Ugly Shirts Fortune Lesson 5 Find Your Target Audience on Facebook

 In this lesson, I’ll show you how to find your perfect audience on Facebook.

You see, to sell our shirts, we need to be able to reach out to the people who are most likely to buy.

If you’re selling firefighter shirts, you want to only show your ads to firefighters and their family members. Not to anyone outside of the space.

Here is what happens. Facebook allows advertisers to target people who have “expressed an interest in or Liked a page related to” a specific topic.

This means that we can target people who liked a certain page or have mentioned it in a status update.

To do that, we’ll use the Facebook search box to find Facebook pages our target audience hangs around.

First, login to your Facebook account.

Next, we will click the magnifier icon at the top left corner; it’s just next to the Facebook logo if you are using a computer.

Upon clicking the magnifier, a search field will open up that looks like the screen capture below.

Next, we will enter our niche into the “Search Facebook” field.

In our case, since we’re selling shirts to firefighters, we will enter “firefighter” into the search field, then select “search for firefighter’’ from the drop down menu as suggested by Facebook.

Next, we will select on “Pages” on the left menu to filter out the search results, as we only want to look at firefighter related pages that are on Facebook:

Once you have done that, we will see a bunch of pages that are related to firefighters:

Scrolling down the page, we see a list of Facebook pages that are relevant to “Firefighter” as suggested by Facebook.

To run your ads to as many people as possible on Facebook, you want to collect a list of Facebook pages with huge followings which are related to your niche.

Here is what you should do: Copy each page related to “Firefighter” onto a note pad. That’s how you’ll gather a big list of highly targeted Facebook pages for your ad campaigns.

Also, remember to check out the pages one-by-one to see if they are the right audience to run ads to.

Once you have gathered your list of Facebook pages, study the pages to see if your target audience is there.

Go in and read people’s comments on each post. We want to see that the majority of firefighters are hanging around on the page and leaving comments, or better yet, commenting back and forth. An engaged audience is a profitable audience.

Remember this: just because a fan page has a high Like volume doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a page that we would want our ads to target.

This is because a Facebook fan page with a high Like count doesn’t always guarantee that the page will prove beneficial for our ads. A page with many likes or posts but low engagement could be run by a business that can afford to buy ads aimed at driving up Like counts, and may not be a place where our target audience hangs about.

For example, an insurance company targeting firefighters as their potential clients can have a very high like count, and most of their likes may have been generated purely by ad buys, not by viral shares.

Naturally, no firefighter would stay on such a boring insurance company page, so that is not a page worth targeting because we are looking for engaged readers who enjoy sharing graphics, sayings or posts that grab their attention. Like our t-shirt ads.

Make sense?

Awesome.

Now, how do you know if your audience is actually hanging around on a page?

Simple. Spend time reading the comments. Are viewers talking like they’re firefighters and firefighter supporters? Is that a busy page with lots of firefighter-relevant comments? If not, skip to the next page on your list.

Now that you have sorted out the fan pages, you want to put them down on a Google Spreadsheet. These will be the pages you will run ads to, which I will show you in the next lesson.

The time that you spend getting this right from the get-go will pay out in the long run. Trust me, targeting will make or break your Facebook ad campaigns.

If you target the wrong audience, you’re toast – no matter how much time and money you spend on shirt designs and on running Facebook ads.

For that reason, you want to make sure that things are done right the first time. It’s certainly time well spent.

Once you have the list ready, move on to the next lesson.

In the next lesson, I’ll walk you through the process on how to launch your first Facebook ad campaign.