9 facts about Expat targeting on Facebook

To help businesses reach people living abroad, Facebook announced new targeting features that enable an advertiser to reach the 92 million expats on Facebook.

Marketers can now connect with expats living within a given country (like expats living in Brazil) and expats originating from a specific country (like people born in Brazil living abroad). Nationality-specific targeting is currently available for people from Brazil, Indonesia, China, South Africa and India.

1. Expat targeting in 10 secs:

The ability to target ads to people whose current country of residence is different from their home country. This is good for advertisers who provide goods and services to expats.

2. Target audience specific 

Expats are a very important demographic for a variety of businesses, especially in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Expats have unique requirements based on their circumstances, and many companies have specific products or services for them. For instance travel companies may want to message expats with offers for international flights around key travel seasons, Telecom providers may offer specific packages to expats knowing that they're likely to need international calling and data plans, or retailers and banks may want to message expats with a different message than locals.

3. User experience

This type of targeting helps advertisers provide the right experience to people based on their expat status. From a user side, this will provide a good experience, as it will diversify the type of ad experiences that they see and tailor specific products and services to their interests. From an advertiser side, this is an high value group of people since they have specific products and services designed specifically for expats.

4. Key Benefits/Advantages over Competition:

Expats are a valuable demographic in virtually any country. Today, it is hard to efficiently target expats, and it is mostly done contextually. For instance advertisers may take out ads in foreign language newspapers to offer expat services, or target expat-centric websites and blogs to find the audience they’re looking for. Through Facebook you can target 92M expats who have explicitly told Facebook that their current country of residence is not their home country.

5. Business specific

Travel companies may want to message expats with offers for international flights around key travel seasons. Telecom providers may offer specific packages to expats knowing that they're likely to need international calling and data plans.

6. Categorization

People on Facebook have the option to share their current city and hometown. In cases where a user's current city is in a different country than their hometown, we classify these users as expats.

7. Country specific

Expat targeting enables you to target all expats within a given country. For example, if I select Expats as a demographic target, and geotarget an ad to Saudi Arabia, I will be targeting expats who live in Saudi Arabia, NOT Saudi Arabians living in other countries.

8. Compatibility 

It is compatible with all other targeting types.

9. Usage

This targeting type will appear in Behaviours > Expats in Power editors and ads manager.