Recently a new Facebook feature rolled out of beta that can provide brands with a viable process to connect their offline CRM databases to those users on Facebook. Now, this process of custom audience list targeting has just rolled out to all brands who advertise on Facebook.
This new feature can be a significant enabler for a brand, as most have larger customer databases outside of the social sphere (after years of traditional CRM outreach) than they have engaged on their social properties.
With Facebook’s new targeting capabilities, brands can bridge the connection of their offline data through social channels. By targeting the exact individuals that the brand already has or had a relationship with, the impact of the targeted reach can be greatly enhanced.
With the new Power Editor, the brand has the ability to identify “who” they want to target beyond the general parameters that have been available. This applies to current customers, prospects, people who like specific products, lapsed users, etc… The ability to take these offline lists and create custom audiences via Facebook’s ad platform is a major step forward for the platform and allows a greater level of targeting to a base that has already established a self-selected affinity towards the brand at some point in that customers brand life cycle.
Brands can create lists based on email addresses, phone numbers, etc.. that represent the groups of people in a CRM database. These elements are then matched to Facebook’s own records to create the custom lists.
In terms of ownership of the data, Facebook does not receive the brands customer data fully. The data is protected and resides on your local computer, then the data is imported via hashes. Facebook then matches the hashes to it’s own records and deletes the data. All that remains is a custom target list. This list is then tied to the individuals Facebook ad account. No other advertisers can use the list.
My recent discussions with Facebook state that their clients have seen a higher ROI based on beta interactions. This applied to higher conversion rates, lower cost per fan, lead or reengaged users than with other campaigns.
Brands have the ability to create unlimited lists at no cost and have the ability to keep audiences up to date. One additional benefit, is that it is possible to map the custom lists to those who have and have not liked the page.
This option is not available at the page level, but only as part of the advertising platform. The ability to marry offline data with Facebook’s social graph to further amplify existing connections is a key addition to the platform.
Follow Tom Edwards @BlackFin360
I think a service like this is highly interesting for organisations which have there customers data already and want to adress them as well via social media eg Facebook.
Do you have any experience if this form of addressing customers must be approved by customers as well? In particularly i mean when i sing up somewhere for a product can they just target me than on Facebook or do they need to include this than as well into their own TOS by signing up for certain service i allow them to “advertise” me via 3rd parties like Facebook ? in particularly i mean the legal side ?
Juergen,
Great question. I have requested additional information from Facebook to confirm the carry over of the TOS. My personal opinion is that most opt-in’s are for brand related communication that was not specific to medium. As long as it is the brand leveraging the data per the Facebook work flow this should not violate TOS.
This is really interesting especially for Facebook clients in Europe as there are kind of much harder policies when it comes to SPAM and things like this. What would be interesting how Facebook will deal with this i will guess they will ignore it first as always, but things like do they have to “flag” ads like this as well on Facebook we will see…