What You Can (and Can't) Do with Facebook Ads

A careful reader wrote in recently to cry foul on a post I wrote that linked to a Plum Line blog item on the campaign of Americans United for Change, a labor-backed group, to run ads targeting Sarah Palin's fans on Facebook with an ad reading "Health insurance reform is too important for outright lies. Send Sarah Palin a message; tell her to stop lying about 'death panels.'" Facebook, of course, is where Palin first floated the specter of government boards that would decide the fate of her son, Trig, who has Down Syndrome. And Palin has more than 850,000 friends on the social network, more than any other prominent Republican. (Or Democrat, for that matter, besides Barack Obama, who enjoys 6.6 million Facebook buddies.) So targeting an ad directly at her supporters had the appeal of both coming into Palin's own house to call her a liar and making sure there was a good-sized crowd gathered there when you did. This Facebook tactic had appeal. The only hitch, said my correspondent, is that it wasn't at all possible.

He was right.

Kinda.

Well, not really.

Here's the deal. It is indeed technically true that the only person who can send a direct message to Facebook fans of Sarah Palin is Sarah Palin (or, of course, whoever on her staff she's handed the reins of her account). Only the official administrator of a Facebook group or fan page can target ads directly at its members, which is what gave our reader, who works in online activism, reason to pause. The key word here, though, is directly. There is a drop-dead simple workaround, detailed below, but the confusion points to the fact that the nitty-gritty of how Facebook's targeted advertising program can work in the political space isn't always entirely clear. To work things out, I went directly to the source: Facebook HQ. Someone who-shall-remain-nameless from their advertising department walked me through what you can and can't do to home in on exactly the demographic you want to hit with your Facebook ad, whether you're calling a political opponent a liar, promoting the unique appeal of Candidate Joe Smith, or attempting to sell your cause to likely allies.

Here's what you can -- and can't -- do to target your Facebook ads to the demographic you most want to reach:

• Here's the wide-open back door into the Palin fan base. You can target users on Facebook through a keyword search, which pulls from all the various pieces that make up a Facebook profile -- including group membership. So the simple way to access the members of Sarah Palin's fan page is to use "Sarah Palin" as a keyword. That will pick up anyone who has either (a) indicated that Sarah Palin is among their most favorite things or (b) has listed membership in her fan group on their personal page. Indeed, choosing the keyword "Sarah Palin" and limiting the search to the United States turns up 867,680 users in your target audience -- which, of course, is just slightly more than the people who are fans of the former governor. Voila, you've gained entry into her supporter base, plus picked up a few extra fans. (The details are fuzzy on whether Facebook only picks up on positive references through fan pages and similarly laudatory groups. But given how closely the numbers match between Palin's page and the folks picked up by a keyword search, presumably the 226,000 members of the "I have more Foreign Policy Experience than Sarah Palin" Facebook group are absent from the tally.)
• A fun aside: since Facebook offers this feature where the number of users hit by your potential ad is calculated on the fly, you can play around with checking out the relative interest in politicians around the world. Palin, for example, enjoys 1,300 connections in France, compared to Obama's 232,000. She has 120 folks in Russia who have her listed in their profiles, compared to John McCain's 80. And when Palin travels to Hong Kong to deliver a speech to a group of global investors later this month, she'll find 300 Facebook users there with an expressed interest in her.
• Beyond group membership, Facebook users can be sliced and diced according to the interests they themselves fill in on their profile pages, whether that's favorite books, movies, music, TV shows, or hobbies. With a few clicks, then, you can target devotees of Ayn Rand or those who list developing green technologies as a hobby. Users can also be narrowed down by their self-identified "political views," whether that's liberal, Democrat, conservative, Republican, Basotho Batho Democratic Party, or other affiliations.
• And beyond interests, simple demographics can factor into your targeting. Users can be narrowed down by age, gender, education level and schools attended, relationship status, and workplaces past and present. What's more, there also a special birthday setting, which allows you to appear extremely thoughtful by automatically serving up a Happy Birthday from Senator Jones! message on a constituent's special day.
• An additional way to segment users is by the networks that users join when they sign up for Facebook, whether that's a geographic network like New York, NY, a workplace network like United States Congress, or a school network like the University of New Hampshire. What you can't do, though, is target folks who, for example, use an @unh.edu email address, but haven't chosen to join their school network. "We're not inferring anything," says my Facebook contact. Network filtering also opens up an added possibility: targeted job hunting. The Facebook rep says he's heard tale of clever engineers who have bid for, and in some cases landed, jobs by pinging the Google and Microsoft corporate networks with ads touting their qualifications -- which suggests a new approach to getting your foot in the door on Capitol Hill.
• Of course, in politics, what matters is often location, location, location. In addition to zooming in on users by the geographic network they've selected and what they list as their home town, Facebook uses the IP address from which users are connecting to the Internet to divine their place on the globe. They can run, but they've can't hide. That said, location is still too high-level to be effective in some political circumstances: you can't drill down beyond cities. But the hint from Facebook is that filtering by zip code is in the works.

Any and all of the above can be mixed together to produce a custom search targeted, laser-like, on your desired audience. (Advertisers on Facebook have the choice to pay on a per-click or per-impressions basis. And a price ceiling can be set so that no matter how popular your ad becomes, it won't break the bank.) Let's face it: Facebook knows an almost astonishing amount about the personal likes, details, and habits of of us who has been sucked into its warm embrace. That wealth of information opens up the possibility of political advertising that reaches only the smallest, most desirable sliver of Facebook's 250 million users.

There are hangups, for sure. When's the last time you clicked on, or even read, a Facebook ad? But the ability to slice and dice people on the basis of their most intimate details opens up creative possibilities, and the company is working to integrate advertising more tightly into the features that users do pay attention to. Facebook touts the story of Bonobos, an online-only pants (yes, pants) start-up that had a stock of lightweight corduroys in what's known as Cubbie Blue, complete with baseball-print lining. Not exactly a mass-market product. The company targeted young men in Chicago with an interest in baseball. They ran an ad calling them "pants for Wrigley" that had the added benefit of being "bleacher friendly." For about $60 in Facebook ads -- about half the price of a pair of Bonobos -- their stock of the pants, says the company, sold out.