MSL Chicago

First reported last week by Brian Honigman of Mashable, Facebook now features functionality for Page admins to better target posts for specific subsets of fans.

… in other words, only certain fans will see particular updates on the Page’s wall or on their own news feed.

… in other-other words, no longer will a brand need to have separate Pages for each campaign or geographic region (at least in theory).

Many brands have an international audience, some with language other than English, and accordingly, brands will split up their total audience to avoid peppering their fans with unusable or irrelevant information.

After all, one of the main rules of Fight Club… err, marketing (sometimes I get the two confused, true story) is relevant content to the right audience, and this has never been more true in the age of Like/+1s.

VS.

Fan Pages by language or location meet that a particular audience’s needs makes audiences very happy – though it requires an immense amount of coordination and time (which equals money no matter what industry you are in) to execute– and execute well.

With the enhanced post-targeting allowing Page admins to post geo- specifically to countries, states, provinces and cities, the need for multiple Pages could reduce so that a smaller amount of community managers can efficiently manage the same volume of updating.

Just off the cuff, the aggregate audience for posts regarding contests, competitions, sweepstakes and promotions – even couponing and grassroots initiatives and local events can now be housed under a single brand page instead of across multiple networks, cutting down on repeat work and increasing the ability to draw more data from fans.

… in theory.

On paper this makes sense on the brand side – the Social Habit 2011 report by Edison Research and Arbitron estimates social Media now reaches the majority of Americans 12+ , with Facebook profiles accounting for over half (51 percent) the total profiles- but how does this impact the agencies who manage a piece, but not all of a brand’s social media presence?

Central piece to the puzzle may be less about the agency’s willingness to manage the social media presence and more about the brand – do they see value in the decreased duplication of efforts managing multiple Pages when the net-net is that multiple agencies or organizations have to play nice in the same sandbox?

The nerd POV (we prefer “data-driven,” thank you very much) offers a secondary concern – what does this mean for the data that comes through these pages? Most of Facebook’s user data is not available to the multitude of third-party tools the way Twitter does, so will Facebook Insights keep up to speed in their ability to dissect an individual’s impact on traffic, engagement, etc.?

Facebook already allows individual pieces to splinter off based on the old-Tab-new-sidebar, so hopes are that the geographic-specific pieces can be housed here, thus be measured individually AND ladder up to the whole of the platform… but these big questions don’t matter unless functionality and buy-in meet up along the way.

… I believe an academic would call such an advance a function of innovation due to demand, so here’s hoping someone along the way calls for it, assuming Facebook hasn’t already thought of this prior to rolling it out.