Wondering how some people rise above the noise and get a high following on their social media accounts? Let me show you how I grew Gavin Lira’s account from 12 followers to 18,000 using the “Facebook for a Dollar-a-Day strategy.”
How I Grew Gavin Lira From 12 Followers to 18,000 Using the Dollar-a-Day Strategy Read More »
Sad about Facebook removing interest targeting and that it could probably go away on the various other social networks? Well, guess what? You can boost posts on LinkedIn– not at a Dollar a Day, but $10 a day. But you can target by their job title, the exact company they work at, their skill, where they live, and so forth. LinkedIn used to cost 20 times more than Facebook but now is only 3 times the price. Yet if you’re smart about who you’re targeting– like picking an audience of only a thousand highly relevant people, then you’re spending only $50 to bombard them. I’m not AJ Wilcox, the king of LinkedIn ads, but I can tell you even my simple boosting of LinkedIn posts works wonders– because I have interesting content and tight targeting. Why do you think they are removing interest targeting? There could be many reasons– more profit, less government interference, and the inevitable result of GDRP. This level of precision in the audience is the reason people are willing to pay 3x the cost of Facebook. Facebook & Instagram: $1/day YouTube: $5/day (usually fires off) LinkedIn: $10/day TikTok: $20/day (unless it’s decreased lately) Also, use Boolean search operators organically first (before advertising) on LinkedIn to find competitors and uncover the best keywords.
Tight Targeting to Boost LinkedIn posts Read More »
Not only is boosting posts my favorite thing to do on Facebook, but I like to boost lots and lots of videos following the “dollar a day” technique to filter for the winners. I fully expect 95% of my boosts to fail– to get rejected, have a low average view length (should be above 15 seconds), have a high cost per view (should be 3 cents or less), not convert as custom audiences (use 10 second view, not default 3 second view definition), and so forth. But the one winner we pour increasing amounts of budget on to more than make up for the losers. I used to think I was a “pro” and could tell what content would resonate and convert best. I’ve since learned to spend $10 per post and let the data tell me. I’m usually COMPLETELY wrong.
I’ve found that boosting posts of lightweight content (not selling– but fun or educational) in video format drives the lowest OVERALL cost per sale. Running ads against a cold audience will smack you with a penalty of $80+ CPM (cost per thousand impressions), no matter the objective you choose. But spending 2 cents per light touch– assembling a string of 6-8 touches with 10+ second video remarketing audiences– brings the cost of your offer down to the $10 range. Would you pay 12-16 cents to warm up an audience to be able to reduce your cost of acquisition from $200 to perhaps $80? Below is one boosted post that I’ve had running over 200 days, going at a dollar a day, to build up remarketing audiences over time. Look at the cost per view.
In December 2018, I looked back at the most popular posts from my page and I extended the boosts on them. So instead of having to come up with new stuff to say every single day, I rely upon my greatest hits to continue producing results. Here is a one-minute video I made at the end of 2017 at Bondi Beach in Australia. It got 38,000 views at $0.004 per view— about half a penny. So I edited the post from saying “in 2018” to “in 2019”, and the message is still as relevant. Then I boosted it again for a few more months- or more accurately, some of our trained specialists are identifying which posts to adjust and boost, following their training. What would have taken me 80 hours to write 100 posts and boost them, now is only 30 minutes for me. I’ll bet this strategy works for you, too. If you understand how to make content evergreen, how to use your profile and public figure page together, how to cross-post to LinkedIn, how to use the “dollar a day” method, and how to train others to do this for you.
I did 80 hours of work in 30 minutes. Read More »
On the one hand, it’s super effective for small businesses. We’ve tested boosting stacked with conversion ads, with or without reusing the posted, versus straight conversion ads. On the other hand, the boosted posts are primarily driving likes/comments/shares, often at the expense of conversion- since Facebook will sub-target to people who engage but will never buy. The same is true of the website clicks objective- to deliver “clicky users” that cost 550% more than when you use the conversion objective. Our Facebook reps also run reports across all our accounts to see what mix of objectives we are using. They and we get dinged for boosting posts, which is the same as “engagement” in Ads Manager. My current take is that boosting posts is great if you are a small business or public figure. For the former, they don’t need crazy micro-targeting and optimization. They just need to reach people in their neighborhood to sell houses, get fit, offer services, or come into their stores. For the latter, social proof (authority and credibility) are key among a particular niche audience. Mine is digital marketers and entrepreneurs, for example. And because I am NOT selling most of the time, the conversion objective doesn’t make sense. Like right now- I’m not selling. I’m sharing what I’ve learned in the hopes that it helps you in some way. And our team will likely copy this post to my public figure page to boost. That means we are spending money to educate without expecting anyone to buy anything right then. Over time, we engage with these folks and build a relationship, which eventually leads to them joining our monthly membership or buying implementation packages. I’ve asked Facebook why they don’t want us to boost posts when the button is right there on every single post and when it’s worked so well (we’ve tested it many different ways)? If brand awareness (don’t get me started about this one) is so much better than page engagement as an objective, why not just change the objective of the boost button? That’s something they are considering, they say. Meanwhile, if you’re not a small business or entrepreneur, and if you already have a converting funnel with strong remarketing, you won’t need the boost post button. Use Ads Manager with your conversion objective, selecting that post from the page or entering in the posted. Are you boosting posts?What have you noticed in your results?
The Facebook folks and our teams have argued the merits of boosting posts. Read More »
5 years ago, Facebook had an auto-boost feature where they would automatically boost your posts. But they killed it because not many people were using it and because the system was boosting posts about site outages, sales that had already expired, and other things. So this new version gives you a bit more control: You can choose the default boost amounts (how long and how much to spend each day), the audience (from your list of saved audiences), and if you want to auto-approve: Some things I don’t like about this re-released product: Only one post gets boosted at a time– I like to be able to put more money on winners, even to have them live forever. As a business grows, we would want to have a growing number of posts boosted evergreen (forever) as part of our Greatest Hits that live forever. The 60% threshold for “top posts” is arbitrary. Instead of getting 60% more engagement than our average post, it should take the top 10% of posts by engagement or all posts that meet a particular fixed engagement threshold (like 10% engagement/impressions or 10+ second average watch times on videos). It’s buggy– I’m not able to switch the audiences. And the reported engagement figures don’t make sense– how do I have no engagement, yet 144 engagements? Have you had a chance to play?
Facebook now lets you automatically boost posts Read More »
An article I wrote on Influencive got 1,600 shares: The “sneaky” trick is that I boosted this post from my public figure page on Facebook, spending $42.25: As you can see, Facebook said I got only 64 likes. But when I look at the post itself, I see 1,400 likes: And rarely do I get more than a couple hundred likes on my posts. So is this a bug or perhaps fake likes? No, it’s the product of Facebook “throwing fuel on the fire”. The post itself organically got 100 likes by itself. And when I boosted it to the right audience, the extra reach caused the algorithm to extend my organic reach. And so the secondary effect is more engagement, counted organically– not as part of the $42.24 I spent to get a couple thousand impressions. If you’re interested in the mechanical details of the newsfeed algorithm or what is counted as organic versus paid, study up here, as well as in this article. Suffice to say that when you boost posts, watch for the spillover effect into organic. You just might have found a gold nugget, but accidentally thrown it away. And if you share a link on Facebook, the likes on that post count towards the shares count on the article page. Pretty cool, huh? Now learn how to boost posts on Facebook to not only drive traffic but increase perceived authority to people who visit your articles.
A sneaky way to get 1,000+ likes on your articles Read More »