More and more, brands and businesses are turning to social ads<\/a> and custom audiences. You can do a lot of awesome, targeted messaging by focusing on the right audiences with your ads — whether you’re talking to a group of customers, a bunch of website visitors, or a list of subscribers<\/p>\n In this post, we\u2019ll talk you through ways to build custom audiences and lookalike audiences on all the major social media platforms, plus share a couple ideas of how you can put these audiences to the best use. <\/p>\n Best wishes for some well-targeted, highly successful ads!<\/p>\n There\u2019s a huge amount to cover with social media ads<\/a>. <\/p>\n Since this blog post focuses specifically on audiences, let\u2019s start there.\u00a0In general, an audience is going to be the bucket of people who will potentially see your ad. This group can be customized based on a variety of factors, which we\u2019ll get to in a minute.\u00a0<\/p>\n A custom audience<\/strong> is a step beyond the basic demographic and psychographic audience filters. A custom audience can be based on an outside source like a set of emails or website visitors or on the social media behavior of users.\u00a0<\/p>\n And then you have lookalike audiences<\/strong>, which take one of your custom audience and expand it to a larger group based on the qualities that the custom audience has in common. For instance, if all the people in your custom audience are interested in augmented reality, use social on a tablet, and have master\u2019s degrees, then a lookalike audience will include people who share these attributes, too.<\/p>\n As you can tell, there are many ways to slice and dice this information to build some really unique audiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n So let\u2019s get dive into some of the details, starting with the biggest and most robust social advertising networks \u2026 Facebook and Instagram. <\/p>\n Advertising for both Facebook and Instagram is combined into the Facebook Ads Manager<\/a>. You can run all your ads from here as well as create and manage all your audiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n Within Facebook, there are a handful of custom audiences that you can build<\/a>. This list includes:\u00a0<\/p>\n 1. A customer list \u2014 also known as a standard custom audiences.<\/strong><\/p>\n This audience is based on a list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs that Facebook can then take and match to its list of users. Typically you\u2019ll find that Facebook can match between 60 and 70 percent of the contacts on your customer list.\u00a0<\/p>\n 2. You can create a website custom audience.<\/strong><\/p>\n With this audience, instead of uploading a list of customer emails or phone numbers, you build the audience based on traffic to your website. Using Facebook Pixel tracking, you can create an audience of people who have visited any specific page on your website during a set time period.\u00a0<\/p>\n 3. You can create custom audiences based on app activity<\/strong><\/p>\n If you happen to have a mobile app or game, you can build audiences based on the actions that people take within your product.\u00a0<\/p>\n 4. You can use offline activity to build a Facebook audience.<\/strong><\/p>\n This could include things like conversations that happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores or information you collect on a spreadsheet.\u00a0<\/p>\n 5. Build an audience from Facebook and Instagram engagement<\/strong><\/p>\n These can be based on who engages with your posts, videos, events, and profile. You can even set the timeframe of this engagement so that you\u2019re building an audience of people who recently engaged, like in the last 90 days, or who engaged anytime in the past year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jumping quickly into the strategy of ads and audiences, we thought this nugget from a recent Jon Loomer blog<\/a> post was really interesting. In the blog post, they shared that the most popular Instagram audience strategy is lumping all audience types and time windows together into one large chunk \u2014 like, everyone who engaged with your profile in the last 365 days, for instance.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n As you might guess, there is so much more you can be doing with these audiences!<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a closer look at engagement audiences for instance: When it comes to these custom audiences, we quite liked this tip from social media today<\/a>:Building \u201cwarm\u201d audiences of people who have engaged with your content within a recent timeframe. Video in particular is a useful engagement and attention metric. So, say you create a ‘warm’ audience of people who’ve watched a certain amount of video from your page. From there, you can create a Lookalike Audience based on the warm audience, which will allow you to expand your reach to include people who share similar behaviors to that initial, warm, engaged group.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Jon Loomer blog has a few favorite audience tips, too, specifically around building engagement-based audiences. These include:<\/p>\n This gets at the custom audience type of pixel tracking and website \/ profile visits.\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u2019ve talked to lots of brands that start out with targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns. Needless to say that approach isn\u2019t always the most effective.<\/p>\n Customers visit your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. Perhaps they\u2019re not looking to buy your product at all. The key is to match your custom advertising audiences<\/a> to those shoppers\u2019 intents. Over the past year at Buffer we\u2019ve created various audiences based on the subject matter our visitors are interested in<\/a> learning about. We have a custom audience for traffic to all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, customer experience, case studies, etc. That allows us to be hyper-focused on what type of content we deliver, which helps to drive down costs.<\/p>\n We have a whole podcast about it if you want to check out<\/a>. <\/p>\n As you\u2019ll find with all of these social networks, they\u2019re not quite as robust with ads offerings as Facebook and Instagram. But that\u2019s okay! There\u2019s still plenty of customization you can do.For Pinterest, you have a few options for what to create when it comes to customer audiences.<\/p>\n You can build audiences<\/p>\n The visitor audience is based on a Pinterest tag, very much like the Facebook pixel. The Pinterest tag is a piece of JavaScript code you can install on your website to gather conversion insights and to build audiences that you can then target, based on actions taken on your site.<\/p>\n The Pinterest engagement audiences are really interesting, too. For these, all you need is to confirm your domain with Pinterest, and then Pinterest will be able to check to see which Pinterest users have engaged with pins that link back to your website. So for instance, if 1,000 people had saved a pin of Buffer blog content, we could build an engagement audience based on this.\u00a0<\/p>\n Similar to the Facebook and Instagram engagement audiences, Pinterest gives you a handful of options to further customize this group. You can filter based on a specific URL, based on a pin category, or even based on the percentage of video that\u2019s been viewed.\u00a0<\/p>\n One interesting way that e-commerce brands can use this is to create audiences that are interested in particular product categories \u2014 people who click on certain links or certain Pins.\u00a0<\/p>\n With Twitter ads, you can build custom audiences based on <\/p>\n The flexible audiences feature<\/a> is similar in nature to some of the engagement audiences we\u2019ve talked about before. These audiences give Twitter advertisers a way to save combinations of audiences and subsets of audiences, based on factors like recency and frequency of interactions.<\/p>\n You can build custom audiences on LinkedIn based on a list of contacts that you upload or you can build audiences based on website data, captured using a LinkedIn tag.\u00a0<\/p>\n One interesting bit of audience customization that LinkedIn provides is with account-based audiences<\/strong>. Let\u2019s say that you want to get a certain percentage of Fortune 500 companies using your product; well, you can upload this list of accounts to LinkedIn and build a custom audience that focused on the stakeholders of these companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yes, there\u2019s a lot of interesting things you can do on LinkedIn if you\u2019re a business selling to other businesses. Then of course Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all great for selling your products and services direct to consumers.<\/p>\n That\u2019s right, and before we go, we\u2019d love to leave you with just a couple more ideas for how you can use these custom audiences in unique ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n I thought this tip from AdEspresso was pretty intriguing.<\/a>They boost a lot of their content to a wide audience and then create a custom audience based on people who click that content and visit the website. This custom website audience, then, is made up of people who have already shown a lot of intent and might be more primed to start a trial.<\/p>\n Another exciting way to use custom audiences is to think creatively about what you share with a custom audience of existing customers. Typically you might think of ads as a way to acquire<\/strong> more customers. But what if you used this list as a way to keep existing customers engaged<\/strong>? You can build a custom audience based on people who have shopped with you in the past or used your product before, but it\u2019s been awhile since they returned \u2014 a \u201csleepy\u201d audience of sorts.<\/p>\n And finally, there are some neat things you can do with custom audiences of newsletter subscribers. You can segment the list into audiences of engaged subscribers and disengaged subscribers and deliver unique content to each group. For the disengaged group in particular there\u2019s a lot of value in re-engaging: MailChimp ran an analysis of 60 million e-commerce purchases and 40 million email addresses from retailers<\/a> and found that a single inactive subscriber is still worth 32% of an active subscriber.<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nAn introduction to custom audiences<\/h2>\n
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How to Create Custom Audiences for Facebook and Instagram Ads<\/h2>\n
Strategy Ideas for Making the Most of Your Custom Audiences<\/h3>\n
With the robust filtering of Facebook\u2019s ads tool, you can build audiences of engagers based on a huge number of different factors like who has visited your Instagram profile<\/strong>, messaged you<\/strong>, or saved a post or an ad<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n
Another way to work with custom audiences is through retargeting.<\/h4>\n
For example, if you\u2019re an e-commerce brand and someone visits your website shopping for shoes, make sure that you segment those people into a custom audience<\/a> labeled \u201cshoe shoppers\u201d or \u201cfootwear.\u201d<\/p>\nHow to Create Custom Audiences for Pinterest Ads<\/h2>\n
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How to Create Custom Audiences for Twitter<\/h2>\n
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How to Create Custom Audiences for LinkedIn<\/h2>\n
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More Tips for Getting the Most out of Your Custom Audiences<\/h3>\n
\nAbout the Science of Social Media<\/h2>\n