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?
The number of people selling courses on how to sell a course is mind-boggling.
And I’ve forced myself to go through about 20 of the most popular ones to see what they’re doing.
Here’s what I’ve learned, if you’re curious:
+ 95% of this is hype designed to make you salivate– like dangling a steak in front of a stray dog that hasn’t eaten a full meal in weeks.
+ The endless Lambos, exotic travel vids, and “freedom” is a total lie– yes, there is a lot of money to be made, but you still have to work and invest, like any other real business.
+ The people selling the courses don’t have experience in producing actual results other than claims of how much money they’ve made in getting people to buy their course on how to sell a course.
+ I could offer a course on how to make $1,000,000….. Interested? The price is $1,000,000, of course, lol.
+ I’ve sat through the 90 minute “live” webinars, waiting patiently though the “struggle”, “lifestyle breakthrough to riches”, mindset motivation (I’m an ordinary guy who did it, so you can, too)… to eventually get to real value. But alas– it never comes.
+ There is a shred of truth to the “$375 million a day of online revenue being made per day– claim your slice” argument. But this is just another flavor of the “make money online” bizopp. Same clown, different circus– sucker born every minute.
+ The reason you only hear from the sole figurehead and nobody else is because their students aren’t winning. I’ve Googled to find their reviews and it’s not pretty.
+ But if I get you excited enough, you’ll not do the due diligence– since you’re panting about what you’d do with that extra $57,383 a month. You need to buy TODAY to get the 3 bonuses and 50% off the price. Would you buy heart surgery from the self-proclaimed surgeon offering it at 50% off, today only?
+ Yes, imposter syndrome is real– that the pros feel they aren’t really experts. But for the 99% of people who feel they don’t know enough to be competently able to dispense advice– you’re right! You could watch as many “motivational” videos to pump yourself up as a newly minted surgeon– but that extra confidence won’t stop you from killing your patients.
+ Would you trust someone who says they can teach you how to start a heart surgery business in just 6 modules you watch over the weekend– so you can start operating tomorrow? $2,000 is a great price if you can make $500,000 or even $700,000 a month, while actually healing patients.
+ And when you look over the course outline, what you find is 90% of the content is more “mindset” and teaching you how to sell the very same way you were just sold– instead of actually teaching you the practice. This is called a PONZI scheme. And many of these folks will go to jail– you watch.
Thus, they’re just repackaging our Facebook ads course + PLF + perfect webinar for their particular niche– 5,000 people all selling the same thing– hope.
So why not skip past all that expensive, heart-breaking fluff to get to the actual meat– to go to the source?
You don’t have to drop $2,500 to attend yet another seminar (unless you enjoy feeling perpetually “motivated”), since the information is already online and almost all of it free.
I want to see YOU actually win, so I provide most of our methods free– in the same way you can go to the library to read medical textbooks and journals.
The surgeons aren’t gasping at HEART SURGERY SECRETS taught only at midnight in a medical school.
I want to teach you the fundamentals from my 23 years and 70,000 hours of digital marketing experience– and I was running million dollar a day teams before these children were even born.
The folks who actually are making money online– we all know one another and we have actual teams, processes, customers, overhead, and stuff you’d find in any type of real business– online or not.
Man, have I ever been so guilty of focusing on the troublemakers– the people who just can’t perform and projects that are failing.
Which means I neglect the performers, since the “squeaky wheel” gets the attention.
I’ve lost some good people because I was so busy helping the stragglers that I unintentionally ignored my top performers.
The unintended result of my actions as a novice manager was to punish the performers and reward the troublemakers.
Have you fallen for the “squeaky wheel” problem, too?
The right answer is to spend 80% of your time with the 20% of your team that is kicking butt.
You’d do the same with your boosted posts.
And even if you’re not managing people, you can prioritize your projects in the same way.
The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 rule– a way to focus on what matters.
Of course, you say– make the good things better.
Who wouldn’t agree with that?
“One way I exercise the Pareto principle in my work is to LIMIT the number of hours I work in a day. This drives my efforts in two ways.
First, limiting my working hours forces me to focus only on those things that are the most important.
I have no choice but to focus on the 20% of activities that drive 80% of the result. Second, limiting my working hours frees me up to focus on the most important assets I have, my health and my time.”
The reason people don’t do this is because we all care for the underperformers.
We want to help them– and then we end up continuing to help them more than we intended.
And pretty soon, they have sucked up your time.
The good natured attempt by you to help has backfired, creating entitlement instead of improved performance.
You’ve set an ugly pattern, since now they know they can cry wolf and you come running.
Perhaps you’re like me, and your people have realized that you will let people get away with things, since you don’t like to fire people.
My mentor, who was CEO of American Airlines, told me that there are 3 types of managers:
Those who are loved.
Those who get results.
Those who are loved and get results.
You’ll see 99% of managers in the first two buckets and 1% in that last bucket.
The managers who are loved are kind to their people at the expense of getting results– this is the majority of managers.
The managers who get results are called 4 letter names for being “bossy”, since they don’t have patience or empathy– they want stuff to get done on time.
The last bucket of effective and loved managers are rare because high performance situations are possible only when the entire team is high performance. All you need is one freeloader, naysayer, or rebel (Leeeeroooooy Jenkins!) to destroy the team culture.
The most effective manager of all time, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, embraces the “up or out” management philosophy.
He says you should promote the top 10%, ignore the middle 80%, and fire the bottom 10%.
Sounds like a professor grading on a curve in school, right?
This works, because in any group of people, you will statistically have some poor performers, mediocre players, and stars.
The grossly incompetent ones are easy to identify and remove, but it’s the mediocre ones that could kill you.
Especially true if your company is young and growing.
With Facebook ads, you know to allocate your budget against winners, instead of putting the same amount on every post.
Or worse, we’ve seen “gurus” recommend that you put even more money on losing posts to “average things out” or “help their performance”.
In the same way that you should put more dollars against winning ads, why not do the same with your people and projects?
We believe in equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome.
Everyone deserves a chance.
We’ll coach them, but not babysit– there’s a difference.
I’ll end by saying something successful entrepreneurs know, but don’t want to admit.
When looking at the performance of a group of people, especially in a start-up or less structured environment, you’ll find that the stars are not just 20% better than the “average”, but are usually 10-20x better.
It’s not that they work harder, attend more meetings, or write 10X more code.
Rather, their efforts make a 10-20x impact.
Logan Young, CEO of BlitzMetrics, younglogan.com
“As an amateur swimmer I used to mistakenly believe by kicking my legs harder and using more force on my stroke I could cover more distance. I was really just flailing and making a big splash.
A pro swimmer covers great lengths not by exerting herculean effort but by having an efficient swimming stroke.
As a manager it’s easy to want to play the role of “life-guard” and “save” those making a big splash and commotion. But your time will be better spent coaching up and rewarding your proficient performers.”
There are millions of engineers who have built or tried to build mail processing systems.
But there is only one Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail all by himself as a side project at Google.
There are many who claim to be Facebook ads experts.
But there is only one Logan Young who has experience optimizing across a broad range of massive companies.
Where are the winners in your company and are you doing everything you can to promote them, encourage them, and spend time with them?
Yup. Don’t freak out– it’s not like walking naked into a mosquito nest.
You already know that Facebook has given us a tool to download all our data— messages, posts, pictures, friends, and whatnot– even private stuff.
But I’ll bet you didn’t know they recently and quietly added a list of all the advertisers that are including you in their custom audiences.
The self-service data export tool was a result of EU privacy laws, which have apparently expanded to allow Facebook users worldwide.
Facebook has a helpful explanation of what you can get.
When you go to your settings and click on the link to export your data, they send you a file back in under 30 minutes.
Mine was 371.3 MB zipped, which expands into folders for video, images, and ads.
Most of the size was from videos.
Go find a file called ads.html to see the thousands of data points FB makes available to advertisers to target you.
Scroll past your detailed ad history and lead ad forms to get to the section called “Advertisers with your contact info”.
Most of these are web custom audiences, meaning you’ve been to their site. Here are a few other examples from my colleagues at BlitzMetrics:
My friend, Joe Merkel, who helps with content. There’s 95 advertisers with his contact info:
Notice how a few entries like Uber and Airbnb appear multiple times? Weird, but probably from different territories or divisions, like how there’s a Spanish and German entry for Facebook.
Now for another, from our head editor, Max Darby, with 48 advertisers:
It seems when one parent advertiser gets your information, they can share it amongst subsidiary of the same brand. Notice the multiple entries for Amazon and Gearbest? Like above, it’s most likely just different divisions.
What does your advertiser contact info profile look like?
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 counted 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.
And rarely do I get more than a couple hundred likes on my posts.