How to customise your Facebook page posts

Do you have people from all over the world who “like” your Facebook page? Do you think, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could decide who sees my page updates”?

Good news – you can!

When you post an update on your Facebook page there is a button next to share (as below) that lets you choose between public and customise. Public means that everyone and anyone, including Google et al can see the post, while customise narrows it down by geography or language.

Once you have written your post (with a link, photo, video, etc) then click on the public button and choose customise. You can now choose the country you want to target and within the country you can narrow it down by:

• Everywhere
• By state/province
• By city

Alternatively you can choose to target more than one country, in which case you can’t narrow it down further within each country. You can also choose which language to target, so if you have non-English speaking people on your page you could do a shout out to them in their language.

Why bother to customising who sees your posts?

1. If you are posting about a physical event, eg. in Sydney, it isn’t really going to be relevant to your “likers” in the US, and could potentially annoy them if you keep doing it.
2. It means that you can target your content, eg. if the link you post is only relevant to those in the UK.
3. You can be more specific to your “likers” needs.
4. “Likers” are more likely to stay liking your page and more importantly not hide your posts in their newsfeed if the content is relevant.
5. Potentially you can post more posts, because you are targeting them and not adding four posts a day all to be potentially seen by the same people.

Before you go crazy with customising go and check your Facebook page insights and look at the demographics of your users, there is very little point customising posts to people who are in US if you only have two people, it’s a bit of a wasted effort.

Do you already use this feature on your page? Have you had lots of success with it? Let me know in the comments below.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks mobile phone socks, Chief Rabbit at Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media, founder of Steps – the online Facebook and LinkedIn training course and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.