Facebook: Candidates can now target political fanatics

Facebook has millions of users worldwide who share photos, videos, news or anything they find interesting. There are some users who are more politically inclined and use social media as a platform for speaking about politics.

Facebook has good news for them. This week, Facebook is adding a new feature that enables advertisers to target the 'political influencers'. They are the users who like a lot of political Pages and advertisements or share content from political parties and organisations.

Using all these actions, Facebook determines if users are liberal or conservative, then segments that audience for political campaigns.

“People are more likely to trust information that their friends share,” says Matt Idema, Facebook’s vice president of monetisation product marketing, “So it is valuable for campaigns to reach people who frequently share political information on Facebook.”

It’s usually the undecided voters and the people with less voting history that campaigns spend a lot of their time and money trying to convince.

When users hear about campaigns, the ones that are from friends and family are more likely to have a better effect than advertisements.

Although there are loads of ways for candidates to target supporters and potential supporters already, Facebook's new custom audiences allows them to target ads and supporter databases directly to those users. 

The problem is, they have no way of knowing whether or not those people even talk about politics online. By layering the political influencer filter on that audience, it's anything but guaranteed.