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 did I do it?
I used the Dollar-a-Day strategy to boost his best tweets. I boosted any tweet that I felt had a lot of value for his core audience for $1 a day, just to generate engagement.
He was in Pakistan speaking at a conference, so I boosted his video to the attendees there. On Twitter, people follow what’s popular. So, I shared crowds following him plus shots with well-known people.
When you start to go viral, you can rely just on organic growth. But to get the initial conversations going, I had to spend $70 to boost 10 tweets for $7 each over a week. I boosted 10 tweets because I wanted to let the algorithm tell me which ones are winners since we are always wrong as humans.
Your audience wants to relive highlights, so boost those.
Who would have thought that this picture with @darrylleeisaacs would get a lot of personal injury attorneys following him?
How do you know you have a winner?
Tweets that got over 20% engagement are winners— meaning 2 in 10 people clicked on it, viewed his profile, commented, etc. Normally, he got 2-3% engagement, which is why I needed to tweet 100 times to find approximately 10 winners.
This is his best post, getting penny engagements, and 5% of people who saw it followed him. @sunnyaliEC is the most loved entrepreneur in Pakistan.
I’ll bet you have dozens of pictures on your phone with someone well-known, where you can honor them with gratitude. The most connected people in any industry are the conference organizers— honor them!
The Misconception
Some people think Twitter is only text. But his videos often get over 50% of people stopping to watch. And then when I boost, my cost-per-view is fractions of a penny.
I literally grab pictures and videos straight from my camera roll. For example, this book was given to him by @kfreberg–the #1 PR professor in the US. I tagged her and boosted it to her followers- super relevant for both of them.
It’s just as hard to go from 10 followers to 100 followers as it is to go from 1,000 to 10,000. Use $1 a day to speed up the beginning of that curve. Promote a friend’s company like @blusharkdigital so they share your posts.
Watching the magic of the Dollar a Day strategy unfold
A week later, he hit 15,000 followers and also got a blue check. This increased his engagement rate by 30%–more trust. If a post would have gotten 100 likes, he’d get 130 likes.
Unlike other networks, no extra cost to post a pic.
I also found content that worked elsewhere and repurposed it into Twitter. Reddit is my favorite source, followed by blog posts he’s written, snappy things I overhear friends say, and Facebook. Build threads like this to stack engagement.
Dollar-a-Day works wonders!
I invented the Dollar-a-Day strategy 15 years ago and works on all social networks.
You might say it’s like “throwing raw meat to the dogs,” which is partly true. Yes, I’ve shared posts that received a lot of attention (for example, 1,000 likes on a post honoring freelancer friends in Pakistan), but if I didn’t also tie these posts to his expertise, his followers would be low-quality and random.
I used high-engagement posts to break through the noise, allowing people to see that his expertise is worth looking at and listening to.
It is a relationship-building strategy called FGF— Find, Give, Friend.
You may be posting really good tweets, but when you have no followers, nobody will see your stuff!
Unfortunately, he failed to take care of what I had built for him because of unacceptable business practices. If you’d like to know more about that, read the two articles below.
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.
Boosting LinkedIn posts works wonders
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.
I will say something with which social media “experts” will not agree.
It doesn’t matter much what time you post.
And this applies to all channels– even though you’re supposed to post during “business hours” on LinkedIn.
I made this above tweet at midnight– but because it evoked an initial reaction within the first 3 minutes, more and more people saw it, then engaged with it.
It doesn’t matter what time of day your audience is on the internet– Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, or whatever.
And even if there aren’t as many people up during the middle of the night, the algorithm will still show your post to people it thinks will appreciate it the next time they are online.
I could stop posting for months, and my traffic would be only slightly lower.
Now here’s the “trick”…
Posts like this tweet got a 10% engagement rate– a great signal on any social network.
So, we’re going to cross-post it to other social networks with different time frames– with Twitter being the shortest, Google being the longest, and other networks in-between.
Thus, any “winner” can live forever in other channels as part of my “GREATEST HITS” to continue delivering traffic.
Significantly when I boost it for a DOLLAR A DAY, throwing fuel on the fire.
So, it doesn’t matter WHEN you post, as long as you’re posting QUALITY stuff that people want.
Don’t worry about how many hashtags to use, the “ideal length” of a post, or whatever the social media gurus breathlessly proclaim.
You do not necessarily need to space outposts to once per day or feel obligated to publish garbage just because you’re supposed to post X times per week on Y social network.
Share it when you have something compelling- as I do at midnight right now.
The fact that you’re reading this proves that the posting time doesn’t matter.
Facebook will show content to whoever is most likely to engage or find value– not by whoever posted in the last few hours.
Twitter is about the “latest news,” but Facebook is still about friends.
It boggles my mind that people worry about the best time to post. Don’t most of us have friends/followers in different time zones?
Because of this myth, there’s also a LOT LESS competition in newsfeeds during non-business hours!
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 a $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 Bondai 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 up others to do this for you.
