To help marketers boost their reach on Facebook, the company has added an option that lets companies advertise to friends of their brand fans on the social network.
The new "Friends of Connections" targeting feature allows you to "expand your audience reach by delivering your ads to the friends of people already connected with your Page, Application, Group or
Event," according to a a post on the Facebook Ads Page. So when someone sees the ad, they will see which of their friends
is a fan.
Previously, advertisers could only target people who "fanned" their pages, used their applications, or signed up to any company groups or events via the site.
The new targeting
capability "should lead to increased conversion on Facebook Ads (Facebook's performance advertising system), because users will find the social context and implied endorsement more interesting,"
according to the Inside Facebook blog. That's the idea, anyway.
While the company has allowed marketers to include social actions in ads before, this is the first time they can specifically
target just friends of connections. If users don't want their Facebook actions in the ads that friends see, they can use the site's ad privacy setting to turn off that feature.
Separately, Inside
Facebook provided a first look at the first full set of APIs (application program interfaces) for managing
large campaigns on Facebook. They include tools for running multiple campaigns, creating and managing ad groups within campaigns, setting targeting parameters and start and stop times, and analytics.
"Until now, direct response advertisers using Facebook Ads have had no way to build tools to manage large volumes of ads and targeting combinations," according to the blog. "With other major
performance advertising platforms, like Google AdWords, large ecosystems of ad tools have been built to help advertisers spend more money more efficiently."
Facebook has already opened up the
program to a limited number of agencies and advertisers for testing, but has not said when it plans to formally unveil the APIs.