It’s Facebook Friday — each week we’ll offer one tip for leveraging Facebook to increase customer awareness of and engagement with your brand or business. This week we’ll show you how to make individual Facebook Page status updates appear only in certain markets or to make it so only speakers of specific languages can see your updates.

This simple technique can be a very useful practice for large companies with customers or clients in several countries, but it can also be used by small businesses serving multi-lingual communities. For example, your coffee shop in Chicago’s largely Hispanic neighborhood of Pilsen can make its English-language updates visible only to those who are using Facebook in English, and its Spanish-language updates only to those who’ve chosen Spanish.

Just go and write your status update on your Page’s wall like you always would; type the message in the field next to the “Share” button. Once the message is typed, don’t click Share just yet. Instead, click the grey box that by default says “Everyone.” Two options will drop down: “Everyone” and “Customize.” Click Customize and a little window with fields for country and language will pop up.

Here you can type the names of any countries or languages you want to limit this update to. For example, you could say this message is intended only for speakers of Simplified Chinese in the United States. Like a Google search, Facebook will try to guess what you’re typing by displaying options that appear below the text field. Select one of these, because you have to match Facebook’s syntax exactly for it to work.

Once you’ve made your selections, just click “Okay” and then click Share to publish your update like any other. After the update has been published, you can move your mouse pointer over the tiny privacy lock icon beneath the message on your Wall to see a pop-up that reminds you who is able to see that message. You can’t change these selections after the message has been published though.

Note that Facebook will remember your selection for all future posts, so if you want to go back to publishing to everyone or to change the target audience, you must change your selection by the process we just described.

Was this tip helpful? Do you have any questions, or great ideas about how to use it to improve engagement with customers? Let us know in the comments!

[Image credit: Steve Cadman]