The most powerful aspect of Facebook, from a marketing and advertising perspective, lies in its vast amounts of audience data. Over the years, Facebook has taken note of your every Like, comment and update, and combined that with your profile information - your name, age, location, occupation, etc. As this has happened, Facebook has constructed what may be the greatest audience insights tool ever created.
Quite simply, Facebook knows you and what you're interested in, and smart marketers are able to use that to their own, significant advantage.
And while you can use this mass of information for your own research purposes, your options are limited due to privacy settings and the walled in nature of the network. Given this, the best way to make the most of the platform's data depth is via Facebook ads.
So what are the interests you can target via Facebook ads? While the depth of possibilities is almost endless, the team at Wordstream have put together this infographic which looks at all the available Facebook targeting options. Of course, there are more than this - you can target people based on the specific Facebook Pages they like, using specific brand names or entities to further qualify these elements - but these are the basic building blocks upon which you can construct your Facebook audience targeting.
Taking the time and effort to understand your target audience is obviously the first, key step, but this in combination with Facebook's in-depth options can help you focus specific ads to each specific audience segment, based on their unique interests and behaviours. And done well, that can lead to much greater reach and response.