Gating and feed targeting restrictions for Facebook and LinkedIn help your posts target the right audience, driving your engagement and conversions while also ensuring that your posts meet legal and regulatory requirements, such as age restrictions or data privacy laws. Use feed targeting to control which posts are delivered to which audiences' News Feeds, based on criteria such as age range, gender, interests, locations, and more. Use gating to specify if your content should appear exclusively to users in selected locations or age ranges. This article covers all feed targeting and gating options available when creating a Publish post.

Overview of targeting restrictions

There are two types of targeting restrictions available for defining the audiences that your content will appear to:

• Feed targeting (available for Facebook and LinkedIn Company Page posts). With feed targeting restrictions enabled, only the users fitting your specified demographics criteria will receive the targeted post in their News Feed. However, all users, including those outside of your specified demographics, will still be able to view the post on your channel's post feed. Feed targeting options include age range, gender, interests, locations, relationship status, languages, education level, and graduation year.
• Gating (available for Facebook posts). Geo- and age-gating allows you to specify that your content is to appear exclusively to users in your selected countries, cities, or regions, or to specific ages. Users outside the selected locations will not be able to view that content at all, even with a link.

Applying feed targeting or gating to a post

1. When creating a new post in Publish, scroll down to the Targeting and restrictions panel on the left. By default, Which followers will see this post in their news feed? and Who will be able to access this post? will be set to Everyone.
   
   
2. Adjust your feed targeting restrictions by setting Which followers will see this post in their news feed? to Only specific followers. You will see the option to restrict the post to appear in followers' News Feeds based on Age range, Gender, and Interests. Click Add other criteria to expand all options and further restrict your post by Locations, Relationship status, Languages, Education level, and Graduation year.
   
3. Adjust your gating restrictions by setting Who will be able to access this post? to Only specific people on Facebook. You will see the option to gate the post to age ranges or by location. 
   
   

   Note:

   Some locations support exclusions. In these cases, you will see an Exclusions text box appear if you would like to further exclude specific locations. For example, if you select a continent, you can exclude countries within that continent. Please be aware that not all locations support exclusions.

   
4. After making your selections, schedule/publish or send your post for approval as usual.

Changing a SMM user's default geo-gating settings

Admin and Team Lead users can set default gating settings for other users in Social Media Management. The users who have default geo-gating activated can only create Facebook content that is gated to audiences within those locations. 

1. Click the Manage settings (gear icon) in the bottom left of Social Media Management and navigate to Organization admin.
2. Navigate to the Users and select a user.
3. Under the General tab of the user's settings, expand Show Advanced.
   

4. Under Geo-targeting, select the countries that the user's content should be gated to.
   

5. Click Save Changes.

When the user creates a new Facebook post in Publish, they can only geo-gate to the selection of countries you set, or any region or city within those countries.