Followup to my previous post.

[randomness]

Facebook has been closing in on me in the last week. From their suggested pages, it appears that they have decided I'm a Jewish lesbian from Cincinnati transplanted to Lower Manhattan working as a lawyer.

(They suggested OMGWTFBIBLE and a congregation I might like, as well as the ABA Gender Equity Task Force. OMGWTFBIBLE's live shows are in Alphabet City, so perhaps I should add "hipster" to that description. SheSeek--which they suggested earlier--is an app that works in New York and a number of other cities, but not Cincinnati. But I'm still getting lots of Cincinnati suggestions.)

Comments

[eac.livejournal.com]

I'm so entertained. :)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

So am I! :)

[donnad.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't even notice the ads on my FB pages until someone mentions a particularly odd combination of ads on their page.

Going over and looking right now, I got:

Backpack Journalism Workshops With Bill Gentile
Citibank
H&R Block
Ultrapetsupplies.com
Free Credit score
Community Credit Union
TurboTax
Geiko
Norton Antivirus

Oh here's a good one...
The Original World Famous All Natural Old Fashioned Gooch's Dick Soap. www.goochsoap.com
I don't even want to know what Dick Soap is.

So I guess they think I need tax advice, a new bank, insurance, my computer needs a virus scan, I have pets and I need a bath. :)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not even mentioning the ads I see. They're heavily clothes and make-up, as they have been since the beginning.

What I'm looking at and quoting here are the pages being suggested to me to "like" across the top of my pages feed. That has been more closely targeted than the ads you're mentioning.

Ever since I found those links I've been using that as a guide to what Facebook thinks about me. It's pretty focused. Right now the majority of the suggestions are for Cincinnati-related pages, as they have been since I "liked" Skyline Chili. I'm also getting a bar review site (legal, not alcoholic), although that one actually seems to be in Massachusetts.

By comparison, the ad links are pretty generic. I've stopped paying a lot of attention to them except that I sometimes click on them out of curiosity. There are a surprising number of inexpensive clothing and shoe retailers whose sites turn out to be somewhere in South China, though they try to hide that with all their website copy in (sometimes broken) English and all their pricing in US dollars.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Executive summary: If you really want to get insight into Facebook's targeting, look at the suggestions on your pages feed, not the ads.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

Okay, what does this say about me?

Compost this
Mindjolt games
I have cat
Right about now
Medfield Animal Shelter
Boston Bruins
Metisgirlbeads
Bones
Broken Tail Rescue
Especially For Pets
BuddyDog Humane
Massachusetts Vest-a-dog
The Trashfinders

Okay, I get the animal sites, I talk about my pets and have liked a bunch of rescue sites. Bruins probably comes from the Red Sox Likes.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Looks like they have you pegged! :)

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Can you put "NSA fodder" keywords at the bottom of your Facebook posts to get the ads of your choice?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the funny thing. I'm not posting at all, and haven't been for over a month, well before I started my experiment with "liking" pages. Targeting appears to result from a combination of pages I've "liked" and the people I've "friended" (and in turn, the pages they "like").