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Behaviors are activities that people do on or offline. These can be everything from ordering a magazine subscription to spending an above-average amount of time online. If you are like me, you are probably asking yourself, "They know what I do offline too? How do they do that?" Then you will probably pause and look out your window to see if anybody is following you. Honestly, it is crazy how much they know about us. We can sit here wondering how they get so much information, or we can use that information to our advantage to help get real estate leads.
Think of it like getting on a plane. You do not ask how a plane gets 900,000 pounds in the air. You just get on and enjoy the fact that you are getting across the country in six hours. Facebook is your plane, and all the other agents are still using a horse and carriage.
To give you some idea of how advertisers and companies get this data, behaviors are constructed from someone's activity on Facebook along with their offline activity. That offline activity data is provided by a variety of Facebook partners.
We are still in the Add Create tool, but this time I've scrolled down just below Interests. We now have the option to add behaviors. You'll enter behaviors just like interests. You can type to search or click to browse.
A lot of these behaviors seem like they'd be great options, but be careful, there's not a guarantee that the data here is accurate. You will have to test these options out to see what works for you. All behaviors will have an OR relationship with each other and an AND relationship with any other targeting option defined. To show you what I mean, I will identify a behavior for our ad. But first I want you to take a look in the lower right-hand corner at our potential reach. You see that right now we have a potential reach of 380,000 people.
So let's add a behavior. I'm going to go into the residential profile category and choose likely to move. Yes, that is correct, you are hearing and seeing correctly. We have the ability to not only target people who have recently moved, but also people who are likely to move. Don't look too much into it, just remember the plane analogy and enjoy the ride.
Once I have targeted people who are likely to move, we can look in the bottom right, and we'll see that our potential reach is now much smaller-9,600 people. That is because Facebook is now looking for all of our targeting options under the category likely to move. So we now have women between the ages of 30 and 60 who are likely to move, living in New York, who share my interest. And as you have seen so far, we can get way more detailed if we want.
Beyond behavior targeting, we have what's called connections targeting, and connections targeting helps you control whether your ad shows to people who already have a connection with you on Facebook, or don't. For example, you can identify people who have liked your page, joined your group, or joined your event in the last 30 days. You can use connections targeting to show your ad to only people who have a connection with you, or only to people who don't have a connection with you. You will use connection targeting for any page you're the admin of, so you can't pick any page on Facebook. You have to have ownership of it. To show you what I mean, I'll be clicking on the advanced connection targeting button, next to the Connections heading. Here Facebook gives us a list of more options. It is here where I would type in my page name, which in this case is Bob the agent.
I'll select that, and now Facebook is going to include people who are connected to this page. You can see in the bottom right that our potential reach has gotten even smaller. It's now fewer than 1,000 people. That is largely because this page is used only for education purposes, so it does not have followers. You should take note that if you do not have a significant number of followers on your page, targeting people by connection may not work well for you.
If you want to remove the page, choose X. This is the same as you would do the for any of the other options. The most common use of connection targeting is to show advertisements to your fans.
Another great place to use connection targeting is for your posts. Because Facebook doesn't guarantee that people who like your page will see your status updates, you may find the best way to increase engagement is to promote a post to your fans. We will go over that later.
Use connection targeting to refine your audience. Behavior targeting and connection targeting add another layer to your advertisements as a way to help you reach the right audience. There are a lot of options, so take your time to evaluate and test them. It's not necessary to include these targeting options, and if it's your first ad you might try leaving them off in order to minimize how many variables you've included.