This afternoon Facebook announced a new targeting feature for advertisers: friends of connections targeting. The feature enables advertisers to target those “users whose friends are connected to” specific Pages, Events, Groups, and Applications that you currently manage. It’s an improvement upon the “connections” targeting feature that we previously wrote about. It’s an interesting feature which enables advertisers to take advantage of Facebook’s social graph.

Previously, Facebook advertisements automatically included statements about a user’s friends. This new targeting lets advertisers focus exclusively on those users though. For example, if you are a friend of mine, an advertisement for AllFacebook would say “Nick is a fan” at the bottom of the ad. The result is that advertisers will be able to more effectively monitor conversion rates on the “friend of connections” ads, something they weren’t previously able to accomplish.

While this should theoretically result in increased conversion rates, advertisers will now have metrics to verify the conversion. Another interesting use of this new feature would be promoting an external site, while using data provided by Facebook. For example I may want to promote a conference and link to the registration page, while letting the users know that their friends are already a fan of our brand.

While it would be interesting to have the ability to target content which you are not an administrator of, Facebook does not currently provide such functionality.