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The $1,000 Facebook Guide: How I Advertise to People You Can’t…Yet

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Today I’m going to show you how I’m (probably) the only advertiser that can reach all of Moz.com’s users via Facebook. I’m also going to show you that for every industry you care about, you should have at least two fan pages to cover it. I’ll also show you how you can steal the best content ideas from any of your competitors right under their nose.

Welcome to the guide I’ve been hyping up for a long time. I call it the $1,000 Facebook guide partly because I had planned to sell this information as part of a premium product but mostly because I think it will be worth far more than that to any Facebook advertiser. If you’re looking to promote any type of website on Facebook these days, this guide will show you information I haven’t seen elsewhere.

This is the first part of what I predict will be a three part series. Today’s post will cover how to learn everything there is to know about your industry on Facebook and tips and tricks on how I make my Facebook pages reach far more people than the competition.

The next post in this series will be getting into ads. The types of ads I run, the pictures I use and how I’m able to get clicks for as little as $0.00. There are no typo’s there, that’s how Facebook reports them (they’re really something like $0.002558 per click).

The following post will likely cover a lot of Facebook angles and opportunities that didn’t really fit in with the first two parts.

I Can Help You Even If Your Budget is Just $5 Per Day

And yes, I’m talking about US traffic as well.

Before we get into this huge post, you are probably asking if this is for you. Well, the headline is clear: If you are willing to put in $5 per day on Facebook ads you can learn more about your industry than pretty much any other advertising channel.

This post will apply to people looking to promote blogs, forums, online stores or anything similar.

Here’s a warning though: If you’re looking to promote diet pills, whitening creams, muscle building pills or anything of that nature, I can’t help you. I don’t have experience with that kind of thing and it’s not something I really want to get into. Even if it has made some of my friends millionaires.

I really want to start with the basics but to keep you interested in this post here’s one idea that works incredibly well for me.

I Build At Least 2 Fan Pages for Every Industry I’m Serious About

And I target the exact same people for both pages in most cases.

Why?

Because, like Google, Facebook gives more weight to something that has been recommended (links, shares) by more than one source.

Like so:

car-throttle
Later in this post I’ll explain why they both tagged themselves which helps as well

The styling of this link share is much more favourable to to getting a higher reach and having more people click through to your link.

Car Memes and Car Throttle both have more than one million likes and regularly push the same links. Car Throttle – the London based automotive blog – show no signs of slowing down their growth:

traffic-doubled

Their traffic has doubled in the last 6 months (and it was already huge). You can see a large part of that is thanks to Facebook which they’ve clearly figured out.

As an interesting side note, in the early days of Car Throttle they noticed a traffic spike whenever the owner of Car Meme’s linked to them. So…they bought the page.

It’s not only Car Throttle who figured this out of course. The guys at DoYouEven – who also own Gym Memes – do the same thing. Since Facebook publish joint shares so heavily (and there’s no branding at the top of the shares) I decided to start building new pages to compliment the ones I have.

I will talk about this more in the next post on ad buying, but basically just requires you to target the same very small, targeted interests when running ads. They’ll likely both get the same fans and you can just keep posting links which will, now and again, get featured prominently like this in a the News Feed, resulting in big traffic spikes.

A Very Quick Back to Basics Primer

ViperChill isn’t about the basics. For that reason, I’m going to skip the lessons on why you should choose a good name for your page, select a custom URL, create a cover photo and all of the other little steps you can read about elsewhere on the web.

I will say – with a matter of importance – that your Pages profile picture should stand out. Even if you have no intention of building up a large Facebook Page, you need a Page when you’re running News Feed ads, and standing out is part of the challenge.

On my biggest Facebook page, the colours I use are literally among the most garish the human eye can see. I don’t just put them for the sake of it of course; I try to use them in a smart way. For instance, one of my competitors uses a bright green colour in their Facebook picture by modifying the object they’re promoting. That could be a bright green golf club, or football, or legal document.

Just be sure that your Facebook picture still stands out when you reduce it to 40 x 40px in Photoshop. Standing out doesn’t mean that you have to get in the way of branding. Companies like Chanel, Ferrari and Harrod’s have still found ways to keep branding in mind and make their profile picture ‘pop’.

With the very basic stuff out of the way, let’s cover what my main focus is when I work with Facebook.

The Key to All of My Facebook Marketing is Pages & Interests

I hope you found that first section on using multiple Facebook pages interesting. It’s a taster of things to come. For now though, I want keep things scaled back a little so I can explain exactly what my plan and thoughts are regarding Facebook Marketing. Or more specifically, Facebook Advertising.

One thing a lot of people ask me is whether it’s worth buying Likes for the pages that you build or whether you should just send traffic directly to your website. To be very blunt: I very much believe in buying Likes for Facebook fan pages. While the organic reach of pages has obviously decreased over the last few years (due increased competition for eyeballs and a desire from Facebook for more money), you still get reach.

Here’s something I posted just a few days ago that had 30,000 people see it without a single boost or ad.

30kreach

Link clicks for this reach are usually much higher, but I wanted to show something I hadn’t boosted at all.

I’ve bought Likes for dozens of different pages and continue to do so to this day. As I write this I’ve spent around $60/day for the last 3 months just for one page. I’m not doing it just to have a cool fan count: I genuinely believe I’m getting or will get a return from having a large audience.

According to AgoraPulse (Via Jon Loomer), here’s the expected reach you can get for each post depending on the size of your page:

  • Fewer than 1,000 Fans: 25.1%
  • 1,000 – 10,000 Fans: 13.8%
  • 10,000 – 50,000 Fans: 10.0%
  • 50,000 – 100,000 Fans: 9.8%
  • More than 100,000 Fans: 7.7%

Depending on the niche I operate in, I don’t like to pay anything more than $0.15 per like and preferably under $.10. For the last few months I ran an American-only campaign for a specific niche and was able to get thousands of likes at $0.04 each. Right now I’m also running campaigns in non-US countries and buying thousands of likes for as little as $0.01.

one-cents-likes

That’s 10,000 fans for $100. Not a bad return at all, especially when they’re so targeted.

Today I’m going to reveal the primary secret for me being able to get such cheap fans and cheap clicks from Facebook. I’ve had thousands upon thousands of link clicks from $0.01 and less (Facebook shows $0.00 in ad stats).

The secret is simply targeting the right interests.

When you run a Facebook ad from the normal Ads Manager you get to target people via their Education, Relationship Status, Income and many other similar angles. The only thing I’ve been touching is the Interests section of Facebook.

I honestly don’t do anything overly complicated in the Power Editor or things like that – though I will be talking more about ads and my tips in the next post in this series – but simply find Interests that other people probably aren’t targeting.

In this post I want to show you how to I build upon what I shared in the last post about spreading your focus as far and wide as possible, then start to connect the dots as you have a better view of the bigger picture.

7 Ways to Find Interests and Audiences

The following tactics should not only be useful for finding potential interests when you run ads, but give you a very clear picture of the niche you’re operating in, no matter what it may be.

What I also want to discover when I follow these steps is pages in my industry that I can learn from in order to improve what I’m sharing to my own fans or improve the content I’m putting in my ads.

Without further ado…

An Update on my Similar Pages Trick

In my most recent post I showed you how you can find similar pages to any other page on Facebook. So, instead of having to click “Like” on a page and wait for Facebook’s similar suggestions to kick in, you can instead use a little URL trick to bypass the process.

I showed you how to find the ID of any page as that’s the ID you need to make the “trick” work. However, one smart commenter told me about a faster way which I’ve used previously but totally forgot about.

For any Facebook page you want to learn the ID of, just add the graph sub-domain to the start of the URL.

So http://facebook.com/viperchill becomes http://graph.facebook.com/viperchill. If you go to that website you’ll see something a little like this:

page-id

My page ID is highlighted in the red box

Once you have the page ID, you simply add it to the end of this URL:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/?frompageid=ID

Changing ID for the actual number.

From a page for a Magician with just 30,000 fans you can find a lot of relevant, similar pages, like so:

This is by far one of my favourite tricks to utilise to find more pages.

The key is putting the time in so you find yourself going further and further down the rabbit hole. From one page you may find two or three interesting alternatives. Then you do the same trick for those two or three pages and on it goes. You really can just keep going on and on and on, putting new pages into the URL, and finding more opportunities and potential interests for future advertising.

Find the Pages Facebook Recommend in Watch Pages

If you head over to a page you’re an Admin of and click on “Insights” on the top navigation bar you’ll learn more about your own audience and the reach of specific posts.

What Facebook also allows you to do in this section is watch other brands to see how they’re performing in terms of not only growth but also their top posts for the week.

All you need to do is add a few pages to watch, first. Then, Facebook will show you other pages they recommend you watch based on the audience of your own page:

facebook-suggested-pages

The suggestions here from Facebook aren’t very good in this example but please keep in mind that I only just added pages to watch for this screenshot – I really don’t follow ViperChill stats too closely – so it may take a while for Facebook to give me more relevant suggestions.

Make sure you implement this for your own pages which you manage and see what Facebook algorithmically suggest if you haven’t already.

Scan Pages that Other Pages Like

Though the following suggestion can feel a little slow and “manual” when implemented, I have found some great pages to follow or interests to advertise to when researching with this method. What you probably already know is that Facebook allows pages to Like other pages and those likes are then shown quite prominently on their page.

Here’s an example of Likes by Pages after checking Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income page and MJ DeMarco’s The Fast Lane Millionaire page.

liked-by-this-page

You can also click on the text that says “Liked by this page” and a pop-up will appear showing more results.

While some pages will simply like people they want to be associated or friendly with, you will find a lot of genuine recommendations this way if you keep going through this process with every large, relevant page that you find.

Follow the People Who Share Your Content

The headline really explains this one so there won’t be any fancy images here. Once you’ve built an audience and start having people share your status updates, go and check out their personal profiles. You won’t be able to see all of the people who shared your update – only the public ones – but I’ve found that the people who share any post generally share a lot of posts.

I’ve found at least one great page per industry that I didn’t know about just by “stalking” the people who share my own posts and see what else they share.

Sadly the only examples I can give would give away the other niches and countries I operate in. If a miracle happens and people start sharing ViperChill statuses – hah – I’ll share some examples.

Run Google Ads (No, really!)

Running a small ($50-100) impression-based campaign on Google Adwords in your niche can teach you a lot about an industry.

Really.

Whenever I do this I don’t spend time testing the ad or trying to make it look amazing so I suggest you don’t either. Just make it relevant enough for at least some people to click on.

Set the category for your ad which should be relevant to the industry you’re targeting and only target the Display Network. Then sit back and look at the sites where the ads are being clicked.

With less than $20 spend I found a website I had no idea about previously that turned out to be an interest with 230,000 reach. All you have to do is start entering the name of the sites you find as possible Interests and see which one Facebook recognises.

This $20 example is still one of my cheapest campaigns to this day because they are an older brand who kind of died off – and most people wouldn’t think of – but still have a lot of people attached to their name.

1-clicks

You can see lots of links which have just sent a single referrer to my site. These are all from an Adwords campaign using this tactic

If you know an industry fairly well then you are less likely to get any great finds with this one but since I didn’t know my industry too well – and Google searches only got me so far – it was a real winner for me.

For this to work even better you can run a retargeting campaign by tracking people who visit your site and then finding out other websites they spend time on.

Utilise Social Bakers

Like the previous suggestion, utilising Social bakers works far better if you don’t know a lot about the industry you’re entering. Though, now and then you could get a few surprises.

For instance, let’s say I’m using Facebook to promote a Football news blog or forum that I’ve just started. I know that I could target people who are interested in Real Madrid, Barcelona, Newcastle United or any other amazing football team (see what I did there?). Then again, everyone else in this niche who are running ads are probably going to be doing the same thing.

With Social Bakers (not an affiliate link) you can not only rank the biggest brands in different industries but you can also look at the fastest growing. Here are the fastest growing brands in sports this week:

interesting

While there are a lot of obvious contenders there’s also one result I’ve never heard of: Spartan Race. I’m probably alone there since they have 4 million fans but they’ve gained a few hundred thousand in just the last week alone. With a little imagination there are probably a few angles I or you could take to capitalise on the event.

“Which Premier League players would be Amazing in the Spartan Race”, “Which Premier League players would be Terrible in the Spartan Race”, “Why Football Players Would be Better than Rugby Players in the Spartan Race” and so on.

The Social Bakers feature I like most is the ability to delve into categories by country. I do run one page in a country I don’t know too much about and I’ve found a few results from the site which, again, I’ve been able to use in advertising campaigns and get very cheap clicks for.

The opportunities are endless with this one if you’re willing to do a bit of digging.

Audience Insights Tool

The Audience Insights tool, here, is great when you have a page that has started to grow an audience. This tool allows you to see a lot more information about your audience than you can from the Pages Admin area.

Here are some interesting stats about the ViperChill audience, for example.

viperchill-insights

From this we can see that ViperChill readers are more likely to be either Single or In a Relationship than the Facebook average. They are also far less likely to be Engaged than the Facebook average.

Perhaps more intriguing is that 15% of my audience is in Grad School, which is 150% more than the Facebook average.

There are a lot of other interesting things to check with the Audience Insights tool so I recommend going through all of the options on your own. These example findings could be especially useful when I start ad campaigns by doing things like excluding people who are engaged or people in High School and so on.

Unfortunately the ViperChill audience seemed to small to test to but I was able to use another page of mine to find relevant pages that my chosen audience would have a strong Affinity with. You can use a lot of other variables, such as interests, to find other potential pages to learn from and target as well.

relevance

Facebook describe Affinity as “How likely your audience is to like a given Page compared to everyone on Facebook” so I’ve found a great list here of pages with a large number of Fans that I could potentially target.

And target, I have 😉

Now that we’ve covered these 7 examples, let’s start getting into some specifics. To begin, I want to show you how I’ve been utilising my knowledge of Facebook interests to advertise to Moz fans for months, very cheaply.

How I Advertised to Moz.com Fans When Nobody Else (Probably) Did

Besides Moz themselves, of course.

The trick, as I mentioned earlier is all about interests and knowing what Facebook look for.

Check this out.

I type in Moz.

moz-nothing

Nothing. Unless you did actually want to target people interested in Islam instead.

Let’s try SEOMoz, since that’s what they used to be called.

seomoz

Just 6,000 people yet they have 187,000 fans.

Now, something else in that screenshot is why I wish I had taken it earlier.

Facebook – literally only this month – now offer Moz (Marketing software) as an option. Until now this has never been the case (please, ask Jon Loomer if you don’t believe me since I showed him this before).

I now realise how cooler this example would have been if Facebook weren’t offering that suggestion but again, trust me, they weren’t until I tried to get a screenshot for this post.

For months I’ve been able to market to their audience because I knew their interest was tagged as “Moz Software” and nothing else. I never received it from any kind of suggestion like in that screenshot.

The result is that my Likes and clicks to website were cheaper than ever before because very few people, if any, ever knew how to figure out the interest to reach their audience.

How did I figure it out?

Well, what you can often do when you can’t find a page in interests (they don’t show up by default) is to look at the category their page is in. Look how Moz have their fan page targeted:

moz-software

Just based on how they categorise their page is how I found this interest well over six months ago and have been using it ever since.

Now, I don’t know the exact process of how a brand or page can become an interest. By default, pages aren’t really interests. I heard a true Facebook expert describe interests basically being generated when a page / brand generates a lot of activity, gets tagged a lot, has people writing hashtags about them and so on.

It’s basically thought to be a combination of activity around a company or brand that allows it to show up in interests.

In the case of Moz, it was simply entering a lot of words around their brand name – such as their category – that allowed me to figure out how to reach their audience.

This persistence, with a bit of luck, is how I’m able to find brands and topics that don’t have other marketers advertising to already. And when you can find those, prices come down by default.

I Feel Like Your Facebook Page Category is Very Important

I say feel, because it’s not something I can definitively prove, and it’s not something other people seem to talk about.

I know there is some importance between categorising yourself as a local business or online brand (so you can enable check-ins, reviews and so on) but that’s not what I’m referring to.

I’m instead talking about changing the category of your Facebook page in order to improve the reach of individual Facebook posts.

The thing that made me question my current Facebook category was a competitor – who only had 20% more fans than me – getting far more than a 20% engagement and reach advantage on their posts. I know my industry inside out and they were absolutely not writing better content than us. I could also see when they were boosting posts, yet the non-boosted post still received insane engagement.

While researching what they might be doing that I’m not, I happened to notice their category was different to mine. Previously I had chosen my category as something very specific towards my niche i.e. Software or Football but theirs was the very broad “News / Media Website” category.

After I changed my category I found that my reach for Link posts (not photos or videos) grew higher than it had ever been. I could also share more links per day and get more reach for each individual article I share.

Interestingly, my competitor only post links, never a single picture or video update, so I decided to do the same. To utilise the two page trick which I mentioned earlier, I decided to create another page in the same industry to share photos and videos that I might have shared previously.

Now, again, I have zero proof that changing my page category had any effect on my results here. It could be that my page hit a certain likes threshold, Facebook started viewing my page as more valuable or dozens of other possible factors. However, when you try to think about it logically, it makes sense that Facebook would give more exposure to links when you define yourself as a website.

If any of you try this, please let me know if you see any changes in the comments.

How to Find the Most Popular Posts for Any Facebook Page

A few months ago I hired a programmer to find the top posts on any Facebook page. Basically the idea was to input any Facebook page, then it would go through all posts, and return back the posts with the most Likes. Logically speaking, this is the kind of content that their audience found interesting and if I’m in a similar niche, my audience would like too.

Fortunately at the beginning of development, I found a company who does this already; they’re called Fan Page Karma.

They don’t really advertise this feature too much which is odd to me since it’s the most useful part of their service in my opinion.

Let’s go back to the Magic niche which I was talking about in the last post and analyse the page of the UK’s Derren Brown. The date I inputted to monitor was all posts from October 1st 2014 to March 1st 2015. Here’s the result:

derren-brown-posts

On the left hand side you can see his most popular posts and on the right hand side you can see his weakest (amazingly, some didn’t get a single like). Sadly you can only see 5 posts per search result – even with a paid account – but if you keep messing around with the date range (I.e. check October only, then November only) you can return a lot of results.

Let’s do another example.

Being the greatest TV show in the world and having 15 million fans on Facebook, checking Top Gear’s most popular posts should be interesting. This time I’ve only looked for their top posts in the last month:

top-gear-shares

I know they have a large audience but people across the world generally respond to the same type of content. If I ran a car blog, for instance, then I can use two of those three posts however I please. I know people will react to them because they’ve already proven to do so.

It’s like how if you’re a regular reader of Reddit.com you’ll see “reposts” on the homepage a lot of the time. The image or story being shared ticks just enough viral boxes that if you reach enough people with the content, they’ll react to it in the same way people did in the past.

The Dubai police video is just a Youtube video that they shared themselves and the Ferrari 488 GTB pictures were released by Ferrari anyway so there would be no copyright issues with sharing them myself. I could put those on my page or website – if I had one – right this minute.

In return I would likely get similar viral results. More often than not, I do. And, you could too.

Please note that I am a paying member of Fan Page Karma but never had any issues getting this information on a free account. I honestly don’t know what their limits are for free accounts but you could definitely run a few URL’s without signing up.

For a Reach Boost, Post Content Just Before an Audience Boost

I think it’s fairly well agreed among Facebook marketers – or at least those who focus on growing large fan pages – that the first hour or so of a status going live determines how far and wide across your audience and the rest of Facebook it will spread. If you get a lot of engagement early on you’ll likely have your post reach far more people as the day goes on.

I personally call this the 10% engagement rule. I tweeted about it a few days ago.

reach-rule
Shameless plug: If you want to follow me on Twitter you can do so here.

If you’re looking to reach as much of your potential audience as possible while a post starts to go viral – this won’t work for boring updates – then look no further than the Insights tab I pointed out earlier.

If you click on Insights (from the top nav of your own Facebook page) then click on Posts you can see exactly when most of your fans are online. Here’s an example from one of my own Facebook pages:

top-times-insight

While days of the week are fairly consistent, it’s clear that there are times in the day that my audience use Facebook the most. I predict noon is popular because that’s when people get a lunch break from work and late afternoon is also popular because people are again home from work and free to browse the web.

Every single day I try to publish something before noon and something around 6pm. This gives my content – if it’s good – the best chance to get seen by a lot of people as Facebook shows it to more and more people if the response is good. As more of my potential fans are online, there are more potential people to see the content.

Tagging Popular Pages in Updates Can Increase Your Reach

For my last post when I was researching pages for the Magic niche and giving examples I accidentally (honest!) clicked “Like” on the Manchester United Facebook page. Interestingly, I haven’t seen much from them, but what I have seen shows how well tagging works.

Both of the following pages – Goal.com and Mirror Football – tagged the team in a status update and I got to see it:

man-utd-mention

Notice that I don’t like either of their pages. Facebook simply assume I will be interested in the story because I have already liked Manchester United. None of my friends liked these posts either – because they’re smart enough to support Newcastle – so it shows the power of tagging.

Now, unless you are a news site there aren’t many opportunities to take advantage of this. I use it very sparingly and often in a nice way so I might say “[Tagged brand] also talked about this story today”.

The results are hit and miss, but can often result in a very big hit to help a post that is going viral to reach more people.

Some Final Tips to Improve Your Posts

We’re wrapping up this post now and I hope I’ve given you some great angles to work with, no matter which industry you may find yourself operating in.

Here are a few additional tips to help you make the most of your time marketing on Facebook.

Check Your Link Formatting with the Lint Tool

In 99% of cases your website will be set-up just fine for Facebook to be able to take the necessary pictures and summary text of your article automatically. I discovered recently though that while Facebook could pull in my article headline and picture, they weren’t pulling in my summary text.

In my frustration in trying to figure this out, I came across the Facebook “lint tool“. I’m sure the name has some proper meaning.

Anyways, what it allows you to do is enter any URL and see how Facebook pulls the information for that site. So if I put in my most recent ViperChill blog post, this is what I see:

facebook-lint

Not only can you diagnose problems like I did (my meta description tag was empty), if you’ve set up a default image for sharing and want to see if it works, this is the perfect place to do it.

Check Your Daily ‘Unlikes’ Based on What You’re Sharing

I post 5-6 links per day on most of my Facebook pages – made possibly by categorising my pages as websites (I believe) – so have a good idea of what people like and don’t like.

What I like to check is which days I receive more unlikes on my page than others. Just because you have someone as a fan of your page, it certainly doesn’t mean they’ll be around forever.

unlikes

I can generally correlate the spikes in Unlikes to the type of content I’ve posted. Often when I try something new and irregular to what I normally share, the spike will be higher.

To access this information head back to the Insights Tab and select Likes in the secondary navigation bar which appears.

Keep Testing and Learning

The hard part about writing this series is that I’m always learning something new about my industry as a whole and how Facebook promotes content. For instance, Facebook just launched a Call to Action button at the top of pages which you can use to send Page visitors pretty much wherever you like.

Organic reach is always going to change. The type of content (links, video, pictures) and the reach they get will constantly change. Your competitors and new players in the space, will also change.

The most important thing you can do is accept that these changes are going to happen – don’t try to fight them, you don’t own Facebook – and continue to learn as they happen.

That is the difference between success and failure in this space.

This post is getting very long so I’ll think we’ll stop it there. I have one slight deviation blog post coming after this then we’ll continue with the series.

I hope you liked the first entry. I have nothing to sell or promote here, I really just care about your thoughts and comments, so all feedback is much appreciated!

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149 Comments


  1. David says:
    March 5, 2015 at 2:27 pm

    >Newcastle United
    >Amazing

    Hah. :p

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 2:36 pm

      I.P. tagged in analytics.

      Blocked.

      Reported to Akismet.

      😉

      Reply
      • Ramsay says:
        March 6, 2015 at 2:40 am

        This made me actually LOL pretty hard.

        Reply
  2. Glen says:
    March 5, 2015 at 2:52 pm

    I can’t believe I forgot to add this to the post sine it was one of my headlines in Evernote. If you made it to the comments, consider this an extra tip as a thank you for scrolling all the way.

    BuzzSumo.com is a great tool which shows you the most socially shared posts from any website. Here I do something similar to Fan Page Karma in which I’ll check the top content on any site which also has a large presence on Facebook.

    If they have a post on their site which has a lot of Facbeook shares I know it will work well as a post on my own site – which I share via Facebook – or as a Facebook status on its own.

    Thank you, as always, for reading!

    Reply
    • David D says:
      March 5, 2015 at 3:30 pm

      I read the comment!

      From now on -just leave out some juicy stuff and pepper the comment section with them to modify behavior of readers to always read them!!

      Great stuff Glen.

      Reply
      • Glen says:
        March 5, 2015 at 3:30 pm

        Haha,

        Thanks David!

        Reply
    • Donal says:
      January 5, 2016 at 11:26 am

      Great post and lots of excellent info in there. I use the Social Kickstart tool for finding popular posts on other pages. You can search pages using keywords and then view and order all the posts from that page and repost them to your page all from within the softeare. You can also schedule the posts. Just thought this might me handy for anyone reading.

      Reply
  3. Kyle says:
    March 5, 2015 at 2:52 pm

    Thanks for outing the Moz software interests method =P

    Good article though and very nice tip on tagging other brands and pages in posts. Now I’m off to mess with my categories 😉

    Cheers,
    Kyle Duck

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 5:36 pm

      Sadly it’ll probably be dead after today, but there are hopefully enough tips here to find interests that your competition can’t.

      Hope all is well with you, Kyle.

      Reply
  4. Joona says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:09 pm

    Hi Glen,

    This comes at an awesome time as I’m just about to launch a new venture, partially inspired by your previous post.

    I have to admit that my first reaction upon landing on this post was “Ok, I need to Evernote this ASAP” in case you come to your senses and realise you’ve made a mistake by sharing too much good stuff.

    Really appreciate the value you provide in these posts and I’m always looking forward to the next one – even if I need to wait for 5 months :)

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 5:44 pm

      Evernote is the best thing ever :)

      Thans for the comment Joona,

      I promise it wont take that long!

      Reply
      • Glen says:
        March 5, 2015 at 5:44 pm

        *Thanks

        Reply
  5. sam says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:10 pm

    Wow this is very nice article I saw on your blog. Thanks for sharing this very important information. I am a very big FAN of you and your blog. Daily I am visited your blog and learn new thing, tips and tricks.

    Reply
  6. Arman says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:13 pm

    This is a meat..very useful

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 3:34 pm

      Thanks Arman!

      Reply
  7. Stefan Zugor says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:14 pm

    Great stuff Glen.

    Was looking forward to this post for a while actually, since you mentioned it on Facebook before.

    The one thing I’m slightly confused about is why you’d rather spend money on getting Facebook page likes over sending the SAME traffic to an email opt in landing page..

    I mean, While Facebook is good for Marketing and building a fan base, wouldn’t it make more sense to get the same people on your email list, which you have more control over, and could very probably get a much better reach (open rate) anyway?

    Just my opinion! Thanks again!

    Reply
    • Ricardo says:
      March 5, 2015 at 5:00 pm

      Sending traffic to a website/landing page is a lot more expensive. To lower the cost, he is playing the long term and volume game growing the page likes. In the end the content is still in the website, people will still go there and a high percentage will subscribe. Glen, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is what I’ve experience.

      Reply
      • Glen says:
        March 5, 2015 at 5:46 pm

        Generally, yes, site traffic can be a lot more expensive.

        That said, I do have a number of ads which I send directly to a website and not to the Facebook page.

        I’ll be talking about them in the next post

        Reply
        • Jerry Roberts says:
          March 7, 2015 at 11:09 pm

          Hi Glen,

          Powerful post! Thanks.

          We know that FB charges more per click if you send traffic straight to Websites.

          How about:

          1. Creating a FB page for the product
          2. Using a iframe or other device to display your video sales letter and optin form on that page

          Will FB still charge you as if you’re sending traffic outside the system, or can you still get cheap clicks with this method?

          I’m interested in your thoughts.

          Jerry

        • Andre says:
          March 9, 2015 at 3:53 pm

          I’ve been able to get very targeted US based traffic at avg .05 CPC. Couldn’t upload a pic so I linked up the URL to the screen shot

  8. Kirils says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:15 pm

    Don’t comment a lot on blogs. But definitely wanted to say thanks for this info. I have heard a lot about car throtle and I like how you took them as an example!

    Thank you again,
    Kirils

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 3:17 pm

      Hey Kirils,

      Appreciate you taking the time out to leave a comment.

      Reply
  9. Tim says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:26 pm

    Hello Glen,
    Thank you so much for this awesome guide. I have been spending hours researching how best to tackle my Facebook campaign. You mentioned this wouldn’t work for magic creams and muscle building and all that but, I want to promote my own personal acne relief guide leveraging Facebook traffic.

    Is this going to cut it?

    Thank you.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 2:21 am

      Hey Tim,

      Facebook ads can work very well for them, but generally the people who are pushing them are using other tactics (such as cloaking) which I don’t have enough experience with to comment on.

      For that industry, unless you’re trying to build up a quality brand image, I would send people directly to a website rather than building up via Pages.

      Reply
  10. Madhukeshwar says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:32 pm

    I think now you are behind Facebook and Matt Cutts will now have some relaxation time…haha

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 3:37 pm

      Hahaha

      Maybe we’re just trying to fly under the radar a little more 😉

      Reply
  11. jon r says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:33 pm

    Always brilliant, insightful and eye-opening, Glen!

    I think of the “likes” as I do creating “authority and trust” over time in FB. Once you build it up (and don’t stop), you acquire “status” improvement (whatever that means in FB these days) – visibility – clearly, it works. And, instead of going for the quick “buy now or die” approach, you are creating a real audience, a target group of folks that really like what you do, and want to hear from you.

    It’s sort of like building an email list, starting the nurture/good-will process and then presenting useful information and offers along the way – and at a much less cost, and with a higher (hopefully) conversion rate.

    Combine that with continous testing, slicing of the data with lookalike audiences, interests and likes – and it’s virtually impossible to lose. :-)

    Liked the category option, haven’t tested it – sounds reasonable. :-)

    Thanks for leading!

    Cheers, Jon

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 7:03 am

      Hey Jon,

      Appreciate the comment. You’ve got some great points…I like your thinking!

      Reply
  12. Steve Roy says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:34 pm

    Hey Glen,

    I’ve been quietly following your stuff for years and the timing of this post was perfect for me. After 4 years of writing for my personal development site, I decided to go in a different direction and started a fitness website geared towards helping busy dads get fit. I have been focusing on FB ads to drive traffic but don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Your post, as usual, is extremely useful and will really help me going forward. Thanks for this.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 3:38 pm

      Glad it could help you, Steve!

      Best of luck going forward. Please let me know if there’s anything I can help with :)

      Reply
  13. Ethan says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:44 pm

    This is pretty phenomenal advice. I’m an SEO person, but now I feel like I have an advantage over some of my “paid”-side coworkers.

    I have one question, unrelated to facebook though – since you do a lot of work in other countries, how often do you deal with the other big search engines out there, like Baidu, Yandex, etc? Do you have your own sets of tricks for these, too?

    Thanks for the great post, and for the frequency lately!

    Reply
  14. Larry says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:52 pm

    Wow!! Amazing! Thanks for sharing Glen.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 3:54 pm

      Appreciate it Larry,

      Glad you liked it!

      Reply
  15. Vincent Nguyen says:
    March 5, 2015 at 3:56 pm

    I’ve been targeting Moz (marketing software) for a couple of my clients for the past few weeks. I guess I should expect the cost per conversions to be going up as people begin targeting the same, eh? :)

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 4:01 pm

      You should! 😉

      Reply
  16. Scott says:
    March 5, 2015 at 4:06 pm

    That was excellent! Very helpful, cutting edge content explained meticulously and I got a lot of value out of it so thank you very much for sharing and as a Facebook Marketer, I look forward to seeing more of your content in the future!

    Top job mate!

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 4:09 pm

      Thanks Scott, that means a lot!

      Best of luck with your Facebook marketing :)

      Reply
  17. Jackie says:
    March 5, 2015 at 4:14 pm

    You did it again! What an awesome post.

    Thanks

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 4:18 pm

      Thanks Jackie!

      Reply
  18. Josh Hamit says:
    March 5, 2015 at 4:32 pm

    Thanks for the FB tips, Glen.

    I had never heard of tagging other related Facebook pages in posts, but that does make sense, and thinking about it I’ve seen this numerous times. I remember thinking to myself, “why would one page mention another?? Surely this could mean a FB user could click on to their page instead…”, but now I see the logic behind it.

    Look forward to the next installment.

    Cheers,
    Josh

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 4:53 pm

      Glad you liked it, Josh!

      Appreciate the feedback :)

      Reply
  19. Marica says:
    March 5, 2015 at 4:35 pm

    Phenomenal post as always Glenn and I haven’t even read it all yet :-)

    Where do you find the Affinity section you mentioned? I can’t seem to find it on one of my pages. Do you have to have a certain amount of likes to get it?

    Cheers!

    p.s.
    Off to reading the rest of the post.

    Marica

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 4:53 pm

      Hi Marcia,

      Where are you going to find it?

      If you’re looking in Audience Insights it could be the case – like ViperChill – that your audience is not being enough yet to show results.

      Reply
  20. Zbynek says:
    March 5, 2015 at 4:38 pm

    Hi Glen, again nice article! Have you considered using groups instead of pages? Sometimes these have much better effect, especially when you are well recognized authority in some niche. My own results show that the organic reach is way much lower then you wrote, even some top marketers I know suspect only 1-2 % in some cases.

    Ive also tested the method for finding similar groups and surprisingly it always returns no results at all. Maybe it is because of my personal account in other language then english but who knows…

    Reply
  21. Slavko Desik says:
    March 5, 2015 at 4:51 pm

    Hey Glen, this is an amazing piece of content. I don’t know a thing about Facebook marketing, and never really gave it a try. This makes me rethink some of that. Just a question though- what happens if you don’t make any activity on your page for a while- say don’t post anything for a week or two, and are in fact very sporadic with your posting overall? Can you still make the same type of engagement when you start trying?

    Is it possible to pile up likes for months ahead, doing nothing in particular when it comes to engaging the audience, and then still be able to drive engagement up once the time comes for launching a well structured content sharing strategy?

    Reply
  22. Ricardo says:
    March 5, 2015 at 4:54 pm

    So much great information. I’m making a printable version of this post and the rest of the series. I have been doing Facebook experiments and your insides give me a lot of new ideas. Thanks Glen

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 4:57 pm

      Hey Ricardo,

      Great to see you here man. Thanks for sticking with me over the break.

      Hope you got and continue to get something from this one. Good luck!

      Reply
  23. Mike says:
    March 5, 2015 at 5:02 pm

    Glenn, pure gold.

    I started a FB page and website combo in a very unique niche in Sept. One day in Nov. decided to promote some posts and boom, the gates opened up. Since then I dug my heels in and learned many of the things you touched on here, but some of the things you point out definitely help gel together my approach.

    Like you, I’m getting .01 engagement, sometimes $.00, and I actually stopped paying for likes. I only use PPE, which naturally generates likes along with website clicks and shares.

    One thing I’m working on is a “viral impact” index that I can use to quickly gauge whether a post I share has enough potential to put more $$ behind it. I’ve already been picked up by some huge mainstream websites (great backlinks) from some viral posts I created. It’s interesting to note the lifespan of some of these as well, which I find can extend upwards of 2+ months depending on the audience size and reach.

    I actually drafted a letter to you outlining my success…maybe I’ll send it over.

    Mike

    Reply
  24. IMPromoCoder says:
    March 5, 2015 at 5:11 pm

    [From Wikipedia] In computer programming, lint was the name originally given to a particular program that flagged some suspicious and non-portable constructs (likely to be bugs) in C language source code.

    The term is now applied generically to tools that flag suspicious usage in software written in any computer language.

    The term lint-like behavior is sometimes applied to the process of flagging suspicious language usage. Lint-like tools generally perform static analysis of source code.

    I feel like a better person right now… :-)

    Reply
  25. Azzam says:
    March 5, 2015 at 5:31 pm

    Outstanding post. For someone who has done exceptionally well on Facebook there are some awesome tips here for me to take away as I attempt at another niche.

    Referring back to your last post about working on something you have a passion about, I know Adnan (owner) of Car Throttle well, someone at th3 same time started a car blog and fizzled out for not having enough passion; but clearly grew his site by consistently delivering great content.

    A shameless plug also. I am building http://www.developer.xtrovert.net, which will auto inject the social meta tags for Facebook. It will me more powerful as will do split testing of headline, description and images of your webpage shares. But I thought it would be useful for that part of your post ensuring people get the social meta tags correct.

    Can’t wait for the course.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 5:52 pm

      Hey man,

      Thanks for stopping by, as always.

      That’s very cool. I’ve read a few of his interviews and taken quite a bit from them. Always great to see a young guy go onto big things and get a few million in investment.

      Really look forward to see what you have coming out. Let us know when you’re done. Happy to share it here if relevant :)

      Reply
  26. Lorraine says:
    March 5, 2015 at 6:00 pm

    Thank you Glen, valuable information as always.

    My site is new and very tricky to promote because it is classified as ‘adult’ albeit it is mainly adult humour, so much of the advice I am finding online about running an FB page just doesn’t apply due to FB policies, however this post has a huge amount of relevant content for me to work through so thank you.

    What I really like is how you are honest and admit that you are still learning. It’s refreshing as so many ‘experts’ claim to know everything about everything. Your posts come across as very authentic and generous.

    So thank you again and keep up the great work!

    Reply
  27. Onder says:
    March 5, 2015 at 6:07 pm

    Brilliant posts as always Glen,

    A quick question on FB page creation. You mentioned how you create 2 pages. How would you structure them both? Would you theme them both in exactly the same way or would you create a generic one in addition to a branded one?

    Looking forward to your next posts.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 5, 2015 at 6:10 pm

      In one example I started by covering all post types in my industry. So that means article links, images of new products, funny images, funny videos and product videos as well.

      I changed that page to only cover article links, then created another page to cover images and videos for the same industry. Now and again, I’ll make that second page share a link to the same article as the first.

      The first one is branded. The second is more of a general page to the niche and doesn’t appear to be associated with any brand.

      Reply
      • Onder says:
        March 5, 2015 at 8:22 pm

        Cool. Thanks for clearing it up. Its a good idea. I never liked the idea of including random funny viral videos in my branded page. I know it’s something Gary Veynerchuk suggests to do.

        Reply
  28. Jillian (Food, Folks and Fun) says:
    March 5, 2015 at 6:11 pm

    Glen,

    Fabulous post. This is something I needed to read to get me rolling again on FB. Currently I have 23K fans for my recipe blog’s fan page. I have seriously neglected the page because my reach has been terrible (about 0.5-1% reach). I can’t wait to try the methods you outlined above.

    Question though, is there anything you’d change or do differently for a recipe blog’s fan page?

    Reply
  29. Dhinesh says:
    March 5, 2015 at 6:20 pm

    Thats a great method to get likes in Facebook.

    Have you ever thought of marketing in other social network which are quite large in demographic like China.

    And do you speak Chinese? If no, then how the hell do you manage to live in hong kong

    Reply
  30. Webspand says:
    March 5, 2015 at 6:25 pm

    As a large agency side social media and PPC director I was almost bummed how behind I was on Facebook ads and strategy. The new clients are pouring in and I need to give them the best value for their ad dollars. This will help me surpass their expectations and then some…Go Viper Chill Glenn

    PS, Glenn is amazing at responding to emails and I tip my hat to you sir for these super top secret tips

    -Craig

    Reply
  31. Archseer says:
    March 5, 2015 at 6:32 pm

    My buddy Craig from over at a big SEO agency forwarded me your email for this and As I woke up to my coffee I figured I’d dive in to see what this was all about. I AM no Facebook or “SEO Agency” expert but I have a little play time logged on the FB platform. The depth, detail and outright brilliance of this post had me signed up to the newsletter in no seconds flat.

    Glenn you are more than gracious for spreading this knowledge to anyone let alone your subscribers for free.

    Thank you…Archseer

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:17 am

      Hey Archseer,

      Please thank Craig for me :)

      Thanks so much for the kind words and I hope you like the future email updates.

      Reply
  32. Dave Madnani says:
    March 5, 2015 at 6:37 pm

    I was waiting patiently for the Facebook post you’ve been talking about and here it is.

    Totally worth the wait.

    Gonna’ apply all this instantly Glen. You smashed it with this one.

    Reply
  33. D.A says:
    March 5, 2015 at 6:49 pm

    Glen,

    Great content, as always. I’ve been following you for years. Why? Because you are a natural teacher. You have a “gee-whiz” teaching style along the lines of, “I tried this, then went here and learned that, then someone gave me an insight that led to another discovery…”. By taking us along for the ride, you make us feel as though we are discovering the ideas right along with you – and learning at the same time. Sort of like being able to look over Christopher Columbus’ shoulders as he is thinking ” I turn the rudder this way a little, then turn the rudder that way a little, I know it’s out there somewhere…, Oh, I see it now”. Thanks for giving us insight into your thought process.

    Looking forward to the next installments!

    Reply
  34. Vladimir Bestic says:
    March 5, 2015 at 7:34 pm

    Hey Glen, awesome post! I’ve been waiting for this :)

    What do you think about the strategies for improving ad relevancy score? (recently added metric)

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:13 am

      Hey Vladimir,

      Thanks bud. Hope all is well your end.

      I saw I’m getting 9 or 10 for most of my ads which is nice. I’ll try and cover it a little in the next post :)

      Reply
  35. Robert Connor says:
    March 5, 2015 at 7:40 pm

    We just started advertising on facebook and this will go a long way to reaching our audience, thanks glen!

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:10 am

      Thanks Robert,

      Good luck!

      Reply
  36. Nicolas says:
    March 5, 2015 at 8:02 pm

    Hello,

    First time i’ll write a comment here (but reading and enjoying each of your post and learning a lot of stuff) : just great great post !! thanks a lot :) :)

    Cheers from Europe :)

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:09 am

      Thanks Nicolas!

      Reply
  37. Gideon says:
    March 5, 2015 at 8:18 pm

    Great Glen! The days of your long silence have been broken with great posts as usual. This is really cracking the areas I’ve not gone into before. Surely I will explore FB more with these helpful tips. Thanks a lot as we cant wait for the next one.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:10 am

      Appreciate it, Gideon!

      Reply
  38. Alex says:
    March 5, 2015 at 8:38 pm

    Thank you!!

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:03 am

      You’re very welcome :)

      Reply
  39. Matthew Chalk says:
    March 5, 2015 at 8:39 pm

    Fantastic post :)

    Really interesting stuff

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:03 am

      Thanks Matthew!

      Reply
  40. Lauren says:
    March 5, 2015 at 9:20 pm

    Great post! I have a couple of questions:

    – I pay for conversions (to an opt in squeeze page) and I’m currently achieving as low as $0.46 (US traffic). Would you still argue that going down the route of paying for page likes is cheaper in the long run?

    – when moz software wasn’t listed as a suggestion for you, how did you include it in your interest settings for the ad? When I use power editor, if a page doesn’t appear in the settings then you just can’t use it. Or am I misreading: did you select niche non-brand interests like ‘software’ ‘SEO’ instead?

    I’ll definitely be sharing this with my audience. So much useful info here so thank you.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:03 am

      Hi Lauren,

      Thanks!

      1. In some niches I do pay for direct traffic to my site and not so much page likes. I find the conversions to be much better.

      2. I meant that I had to keep using search term variations until I tried “moz software” and that got it to show :)

      Reply
  41. Alan says:
    March 5, 2015 at 10:04 pm

    Another Great Post.

    If you ever want to dig into Twitter growth let me know. I continue to grow my following yet I honestly don’t have a website nor do I tweet all the time. I rank high as a “recommended person to follow” sadly for ppl not in my own country USA. (Basically I get alot of british people that follow me and Im not sure why Twitter recommends me to them.

    Would love to share my thoughts and have your analytical mind come to some conclusions.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:08 am

      Hah that’s pretty interesting.

      I definitely don’t get as much out of Twitter as I possibly could. If I ever write about them I’ll keep you in mind Alan,

      Thanks!

      Reply
  42. Jeremy says:
    March 5, 2015 at 10:13 pm

    Glen you’re most recent few posts have been killer! This article has more value in it than most web courses I see my friends buying.

    I’m making the jump and leaving my job to live the cheap life in SE Asia while trying to establish a living income online. These tips give me loads of confidence and hopefully I can put them to use to satisfy some freelance clients.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:02 am

      Wow that’s exciting. Best of luck Jeremy :)

      Reply
  43. Alex Sol says:
    March 5, 2015 at 10:45 pm

    Awesome stuff, Glen!

    Facebook marketing is something I really want to get into but I haven’t touched it yet. I created a few fan pages but when I realized I won’t be getting any “free” likes I out that idea aside, at least for a while.

    Going to use your blog posts to get this thing rolling 😉
    – Alex

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:01 am

      Best of luck, Alex.

      Let me know how you get on :)

      Reply
  44. Luis says:
    March 5, 2015 at 11:35 pm

    Awesome. Yes, you did it again as Jackie says.

    Looking forward to read the rest of the posts of this Facebook series.

    Thanks million.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 1:00 am

      Appreciate it, Luis!

      Reply
  45. Kimberly says:
    March 5, 2015 at 11:51 pm

    Wow, so well done. I’ll need to re-read it a few times.– and the comments section — to get it into my pea brain.

    Like the lint tip too! Thanks-

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 2:22 am

      You’re welcome Kimberly,

      Thanks for reading!

      Reply
  46. Wess Stewart says:
    March 6, 2015 at 12:50 am

    Wow, Glen. This is seriously probably the most informative post I have EVER read. I’ve already started messing around with trying to find pages on FB with good traction, but so far all I have learned is that my friends are really, really boring. Great post!

    Reply
  47. Steve says:
    March 6, 2015 at 2:07 am

    Hey man, thanks so much for the awesome advice here!

    I have a followup question for you on your Moz tip…

    I’m in a niche where a lot of the pages with big (200k-500k) followings are all in the “Artist” category.

    For the life of me, I can’t get them to appear in the interests targeting options, even now using your advice here.

    In your experience, could this be a category issue? Or do you think that it’s possible to find any/every page as long as you hit the right search keyword?

    Cheers mate

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 2:24 am

      Hi Steve,

      It’s definitely not possible to find all of them. As I mention in the post, it is a little bit of a mystery as to exactly what shows up in Interests and there are more factors than just a page with a lot of likes.

      It seems very strange that you can’t find any of them though…

      Reply
  48. Sheree says:
    March 6, 2015 at 2:25 am

    This is amazing, Glen. Thanks for such detailed guidance. Well, you always deliver it, but thanks as always.

    I’ll be digesting this for days and experimenting a LOT as I launch a new online venture.

    Reply
  49. erik says:
    March 6, 2015 at 3:08 am

    Glenn,
    Great post! One thing that is worth mentioning too is that Videos are the new memes…. Videos content seems to fly effortlessly through FB for me on http://www.facebook.com/rtba.co.

    Side note…. What is carthrottle.com built on? Is that ning?

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 6, 2015 at 6:34 am

      They’ve been through three redesigns since I’ve been following them. I imagine they’ll have something pretty custom right now.

      I have seen people talking about how big videos are but honestly, I just don’t get much reach on mine at all. Well, I do, but very few seem to be clicking play.

      I did use one for a competition recently though that worked very well.

      Reply
    • Kristie Turck says:
      March 9, 2015 at 9:46 pm

      Here is some Car Throttle info. http://builtwith.com/carthrottle.com

      Reply
  50. Guille says:
    March 6, 2015 at 7:09 am

    Amazing stuff!

    Thanks a lot for it!
    I have a couple of Facebook pages a I am now testing with them. It is difficult to find patterns but the process is always entertaining.

    Maybe you will cover this in the next post but just in case I have a very newby question:

    when I find a post, video or photo from one page with similar content sometimes that got loads of likes I share it on my fan page just clicking on the share button, others I share it by updating it on my status and others I post it on my own website and then share that post on my fb page.
    But im still not sure what’s the best approach or why.

    Thanks Glen

    Reply
  51. Annie says:
    March 6, 2015 at 8:19 am

    great post Glen,just getting into Fb marketing and this is similar to what im doing,so maybe it means im on the right track,love all your posts,im a silent reader,well most time…but yep big Cheers for that post.my eye will be out for more:)

    Reply
  52. mike says:
    March 6, 2015 at 8:21 am

    Awesome content as always, rly makes me wanna get in the facebook game.
    Ohh yeah, btw. Go Gunners!

    Reply
  53. Inzamam says:
    March 6, 2015 at 8:46 am

    Hi,
    Its really a good post and its time to make do some action with FB for me.

    Reply
  54. Casper says:
    March 6, 2015 at 12:22 pm

    Hi Glen,

    Thanks for another great article!

    I read the whole thing a few times, and have a few questions.

    – You say that you are buying likes through the Facebook Ad system via interest. Is that correct?
    How do you get the likes?, On my own newsfeed, i get “Sponsored Content” some times. But i dont have any choice of liking the page that made the add? I just get redirected to their website.

    – If we have around 55.000 likes on our page. and reach between 2.000 – 200.000 depending how “viral” it gets. Do you think we should create another page and make an ad to target our existings users, so they like the new page. So we have a “double” page like car throttle?

    Thanks again!

    Regards, Casper

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 7, 2015 at 5:30 am

      You should have the choice of liking a page on News Feed ads – if you don’t already – but yes, it won’t be very prominent.

      When you get into building ads, which I’ll show on the next part of the series, you have the option to buy Likes, Clicks to Your Website, Video Views and far more.

      If possible, I would do so, yes. However if you don’t have your own page show as an interest or haven’t captured your current audience in another way, you’ll have to make both pages target the same interest to make sure you’re overlapping fans.

      Reply
  55. Vladi says:
    March 6, 2015 at 3:12 pm

    Thanks Glen,
    Im an old reader from Israel, but its my first comment here, i followed your “viralnova” guide and made around 50k$ in 2 months – but than facebook shut down my ads account without a reason.
    I didnt care about the fan page, i was driving traffic to the website.
    I was banned pretty quickly for 5 times now. different pc and websites. didnt help.

    I’m starting to think facebook doesnt like “viralnova” style websites. I know its not only me getting banned with these kind of websites.

    Did you ever experienced something similar with facebook? Any idea how to overcome it?

    Reply
  56. Jean Paul Cortés says:
    March 6, 2015 at 3:29 pm

    What a great post, as always Glen, chock full of golden nuggets of information. Empirically, I used interests to get traffic to a new website I’m building, for the Spanish speaking market, and was also able to get thousands of clicks to the site dirt cheap. I don’t have the analytics unfortunately, however I paid $1 per lead and 6 cents per website conversion which I think is fairly good.

    Reply
  57. Meena Sharma says:
    March 6, 2015 at 4:49 pm

    Ohh!.. Great

    I am going to start to use facebook ads services soon. And now i can start easily, Thank You admin to share awesome post.

    Reply
  58. Merab says:
    March 6, 2015 at 6:04 pm

    Thanks for sharing this valuable info Glen!

    I have a question though: you said you had targeted an audience by specifying their interest as “Moz software” and facebook didn’t show it in its suggestion list at the moment. Facebook doesn’t allow you to type in an arbitrary interest if it’s not in its suggestion list, so how did you do it? How did you specify an arbitrary interest?

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 7, 2015 at 5:28 am

      Hi Merab,

      It was there. It just only appeared when I started to type “Moz Sof…”. Otherwise, it would never have shown.

      Reply
  59. Kyler says:
    March 6, 2015 at 8:48 pm

    Very good stuff. I’ve noticed that some things show up in different searches. Just have to find that sweet spot.

    Another thing I like to do is to put my buyer profile in the audience insights to see what they’re into. Then I basically follow the paper trail of similar pages / companies to look at. I’ve found some influential business people that I hadn’t heard of and ran campaigns to their audience.

    Last trick I do is a little reverse engineering. I don’t mind piggy backing if it works. Hit the down arrow on the top right of the ad and it will give you the option “Why am I seeing this?” and hit that. It’ll tell you how that person targeted you. If it’s a really broad campaign, it might just list your country and age. But sometimes I found gold nuggets I hadn’t thought of before.

    Hope that helps someone!

    Reply
  60. Simon Paul says:
    March 6, 2015 at 9:15 pm

    Great article, thank you!

    I changed my FB page’s category to website and noticed an immediate upturn of about 20% for exposure

    Then I dug a little deeper around FB settings and found that the Open Graph field fbadmins wasn’t being propagated properly, so I fixed that, and have noticed at LEAST another 20% upturn in exposure to well over 25% of “fans” from around 15%

    Might be another tip to help people

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 7, 2015 at 5:30 am

      Very interesting Simon,

      Thanks for sharing!

      Reply
    • Guille says:
      March 7, 2015 at 11:33 pm

      Hi Simon. How did you fix the fbadmins problem?
      Thank you

      Reply
  61. Nicolas says:
    March 6, 2015 at 11:45 pm

    I love the guide! And I was wondering could something like this work for a Viralnova type website?

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 7, 2015 at 5:31 am

      Absolutely!

      Reply
  62. DK says:
    March 7, 2015 at 3:32 pm

    Hi Glen,

    Pretty detailed post. There is a lot of unconventional aspects of Facebook that keeps us guessing as to what works and what doesn’t. About 15 days back, I had run a couple of Facebook ads as an experiment. Some strange things that I noticed – the same type of ad ran for the same type of audience but targeting 2 different websites with a lot of fans and reach showed 138% variation in performance. Strange that though both websites were in exactly the same niche, with pretty much the same kind of content and engagement, showed so much of variation. Kind of tells me that it is the method in which they would have built their Fanbase.

    In reality, Facebook has never worked for me. But I still don’t shy away from trying something.

    Some nice tips in this post of yours which has taught me some new tips.

    Reply
  63. Thomas says:
    March 8, 2015 at 3:31 pm

    Hi Glen,

    Thanks for all those great ideas

    Your “10% rule” was really interesting as until now I saw this rule in the opopsite way. Something like : each time I got 1 engagement (like, comment) on a post, Facebook displays this post to 10 more people

    Regards

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 9, 2015 at 7:03 am

      That’s an interesting way to look at it!

      Thanks for the comment, Thomas.

      Reply
  64. Mauricio says:
    March 8, 2015 at 5:43 pm

    Hey Glen,

    Thanks for the awesome post. I’m trying to follow this guide but I get stuck when I target interests of certain pages I like.

    For example I’m trying to target pages of some of my competitors but the interests don’t populate when I type the name of the page.

    I looked on the facebook help center and this feature isn’t available. This guide targets those types of audiences so there is something off or I’m not understanding clearly.

    Can you please elaborate here?

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 9, 2015 at 7:03 am

      Hey Mauricio,

      Make sure you read the post again. I state that not all pages become interests, there are some other factors to it. So, you can’t target them all I’m afraid.

      Reply
  65. Marcel says:
    March 8, 2015 at 6:50 pm

    Thanks Glen,

    I love your in-depth articles… so much value.

    You’ve said you skipped the basic lessons on good page names, custom URLs, cover photos and all of the other little steps.

    Can you recommend a source for this basic lessons? When an aspiring FB marketer had to read only one article/series/guide about this basic lessons, which would it be?

    I think highly of your advice!

    Reply
  66. Ion Doaga says:
    March 9, 2015 at 11:50 am

    Hi Glen,

    Sorry, but I didn’t clearly figured out how did you manage to lower your cost per like to 0.04$.

    My suggestion is that you found pages similar to yours and when you run a campaing you target their audiences? This is the way you managed to get such low pricess for Facebook likes?

    Reply
  67. Will says:
    March 9, 2015 at 2:03 pm

    I’ve just changed the category of my Facebook page to news/media website, let’s see if anything happens – I only have 16,000 likes but it’s a very active and loyal community.

    Reply
  68. jimmyp says:
    March 10, 2015 at 5:37 pm

    Do you create/manage the different pages under the same or different personal accounts?
    Thanks

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 11, 2015 at 5:26 pm

      Both :)

      Reply
  69. Charles says:
    March 10, 2015 at 10:09 pm

    Hi Glen,

    First great post.

    Quick question, about the MOZ example of an interest. If you did not find them as an interest, when you ran a like campaign or PPE ad how did you actually find and reach them?

    Reply
  70. Nick says:
    March 10, 2015 at 10:14 pm

    Hi Glen

    Great post, lots of potential with Facebook. I have noticed that some of the viral sites such as sfglobe.com, viralnova and diply have recently started using a custom subdomain for each link post they share. I.e their og:image tag is different for each link post. Any ideas as to why?

    Looking forward to your next piece
    Nick

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 11, 2015 at 5:25 pm

      Someone emailed me about this (possibly you?)

      I DID look into actually and couldn’t really figure it out. I even removed the URL slug from the links so it was just like http://march.viralnova.com and it didn’t show anything really.

      Sorry I don’t know more…yet.

      Reply
  71. Orvel Sternberg says:
    March 11, 2015 at 12:36 am

    Totally blown away by the tips, examples, and reference sites you list to enable us to run more successful FB ads. I’ve been a follower for a long time and you still never cease to amaze me with the excellent content you continually post.
    Thank you so much.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 11, 2015 at 5:24 pm

      Thanks Orvel,

      That really means a lot!

      Reply
  72. Ryan says:
    March 11, 2015 at 8:34 pm

    Hey Glen,

    Great post, packed full of content. Couple things I’m running into though — you mentioned tagging your own page is helpful and said you’d get into it later, but then talked about tagging other larger pages… Did I miss something? Should I be tagging my own page in updates for some kind of benefit?

    Two, is the above only applicable for super large pages or niches? I’m trying to follow what you’ve outlined above to buy more likes for my page, but the expected rate of return is pretty poor from facebook’s projections between 5-20 likes for $5, ie .26 cents to $1 per like. You mentioned .15 or below. The more specific and niche interests I add, the lower the return goes. What do you think?

    I’ve kind of let Facebook fall out of favor as I’ve watched my reach continue to decline. I’d like to resuscitate it, if possible.

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 19, 2015 at 6:17 am

      Sorry, you’re right.

      It’s just about improving your chance of reaching your own audience, I believe. Unfortunately for my own page I can’t tag myself as I haven’t been classed as an interest (or similar).

      Hopefully I can cover the other stuff in my next post :)

      Reply
  73. nirupama says:
    March 12, 2015 at 9:27 am

    really nice post thanx for sharing with us

    Reply
  74. Dennis Seymour says:
    March 14, 2015 at 2:32 pm

    Freaking monster post Glen. I love it and I’m applying some already. I also like the fanpagekarma tool.

    Great to see new content here and I hope the podcast is next 😉

    Reply
    • Glen says:
      March 19, 2015 at 6:01 am

      Thanks Dennis!

      Reply
  75. David says:
    March 14, 2015 at 11:18 pm

    Excellent blog post, Glen.

    Really interesting to hear what you have to say about Facebook marketing, as it’s something I’ve been pondering for a while… This is by far the best post out there (that I’ve read) on the subject. I’m still amazed by the amount of work and research that goes into these posts.

    Reply
  76. Robert Connor says:
    March 15, 2015 at 7:53 pm

    Wow great stuff can not wait for the other series to come out on actual adds setup!

    Reply
  77. cara membuat rumah says:
    March 16, 2015 at 1:50 am

    U doing great researh and bring benefit to us

    Really like this stuff :)

    Reply
  78. Rakesh says:
    March 18, 2015 at 8:45 am

    Hi,

    Your post is really valuable for me and i’m waiting for your next post:)

    Thanks a lot.

    Reply
  79. John says:
    April 3, 2015 at 8:23 pm

    Wow, I never saw so much traffic from Social like Facebook, you must be an expert.
    In my case, I have many followers on Twitter, but under ten on Facebook and Google Plus, and I don’t really know why.

    Reply
  80. sam says:
    April 4, 2015 at 1:49 pm

    found a lot of value in your article since I am using facebook ads for my teespring campaigns

    Reply
  81. Jon says:
    April 5, 2015 at 6:19 am

    You are giving such good advice and examples. I’m really looking forward to your next post in this series about Facebook. Hopefully you post it soon.

    The suggestion for making two pages is great. I would be interested in knowing how you monetize your fan pages.

    Thank you so much for doing what you do!

    Reply
  82. Niladri Chatterjee says:
    April 26, 2015 at 12:18 pm

    Hey Glen. It’s just awesome. No words. The guide is worth more than a thousand bucks. Thanks a hell lot for sharing.

    Reply
  83. Carlos E. says:
    April 27, 2015 at 3:57 am

    Very good post

    Congratulations!

    Reply
  84. Asif Raza says:
    April 28, 2015 at 8:46 am

    Excellent Post !!!

    What is the minimum quantity of likes a fb fan page should have in order to show a fb page as interest. ??

    Many My competitors Pages are not showing up as a interest. I think, this is just due to low likes.

    Reply
  85. Annie says:
    April 28, 2015 at 10:58 am

    Hi Glen,
    Been looking at your blog posts for a while and just finished this last post here,this is great info,new a few of the things but you just tripled what I new knew,thankyou heaps for Viperchill,keep it up,,,,please.Regards from me to you:)

    Reply
  86. Vern Lovic says:
    April 30, 2015 at 5:53 am

    Thanks Glen, that was jam-packed with great ideas. I love the detail you go into with your posts. Glad to see you writing here again. Cheers man!

    Reply
  87. Ravinder Dande says:
    December 10, 2015 at 7:59 am

    Hey Glen

    You completed or discussed every thing wihch we need to get target audience. thanks .

    Reply
  88. shane says:
    December 11, 2015 at 10:27 am

    hey man, some good new insights here for facebook,

    i started a page for my website 3 months ago and have been doing $5 a day promotion plus 9 post a day too, its now up to 40k, whic is ok,

    but what i want to do is bring you attention to this page https://www.facebook.com/3dfirstaid/ !

    when i started my page, they has 2.5 million, they are now at nearly 8,000,000 they are seriously gaming the system!

    they do about 18 posts a day and every single image or video is pretty much tagged to the max!

    now tagging gets you way more reach right,… but this can get you banned, but they are flying along with about 50k new likes daily… WTF

    they only thing i can think of what they must be doing, and i discussed this with one of my social media manger friends in the Philippines is creating multiple personal fake profiles building them up at the same time and tagging them all in every image,

    well what ever the are doing , it works! im doing ok legally and ethically myself… :)

    anyways Kepp up the great work!

    shanx :)

    Reply
  89. Tina Devi says:
    December 30, 2015 at 7:23 pm

    Thank you for a very informative post. I thought I did a lot of research, but now I see my blind spots pretty clearly.
    Keep up the good work and I will follow your every move.
    Tina

    Reply
  90. Marty says:
    January 14, 2016 at 11:05 pm

    Hi, Glen.
    Great as usual.
    I tried the technique of the facebook ID. This is the result:
    {
    “error”: {
    “message”: “An access token is required to request this resource.”,
    “type”: “OAuthException”,
    “code”: 104,
    “fbtrace_id”: “FtqVSKrk+Za”
    }
    }
    What am I missing?

    Reply
    • James says:
      January 22, 2016 at 5:14 am

      It used to work, now Facebook has changed some stuff and it’s not working any more :(

      Not Glen’s fault.

      It was a great tool while it lasted…

      Reply
  91. Louisa says:
    February 4, 2016 at 4:03 am

    Trying to find a way to lower my Facebook Ads costs.

    I have tried 100+ interests, but aren’t able to get prices lower than $0.80 per like (my niche is beauty/makeup).

    Any ideas for finding a way to get a lower price per like?

    Thanks!

    Reply
  92. Denis says:
    February 15, 2016 at 10:26 am

    Hi Glen, thanks for this article, it’s really impressive. I just wanted to ask something. I sell watches and sailing jewelry. I followed your advises but still can’t achieve cheap likes, they are above 0.3usd.

    Do you recommend to choose interest pages which are very specific to this niche? I mean other pages which sell similar products. Or should I look for something else?

    How big those pages should be? You mentioned that audience should be very narrow.

    What budget do you recommend for tests? Sometimes initial page like cost is high and then it goes down.

    Thanks a lot for your time. All the best

    Reply

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    Hey, I'm Glen. In February 2009 I quit my full-time job and have made my living from the internet ever since. Having previously worked as the Social Media Manager for the likes of Nissan and Hewlett Packard, I took my skills and successfully applied them to my own projects. ViperChill is the place I share everything I've learned in order to help other people make a living online, and to live in the Cloud.

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