You May Be A Target On Facebook

Ad Targeting With Phone Numbers

As all of us have come to know, contact information is valuable.  It’s valuable to us personally to keep up with friends and family.

It is financially valuable to advertisers who depend on contact information to make their income.  Marketers devote a great deal of time to the gathering, sorting and maintaining contact information.

Facebook has taken a bold step in allowing Facebook advertisers to target their ads toward phone numbers which are a part of the advertisers contact list.  There hasn’t been much to-do about it and may not become public knowledge at all except for the fact that people who watch for that sort of thing saw the process go live temporarily.

After agreeing that this is a real situation, a Facebook spokesperson explained how it will work.  Hopefully, this will reduce the anxiety that might be felt by some Facebook users about privacy issues.

As I understand it, there will be two lists … one list marked as Facebook members and one marked as Advertiser’s contact data.  The two lists can be compared with only that information that is on both lists being used by advertisers.

There is the confirmation from Facebook that advertisers will not receive the personal data of the membership.  Likewise, it’s said that Facebook will not have access to the advertiser’s data.

An article by Brittany Darwell on August 30 of this year was published at http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/08/30/facebook-may-soon-allow-ad-targeting-by-email-user-id-and-phone-number/.

Inside this article, there is confirmation of advertisers targeting Facebook members who are already on the advertiser’s contact list.  This article, however, goes a little further with the targeting activity by including email and user id along with the phone number of a Facebook member.

Any, or all, of the above information, that appears on the advertiser’s data will be included in the demographic target.  This should prove to be an interesting development.