How great would it be if you could target your organic Facebook business page updates by more than just users' location and language? That'd probably be pretty valuable -- and more effective -- right? If you're nodding your head in agreement, we've got some great news for you. According to TechCrunch, it looks like Facebook has started rolling out powerful new post targeting options today called 'Page Post Targeting Enhanced.'

New Facebook Post Targeting Options

Facebook hasn't released a ton of details about its new targeting options yet, but TechCrunch reports that Facebook page admins will soon be able to target posts to segments of fans by a variety of characteristics in addition to the basic location and language targeting options admins are already used to.

Below is a list of the full set of targeting options that will soon be available to marketers.

• Age
• Gender
• Interested In
• Relationship Status
• Education
• College Grad: College Name, Major
• In College: College Name, Major, Years
• In High School
• Workplace
• In addition to existing options — Language, and Location: Country, State, City

Remember, up until this update, Facebook admins were only able to target their updates by those last options, language and location:

According to a post from a page admin who is a member of the closed Social Marketers Facebook Group, a Facebook rep has indicated that the new, 'enhanced' targeting options are available to a select number of pages today and will be rolling out to all Facebook pages over the next few weeks.

Just as with targeting by language or location, we're told that all updates a page publishes -- even if it's targeted in one way or another -- will still appear on the business' Facebook page timeline. However, targeted updates will get displayed in the news feeds of only the appropriate users being targeted.

In other words, if HubSpot chose to target only females who are at least 20 years old for a specific post about Cyndi Lauper performing at our upcoming Inbound conference (it's true!), that post will be visible to males visiting HubSpot's Facebook page, yet that post wouldn't appear in males' news feeds.

More Targeting Options Means Better Facebook Marketing!

Face it -- having more targeting options can only lead to better marketing. We already know how much more effective segmenting your email communications can be because it allows you to tailor your content and messaging to different audiences. Consider HubSpot's own research, in which we found that targeted and segmented lead nurturing emails generate an 8% click-through rate compared to general email sends, which generate just a 3% click-through rate. Furthermore, Jupiter Research reveals that relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. Now imagine what better targeting can do for your Facebook marketing!

For example, if you're a clothing store that sells to a wide range of ages -- from teens to baby boomers -- you could target updates about your new line of sparkly, pink tube tops much more appropriately, crafting your message language and copy accordingly and filtering out older generations from seeing that update in their news feeds. Or, if you owned an online dating site, you could target your updates only to Facebook users with relationship statuses of "single," "divorced," "separated," "it's complicated," "widowed," or "in an open relationship." Pretty savvy, huh?

What do you think about Facebook's new enhanced targeting options? Will you use them once they're available to all page admins to improve your Facebook marketing?

Image Credit: Naomi Ibuki