Facebook has recently made a number of changes to the way businesses can utilise advertising on the social network, increasing the specificity of ad campaigns. One such area that has been tinkered with of late is relationship status types, which has now been expanded to include all of these different options:
- Single
- In a relationship
- Married
- Engaged
- Not specified
- In a civil union
- In a domestic partnership
- In an open relationship
- It’s complicated
- Separated
- Divorced
- Widowed
This was first hinted at back in January when the social network announced that it would sunset Facebook sponsored stories in April, and last month the arrival of ‘core audiences’ within ad-targeting heralded a new level of detail for marketers to apply. This particular level of granularity in terms of relationship status types won’t be helpful for everyone, but for some businesses it could make a real difference to their ad targeting.
Facebook also recently added new gender identity options for individuals, allowing users to give more details about themselves over to Facebook. For the vast majority of us this changed nothing whatsoever on our profiles, but for some people it would have been a significant and welcomed update.
Adding further categories and increasing the options for advertisers does suggest that social networks and ad-targeting in general are getting better and more accurate, but at the same time it’s tacit acknowledgement that each and every one of us is an individual in our own right. There is a whole lot more that make us us than just selecting a series of limited, preset options for a kaleidoscope of criteria…
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