11 Ways To Find & Target Your 1,000 True Fans With Facebook Advertising

The theory of 1,000 true fans states that you can make a living from having a core group of people who consume all of your media and purchase all of your products.

Kevin Kelly’s (the founding executive editor of Wired magazine) infamous blog gave modern-day creators and entrepreneurs the revenue formulae of targeting this die-hard longtail of fans. If you aim to generate £100 for each of the die-hard fans, that’s £100,000 in the bank per calendar year.

This theory is typically adopted and thrown around between musicians, artists, craftsman, photographers, designers, authors, animators, app makers and so on.

In my opinion, it’s easy for large e-commerce stores with a strong brand to add a massive bump to their revenue figures by identifying their 1,000 true fans and creating exclusive offers, events, products and pre-sales for them. Or alternatively, on a basic level just knowing they exist and having them as a separate targeting segment in your Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising campaigns.

I always point people to the article ‘1,000 True Fans’ by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You’re done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it’s unfortunate. – Tim Ferris

So how do we find and segment these audiences in our available Facebook advertising targeting options? How do we find more people like them?

It’s really simple, but you do have to think for your self on what combinations of targeting you should use to identify your fans based on website traffic, purchasers, Facebook fans and first-party data.

1. Visitors by Frequency

Create audiences based on the user’s frequency.

2. Visitors by Time Spent

Create audiences based on the amount of time they spend on your website. You can refine this further by targeting the URLs they have visited.

3. By Value Parameters via Events

Create audiences based on the value of their purchases.

4. By Aggregated Value via Events

Create audiences based on purchases someone made in aggregate.

5. Lifetime Value / Lookalike

Within your Facebook audiences, you can upload your first party data (purchasers) with 15 identifiers:

• Email
• Phone Number
• First Name
• Last Name
• Post Code
• City
• Province
• Country
• D.O.B
• Y.O.B
• Gender
• Age
• Facebook App User ID
• Facebook Page User ID
• Mobile Advertising ID

You can either upload this data via a .csv and .txt file or you can paste the data straight into Ad Manager. You can also upload data from MailChimp via Ad Manager’s integration.

Once you upload your customer list you can assign and attribute a financial worth for each customer.

You can now target these people based on values as well as create lookalike audiences.

6. Most Active Users – App Activity

Create audiences based on the top % of active users on your app.

7. Users by Purchase Amount – App

Create audiences based on the top % of people who spent the most on your app.

8. People Who Interacted Offline

Create audiences based on who interacted with your brand or business offline.

9. People Who Engaged With Any Post or Ad

Create audiences based on who engaged with your page posts or ads.

10. People Who Sent You A Message

Create audiences based on who sent your page a message.

11. People Who Responded Going To An Event

Create audiences based on who said they were going to your event.

Image sources: Jon Loomer

Of course, some of these targeting options can be applied to your Instagram profile.

Remeber it is not just about using one targeting option it’s about using multiple targeting options blended together to create a hyper-targeted audience of 1,000 true fans.

Please bear in mind these are your top customers. DO NOT SPAM! Instead, add more value to their experience.