This is pretty significant. When I used to manage campaigns and now as a consultant, you focus efforst and apply targeting to ensure your message is being delivered to the most receptive potential resource because you had limited resources. Rather than taking a shot in the dark, you targeted your efforts in hopes of maximizing your results.
Facebook has now taken steps to make that possible in your social media efforts:
Community managers can now create and serve content that will appear in the individual Newsfeeds of a more narrowly-selected subset of its fan base. New targeting options include gender, relationship status, education, workplace, language and geography.
With Facebook’s former language and geo targeting, targeted posts only appeared to people who fell within that range of the target, and no one else was allowed to see the post. Now, targeted posts can be seen by all users on the Page in the Timeline (so don’t go overboard with too many posts at once), but only reach targeted users in their own Newsfeed.
They tell us what it really means:
This update gives marketers the ability to boost social engagement by crafting more detailed and sophisticated content calendars that are tailored to the nuances of their brand’s audience. With more sophisticated content strategies will come greater engagement, as marketers will be hyper-relevant to the behaviors and preferences of various consumer groups.
It will be interesting to see how digital marketers incorporate this new feature into their strategy. Facebook says that it is just beginning to roll out the enhanced post targeting, so we'll have to see what they come up with next while figuring out how to best utilize this option.