Want to launch a new line of cleaning products that are targeted at janitorial professionals? Perhaps you’d like to offer consulting services to company executives. Facebook has quietly begun targeting ads based on the job title that users enter into their profile. Whether you are a sales associate or the founder of a startup, Facebook’s SocialAds can now pick out exactly what you do. If you’ve noticed Facebook’s ads improving, this could be one of the reasons.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed highly targeted ads that have used my age, gender and frequently profession to determine what to display. One ad, pictured above, was for a bug reporting software. While I don’t do as much web development as I used to, the ad was able to check out that I was once a web developer and as such decided to display the ad to me. Historically, Facebook’s ads have been horribly targeted but over the past few weeks it appears as though things may be getting a little better.

Rob Webb sent me an email last night notifying me of the recent change. I took a look and sure enough I could now begin targeting my advertisements based on user job titles (as pictured below). This is a great step forward for Facebook am hopefully the advertisements on the site will continue to improve.