Facebook business tools can be useful for Public Sector marketers!

After all the negative attention Facebook’s Beacon service has been getting lately in terms of privacy issues, I decided to inspect it myself and browse around the remainder of Facebook’s business tools (which have expanded considerably since I last used them a few months ago). In doing so, I came across this great little summary description page of each service, which I have posted up here for your convenience:

I ran a little experimental “Social Ad” and was amazed at just how much targeting I can do. With each targeting criteria I set, Facebook automatically updates the number of people that match those criteria on Facebook. Here’s a sample screenshot of how it works:

Play around with it (you can bail out at any time before you enter your credit card information), see if you can reach a big enough size of your target audience through this channel. The best part is that once you decide to commit, you set the maximum daily budget you want to spend and the bidding price of your ad! (similar to the PPC Google Adwords concept). Remember that even though the number of your audience may appear small and insignificant, it’s the quality that counts (long tail theory).