Advanced Facebook advertising: The “hack” that could change your life

July 29, 2014

I’m going to cut right to the chase here and state that the “hack” (for lack of better words) that I’m about to spell out in the following scenario is fairly advanced, so if you’re at all unfamiliar with advertising on Facebook this might be a little out of your league. However, if you’ve at least dabbled with Facebook ads, this should give you several new ideas on how you can take full advantage of the power of the Facebook advertising platform.

Now, let’s get started.

Scenario: I’m a Realtor. My passion is high end sports cars, so I’m heavily involved in local area car clubs, I’m a member of several of their related groups on Facebook, and I’m constantly looking for a way to stay “top of mind” with anyone involved in these groups that may be looking to buy or sell a home that has a large garage (for car collectors and gear heads).

Seems like a fairly common scenario, right? Replace cars with Legos. Barbies. Bird watching. Whatever. You get the idea (I hope).

Here’s the fun part:

Grab a tool like the FB ID Scraper which allows you to basically “grab” the user ID of any member of a Facebook page or group. Build an excel file of all the user ID’s of the groups (Pro tip: you don’t even need to be a member of the group or like the page) which then you convert to Facebook emails with the included tool.

You then use that list to create a “custom audience” of targets within the FB ad manager. By doing this you now have an extremely targeted group of people to advertise against because your ad will ONLY be displayed to those people (Pro tip: you can also do this with phone numbers and email addresses).

Create ads promoting your personal brand, your listings (handy for the car enthusiast mentioned above), your website, your Facebook page, etc. all targeted to a very specific audience that you’ve just created.

Using a custom audience built with email addresses and phone numbers you can create ads targeted to past clients, re-target seller leads captured through landing page websites geared toward potential sellers, etc.

There are so many possibilities with this strategy, hopefully you can see what I meant when I said this hack could change your life! 😉

A little disclaimer: this “hack” is perfectly legal as the user ID’s are displayed publicly in the source code of Facebook. The FB ID Scraper script simply automates the process of gathering those visible ID’s. As we know with all things Facebook, this may change… so use at your own discretion.