Facebook announces new ad product aimed at expats

Facebook today announced a new advertising product aimed at people whose current country of residence is different from their home country.

According to Facebook, the service is aimed at providing relevant ads to the social network’s 92-million or so expats. People in marketing, it says, 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.

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Facebook cites the example of Etihad Airways’ Diwali campaign as an example of how successful the new product could be. There are some 27-million Hindus on Facebook living outside India and while not all of them still have direct links to the country, the airline still saw an opportunity.

“Like many holidays,” Facebook says, “Diwali is a festival to be celebrated with family and friends. Using expat targeting, Eithad connected with expats with messages about traveling home for the holiday, reaching 536 000 Indian expats living in the Middle East, leading to 700 bookings and a 50X return on investment”.

The social network also points out that this new targeting capability is built in a privacy-protective way, meaning that it doesn’t share specific user data with advertisers.