Facebook recently released topic targeting to advertisers through both the self-service UI, as well as the Ads API.  We’ve been exploring their targeting quite a bit and found the sands still shifting underfoot.  The number of targetable topics decreased over the last couple of weeks, reflecting a probable consolidation of actual topics…or perhaps an initial automation of the creation /grouping /clustering of topics…with a further manual consolidation a likely scenario in the future.  Facebook is now also providing global audience counts, alongside the keyword /topic itself, and you are able to get a more specific audience prediction based on your targeting criteria.  For example, you may just want to show your ads to Los Angeles residents – which means the targetable number of users would be much lower than the global audience prediction.

Here is an interesting cut of that global data – as we took our proprietary interest database and analyzed a few of the topics which have the lowest penetration among US users, as compared to a global audience.

Cricket certainly stands out sensibly as a non-US topic.   Allah has a very high global penetration, compared to US interests, partially because Indonesia (as the world’s largest predominantly Muslim country) possesses a sizable Facebook audience.  Quite a few football teams (some would say “soccer”) show up in the top 20 list: