Behind Google Ads, Facebook Ads is 2nd largest ads platform in the world. It allows advertisers to reach users across all of Facebook’s main properties; Facebook itself, Instagram, Messenger and (soon) WhatsApp.

Facebook Ads lets advertisers target users using a variety of methods. These range from the broad and benign, like targeting people in North America aged between 18 and 45, to the granular and precise, like targeting parents of newborns who also own a pet cat.

The range of targeting options available to advertisers has changed frequently throughout the years, at times increasing and at others reducing. More recently, Facebook appears to have been cutting down on certain targeting options that pose too much of a threat to user privacy.

While Facebook’s actions have trended in the direction of removing options for precise micro-targeting, a wealth of options still remain for advertisers. One lesser-known option is the ability to target people who are members of specific groups, or who like specific Facebook pages.

Cue LeadEnforce

Facebook itself doesn’t offer these targeting options, but they are available via third party tools such as LeadEnforce. LeadEnforce offers advertisers the ability to pick specific Facebook groups or pages whose fans they want to target.

LeadEnforce will then pull together an audience of all of the people they can find who are members of that group, or who like the relevant page. This audience is then shared with the advertiser so that they can use it to target their ads.

You Can Tell a Lot from The Pages You Follow

The usage examples on LeadEnforce’s site are fairly mundane. They suggest how a car dealer could target a fictional ‘Car Sales’ group in order to find potential customers. Or how someone (I don’t know who) could target a group called ‘Content-marketing’ in order to find, I guess, content marketers.