Last month Facebook followed the example of the search advertising platforms by introducing Topic Targeting – a rough equivalent of Google and MSN’s Broad or Yahoo’s Advanced keyword targeting. Until then, when specifying one’s audience by interest, the advertiser had a choice of Broad Categories (available in English in Australia, New Zealand , the USA, Canada, India, Ireland, , Singapore, South Africa and the UK):
or Precise Interests:
Broad Category Targeting extracts information from users’ profiles, thus forming categories. Good as it sounds, it is a very high-level solution, so advertisers looking for more precision would opt for Precise Interest Targeting. The latter allows to target users by pages they Like. This time, the distinction may be too granular, with Facebook golfers following pages such as Golf, Golf Golf, Golfing, I Love Golf, etc. While Facebook helpfully suggests what related interests we may want to include while Interest-Targeting, we always run the risk of not including an item with non-standard spelling such as G.O.L.F. That’s why Facebook decided to come with a silver bullet.
Topic Targeting groups individual interests into topic groups. This way, the topic #Golf will encompass Golf, Golf Golf, Golfing, I Love Golf…
Does it really?
It seems that the estimated sum of users defined by the Precise Interest and Topic together is greater than that of the Topic alone, which goes against the definition of a Topic. In physics this is referred to as Mass Defect, where the total mass of nucleons is greater than the mass of the nucleus itself. Very clever, right? But what should advertisers make of it?
CONCLUSION:
Topic Targeting is a tool useful for efficiently defining interests without going too broad (Categories). When trying to be more precise, however, one should consider using both Topics and Precise Interests together. While less time/labour efficient, the combination of the two is the most effective way of defining the target user group.
