs for anyone who’s posted on your wall. That’s good data, but filtering based on comments would be great, too. Unfortunately, every time I query the ‘comments’ field the results are empty. If you’ve worked around this, leave a comment below.
7) With wall posts isolated, click the expand button next to the “from” column header. Select only the id field. Click OK.
This will populate the “from” column with the Facebook IDs of the individual users.
8) Click “Apply and close” from the Power Query ribbon to load the query results to your Excel Worksheet.
9) If necessary, remove all the positive or neutral posts — you want a worksheet of just the bad stuff.
10) With a worksheet of detractor posts, remove all the columns except for the “from.id” column containing the Facebook IDs of your detractors. Save the worksheet as a CSV for import into Facebook.
Part 2: Create Exclusion Audiences
11) Create a custom audience using your CSV of user IDs. Call it something like “Detractors.”
12) Once your Detractors audience is created, creating a Lookalike-Detractors audience is only a few clicks away (be sure to fine-tune the precision of the lookalike audience based on what makes sense for your brand. For example, if your brand sells cutting-edge tech widgets, consider adding “Technology Late Adopters” to your detractor lookalike audience. Remember: these are the people — the haters, and the people like them — you’ll be excluding from your ads and promoted content.
13) Using Facebook’s Power Editor, exclude your Detractors and Lookalike-Detractors custom audiences from your paid content. More on the Power Editor, and audience exclusion, is available here.
Parting Thoughts
Identifying detractors and creating lookalike audience based on their Facebook activity should be an effective method to keeping your promoted content out of harms way. In this case, the more detractors your brand has, the stronger the lookalike audience becomes and the better the odds of keeping them out of your paid content stream. But use caution — there’s no guarantee that Facebook has enough data to separate detractor lookalike from your target audiences, so you need to make the demographics, behaviors, and lists of detractors as specific as possible.
Photo credit: TheLotusCarroll, Flickr
The post How to Identify Facebook Detractors and Exclude Them From Paid Content appeared first on Dubelclique.
