How to Target Facebook Posts

Posting content on Facebook and hoping the right people see it is a strategy for burnout, not business growth. To get meaningful engagement, you need to be intentional about who sees your posts. This guide breaks down exactly how to target your Facebook posts, covering everything from understanding your audience to using Meta’s powerful advertising tools to reach them effectively.

Why Targeting Your Facebook Posts Matters

In the early days of Facebook, nearly all of your followers would see your posts. Today, organic reach is significantly lower. The news feed is crowded, and without a little push, your content can easily get lost. Targeting solves this by putting your posts directly in front of the people most likely to care about them. The benefits are impossible to ignore:

• Higher Engagement: When the right people see your content, they’re more likely to like, comment, and share it. This signals to Facebook's algorithm that your post is valuable, which can lead to even more organic reach.
• Better Ad Spend ROI: If you're putting money behind your posts, targeting ensures your budget is spent on people who might actually become customers, not random users who will scroll right past.
• Build a Relevant Community: By consistently reaching people interested in your niche, you attract followers who genuinely care about what you do, leading to a stronger, more engaged community over time.
• Filter Out the Wrong Audience: Targeting also allows you to exclude people. This is useful for avoiding showing ads to existing customers, competitors, or people outside your service area.

The Foundation: Know Your Audience Before You Target

Precision targeting is useless if you don’t know who you’re aiming at. Before you spend a dollar or tweak a single setting, you need a clear picture of your ideal customer. If you’re just guessing, you’re wasting your time. Here's how to get the data you need to build that picture.

Check Your Meta Business Suite Insights

Facebook gives you valuable data for free, you just have to know where to look. In your Facebook Page’s Meta Business Suite, navigate to the "Insights" tab. Here, you’ll find an "Audience" section bursting with information about the people who already follow you and engage with your content.

Look for patterns in:

• Age &, Gender: Are your followers mostly men or women? What is the dominant age range?
• Top Cities &, Countries: Where does your audience live? This is essential for local businesses.

This data tells you who is already responding to your content. It’s your starting point for finding more people just like them.

Create Simple Audience Personas

Data is great, but it helps to turn it into a human story. Create 2-3 simple "personas" that represent your ideal customer. Give them a name and a few defining characteristics based on your research. This makes the targeting process feel more concrete.

For example, a boutique fitness studio might create personas like:

• "Busy Professional Brenda," 32, lives in the city, works a demanding job, values convenience, is interested in high-intensity interval training (HIIT), and follows athleisure brands.
• "New Mom Megan," 28, lives in the suburbs, is looking for low-impact postpartum workouts, values community, and engages with parent-focused content.

Now, when you go to build an audience, you can ask yourself: "How do I reach Brenda?" or "What interests does Megan have?" This is much easier than staring at abstract toggles and buttons.

Option 1: The "Boost Post" Button (The Simple Way)

The "Boost Post" button is Facebook’s straightforward introduction to paid advertising. It's designed to be quick and easy, letting you take a post that's already on your Page and get it in front of a larger, more targeted audience with just a few clicks. While it doesn't offer the deep controls of Ads Manager, it's a fantastic starting point.

How to Boost a Post and Target an Audience

1. Find the post on your Facebook Page you want to promote and click the blue "Boost Post" button.
2. Choose a Goal: Facebook will ask what results you want. Common goals include getting more post engagement, more messages, or more website visitors. Select the one that matches your post's objective.
3. Define Your Audience: This is where the magic happens. Look for the "Audience" section and click "Edit." Here, you have a few powerful options, but you'll almost always want to create your own by setting:
   • Location: Target users by country, region, city, or even a radius around a specific address. For a local coffee shop, you might target a 5-mile radius around your store.
   • Age &, Gender: Use the sliders and selections to match the demographics of your personas.
   • Detailed Targeting: This is the most important part. Start typing in interests, behaviors, or demographics. Thinking about "Busy Professional Brenda," you could add interests like "HIIT," "Lululemon," or job titles like "Marketing Manager." Thinking about "New Mom Megan," you could target interests like "Parenting Blogs," "BabyCenter," or demographics like "New Parents."
4. Set Your Budget and Duration: Decide how much you want to spend and for how many days the promotion will run. Facebook will provide an estimated reach based on your budget.
5. Review and Boost: Double-check your settings, add your payment method if you haven't already, and click "Boost Post Now."

The Boost Post function is perfect for getting more eyes on your best content, promoting an event, or driving traffic to a new blog post without getting bogged down in complex campaign setups.

Option 2: Using Meta Ads Manager (The Professional Way)

If boosting posts is like driving an automatic car, using Meta Ads Manager is like getting behind the wheel of a manual race car. It gives you complete control over every aspect of your advertising campaign, from objectives and bidding to highly advanced audience creation. This is the tool professional marketers use to build sophisticated campaigns that deliver serious results.

To access it, go to facebook.com/ads/manager. Inside, you can create new campaigns by defining audiences in three main categories.

1. Core Audiences

This is where you build audiences from scratch using Meta’s vast user data. It's an expanded, more powerful version of what you see in the "Boost Post" menu. The key categories are:

• Interests: Target people based on the pages they’ve liked and topics they engage with. This is incredibly broad, covering everything from "Coffee" and "Science Fiction Novels" to "Mountain Biking."
• Demographics: Go beyond age and gender to target based on education level, relationship status, job industry, life events (like "recently moved" or "newly engaged"), and parental status.
• Behaviors: Target people based on their online actions, such as purchase behaviors (e.g., "engaged shoppers"), device usage (e.g., "Facebook access (iPhone 14)"), or travel intent.

Pro-Tip: Use the "Narrow Audience" feature to layer targeting criteria. For instance, you could target people interested in "Yoga" AND who are also interested in "Sustainable brands." This ensures you're reaching people who meet multiple, highly specific criteria.

2. Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences are where targeting becomes extremely powerful and profitable. Instead of looking for new people, you're targeting users who have already interacted with your business in some way. This is ideal for retargeting.

You can create Custom Audiences from several sources:

• Website Visitors: Using the Meta Pixel (a small piece of code on your website), you can target everyone who has visited your site in the last 180 days, or even people who visited a specific pricing page but didn't buy.
• Customer List: Upload a list of customer emails or phone numbers. Meta will securely match this data with its users to create an audience of your existing customers you can target with new offers or loyalty programs.
• Engagement: Create audiences of people who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram profiles. This includes people who have watched your videos, liked a post, sent you a message, or simply visited your page. A great example is targeting a product ad to everyone who watched more than 50% of your product demo video.

3. Lookalike Audiences

Once you have a high-performing Custom Audience (like your best customers), you can ask Facebook to build a Lookalike Audience. This tells the algorithm to go find millions of new people on Facebook who share similar characteristics - interests, demographics, behaviors - with your source audience.

Creating a Lookalike Audience is a brilliant way to scale your best campaigns. You're essentially telling Facebook, "Here are my best customers. Go find me more people just like them." It’s one of the most effective ways to reach a highly relevant new audience that is likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Final Thoughts

Mastering Facebook post targeting is about connecting your message with the right people at the right time. By understanding who your audience is, thoughtfully using tools like Boost Post and Ads Manager, and continuously testing your approach, you can transform your Facebook presence from a passive broadcast into an active dialogue that drives real results.

Getting your targeting right is a massive part of the equation, but it works best when paired with a consistent content workflow. At Postbase, we created our platform from the ground up for today's social media, where managing short-form video for Reels and TikTok is just as important as your Facebook presence. With a smart visual calendar and super reliable multi-platform scheduling, we help you plan your content and trust it goes live, giving you more time to focus on creating that next great campaign for the audience you're trying to reach.