š CONTENT FIRST, growth hacks second
One Facebook audience growth strategy in particular
Just before we launched on November 1, 2017, I asked the team and folks in Some Spider HQ to guess how many followers The Dad would have ON FACEBOOK on January 1, 2018 (2 months later).
Here were the guesses:
Jordan 2,129
David 8,000
Laura 8,880
Ben 9,000
Dan 9,100
Andrew 12,000
Paul 15,000
Nick 30,000
Ally 40,000
Joel 50,000
Josh 50,000
Simon 61,000
Andrew Cohen 72,101
Joanna 80,000
Aaron 83,956
You can see my guess there towards the middle, an ambitious 50,000 followers in 2 months. (Reminder, we started at 0.)
Our mantra on The Dad, as it should be for any media brand, was CONTENT FIRST, CONTENT FIRST, CONTENT FIRST.
We very strongly felt that if we made good content, the engagement and followers would come. On the other hand if you chase engagement and followers, that may give you numbers, but will never lead to great content.
THAT BEING SAIDā¦ there ARE growth strategies (hacks if you will) that can be deployed on top of great content.
Letās get tacticalā¦
Iām gonna talk about Facebook specifically. How their ads work, and one follower growth strategy we used in the earliest days to jumpstart The Dad.
Things have changed, and Facebook growth isnāt as sought after as it was 5 years ago, and perhaps this strategy doesnāt even work anymore. (But maybe it does. If you try it, let me know.) Regardless, the takeaway here is that if you get creative you can find ways to promote your content and grow your channel, outside of the obvious moves.
First, a little about Facebook advertising.
Regardless of how you feel about Facebook, the ad model is pretty brilliant. Anyone can go into the business ad side, and create āaudiencesā based on parameters. You can say āI want to reach men, 20-30, in the US, who are dads, and who like memesā and *futuristic sound* the reachable audience size will appear before you. You can lock that in and advertise just to those people.
Hereās me using FB audiences to find dudes who like cargo shorts, grilling, and white New Balances:
Much like Google AdWords and others, there then is a real time auctioning of impressions when those people are on Facebook. Facebook will serve up ads from the inventory based on what the advertisers are willing to pay, and how well their targeted audience matches the demographic of that particular user.
All of the data is collected and stored, and Facebook will tell you, the advertiser, how many impressions you got, how many actions you got, and how much it cost per action.
But wait, thereās more. You can enter in a whole collection of content for a given ad campaign, and Facebook will automatically serve up all of them at first, then optimize based on which creative performs most effectively towards the goal youāve defined. So if you ran a campaign with 10 different photos trying to drive traffic to a sale, Facebook uses analytics to determine which of the 10 photos are the best performers, and then puts all of the money in your budget towards only the best ones so you get more bang for your buck.
(It also makes the served up content ābetter,ā which theoretically annoys the users a LITTLE less. THEORETICALLY.)
Facebook has various types of ads. I donāt remember exactly what they are and I already feel like throwing up after typing this much about Facebook ads so Iām going to just go off memory hereā¦
You can advertise an external page, like your site or a product page.
You can advertise newsletter signups.
You can advertise your page, to try to get page likes.
Or you can boost a post to get more visibility.
Alright, there ya go. Facebook ads 101. Let me clean up the puke and letās talk about The Dad again.
The Dad was lucky enough to have a marketing budget for audience growth. Thanks Some Spider! So we decided to buy Facebook ads.
Our goal was to get page likes, so we ran PAGE LIKE ads, right? Nope. Hereās what we didā¦
If you manage a Facebook page (not a profile, a page), you may notice that when you view who all engaged on a post, there will be an āINVITEā button next to those who liked the post but donāt yet like/follow your page.
When you click INVITE, those people get a notification saying they were invited to like your page. With one click, they can like/follow.
Page managers: Always good to go through those engagements and press INVITE on anyone who doesnāt follow yet.
Sure, not everyone will accept that invite. Most, probably, donāt. But some do! Especially if the content is good. CONTENT FIRST, CONTENT FIRST, CONTENT FIRST.
But if all your likes are coming from people who already follow, there wonāt be a lot of INVITE buttons. :(
So hereās how we spent our marketing budget. We created an audience that matched our targeted demographic (dads in the US who donāt yet follow The Dad). Then we boosted every post to that audience. Every day. And Facebook optimized those so that very quickly it was spending all of our budget on just 1 or 2 posts.
Those posts got served up in feed for people who didnāt yet follow The Dad. Since the content was good, theyād click like, share, comment. The posts would start taking off, even shared beyond those we paid to reach.
We regularly had posts with 1k+ engagements and it was INVITE pressing time! It worked best on mobile, but youād pull up the post, click engagements, then scroll and press INVITE over and over until your fingers bled.
Totally kidding! You canāt, because Facebook has a limit of how much you can do this in a day. It varies, but I felt it was around 200-300 per day. But if you kept trying despite the ban, I think it extended your ban or made the max amount smaller.
Sooooo what we did was make all the staff and some folks from HQ office Page Editors on The Dadās Facebook. Then each morning I logged in, saw what the top posts were, and assigned them to particular groups of people in the office to go through and press INVITE 200 times. Even the CEO, COO, etc were involved!
Spammy? Perhaps. But I prefer to think of it as tenaciously scrappy. I still look back on those days with a sense of fondness. I mean, this was like the digital equivalent of passing out flyers for your bandās show. We were all in it together. And it was addicting pressing all those invites and watching our initial fan base grow.
A few points:
Last time I checked, the INVITE button goes away when your page has 100k+ followers.
If you really ONLY care about numbers, you can run PAGE LIKE campaigns in non-US countries. Youāll find that some of them will miraculously generate ultra-low cost page like conversions. Iām talking a penny per follower. These are coming from click farms, either bots or real people. But they are not really REAL followers. So remember: itās more than just numbers. If you have a million fake followers, they will not interact with your content. And your page relevancy (quality) will be rock bottom and your page is nothing. Again, realness counts, content quality counts, and audiences can not be purely bought.
Thatās actually why we used this strategy instead of Page Like ads. This way, we invited people to like the page who already showed an interest in our content by engaging in it. This ensured they were real people who liked The Dad stuff. Took a little more work, probably cost more marketing budget, but create a high quality audience who believed in what we were trying to do.
Video works a little differently in terms of optimizing for actions. Because FB counts video views as an action. Also FB has been known to artificially inflate view counts in the past. š¬
How many Facebook followers did we end up with on January 1?
146,269.
Hereās a line in my email to contributors:
āHOLY F*CKING SH*T. We almost tripled my own ambitious expectations, thanks entirely to all your talent and hard work. 2018 is going to be batsh*t crazy. I can't wait.ā
Spoiler alert: 2018 was, indeed, batsh*t crazy.
Who is Aaron and how dare he Price-Is-Right me for the closest guess
Tenaciously scrappy - ha!