More Social Power

New Editor for Facebook Ads

By Leah Etling on May 9, 2013 in Technology

Facebook has introduced a powerful tool for managing online advertising campaigns that is being heralded as a major advancement in targeted marketing.

If you are using social media-based ads to reach potential renters for your multifamily property, the Facebook Power Editor could change and enhance the campaigns you create. It allows you to create and manage multiple advertising efforts at once, which means you can parse your ad budget according to the markets you most wish to reach.

Placement of the ads within Facebook is a major added feature offered by the Power Editor, which will allow you to select where you want your ads to show up.

You might choose to advertise in the Facebook News Feed (where users are accustomed to seeing posts from their Facebook Friends) or continue to advertise in the right side bar of the site, where advertising has traditionally appeared. However, many Facebook users say that they no longer see the right hand column, considering it a “blind spot” where ads will be ignored.

You can also use the Power Editor to ensure your ads only appear on mobile devices, which is increasingly the way most users engage with Facebook – more users now use phones or tablets to reach the site than computers. And that group is getting larger – the number of people accessing the internet via a mobile phone has increased over 60 percent to 818.4 million since 2011.

The mobile version of Facebook is a very different interface from the web-based interface, and ads must be formatted differently to reach mobile users.

Using the Power Editor, which can only be accessed on the Google Chrome browser, you can decide on how large of an audience you’d like to reach. Targeting specific groups within the more than 1 billion active Facebook users is essential to a successful campaign. One of the most interesting features is that the Editor partners with three major consumer data providers – Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon – to pull data about users’ occupations, household size, and spending habits.

The more than 500 partner categories could be a trove of good data for multifamily firms looking to advertising their communities using Facebook. And they offer the opportunity to exclude homeowners from the reach of a given campaign, creating an audience that is more likely to be renting apartments and may be enticed by an attractive community that better suits their lifestyle.

“The ability to target very specific audiences and not just by what they do online but their offline activities, too, is huge,” said Elizabeth Giles, a social media marketing expert with Yardi. “There are myriad opportunities for the real estate industry to take advantage of this information and reach a useful niche audience.”

The particular focus or amenity offerings of your community might be a great place to start when using the Facebook Power Editor. If your apartments are especially pet friendly, you may wish to target adults in your geographic region who have recently purchased pet supplies. If you have a fabulous gym or fitness center, the athletic crowd would be a good market to try. Senior, student, and other target-audience housing providers can also benefit from this feature.

Another feature not to be overlooked by multifamily is the ability to create custom audiences.  If you have a large mailing list you can make use of telephone numbers and email addresses to advertise to a very specific selection of people. Facebook will use the emails and search for corresponding users; keep in mind that not every email will match as some on your list may not be on Facebook or may have signed up for Facebook using a different email.

Have you found advertising via Facebook to be beneficial for your multifamily community? Will the increased functionality of the Power Editor make you more likely to give a Facebook campaign a try?