The Simple Trick That Revived My Facebook Page

I love how varied and unpredictable this business can sometimes be.

Of course, we’d all love it if everything were easy and predictable. But, alas, the world is complex, and it’s hard to tell what will work and what won’t.

The results of an approach can change based on niche, specific audience, your own content style, and probably dozens of other variables.

But sometimes, something unexpected works, and well, that’s just fun. It’s the good ole dopamine rush of unexpected success.

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Back to this strategy I stumbled upon.

I almost gave up on this page

This was an older page with around 130K followers that we couldn’t get to send a significant amount of traffic back to the site.

You see, not all Facebook pages succeed. I’ve discussed this with others who specialize in organic Facebook traffic, and they agree that some pages just don’t work.

Nobody knows for sure why. My theory is that it’s all about your audience—more specifically, the audience that Facebook shows your posts to.

This page utilized many memes early on, which generated great engagement but no traffic to the site.

You can also “recreate” memes to make them your own. We’ve done that for a while, and it worked. But, it was time-consuming. I got tired of this page sucking our resources without generating traffic. Yes, it’s in the bonus program, but these memes got around a couple of bucks for a relatively viral meme. Peanuts. Not worth the effort.

Giving it one last chance

Before giving up completely, I decided to try something else. Something that goes against what most Facebook folks do.

I noticed people responded to simple images (it’s a visual niche). We happened to have a lot of credits on our Shutterstock accounts. I’m talking over a thousand unused credits that don’t roll over month to month.

Going into Shutterstock, I downloaded a few hundred pretty awesome images.

Then, I used Post Planner‘s tool to create multiple posts and uploaded the images all at once.

I used a simple caption, the same one for all of them: “Do you like this image? Rank it from 1 to 10 and let us know what you think”.

The whole thing took me under an hour and mostly involved downloading tons of images from Shutterstock. Posting everything took a couple of minutes.

It took time

It wasn’t an overnight success. The first week or so, the page was still kinda blah.

But then, gradually, posts began to gain more traction. From 20-30 likes per post, we moved to 100-200 likes per post and a few dozen shares.

So, I added more time slots. From posting these 8 times a day, I moved to 12, and then 15 times a day.

Engagement went up, and so did overall reach.

Some posts now get thousands of likes and hundreds of shares. Granted, nothing has gone truly viral yet. But the numbers are up.

Moreover, the bonus program seems to like these posts. These posts now average a couple of bucks per post, and the page makes around $30 a day from the bonus program.

The best part?

It’s so easy to create these posts!

What about traffic from that page?

I started adding two link posts every day, so now there are 15 image posts and two link posts. Again, using PostPlanner‘s bulk uploads, I could upload links to all of our page-relevant posts in 15 minutes. They’re set to recycle forever, so each link post will show up once every couple of months.

Surprisingly, people still interact with the link posts, so these get a good amount of likes, comments, and even shares.

However, these folks rarely click through, and the page’s traffic is still negligible.

It seems like our crowd wants to have fun on Facebook and stay there. They’re image-driven, and since they get their kick on the page, there’s no real motivation to click through to our site. Some people click through, but there are just not enough of them to make it a reliable source of traffic.

Oh, one thing they do click on occasionally is the link to our newsletter sign-up page. I’ve added that to most of our posts. It doesn’t seem to hinder reach whatsoever.

Flodesk reports 360 subscribers from that form so far, and they’re very engaged with the list. People who signed up through that form have 23% open rates and 3.6% click-through rates, which is higher than average for that list.

By the way, if you’re new to Facebook traffic and are curious about the overall model, this course pretty much covers all the ins and outs of the method I’ve used to grow my pages. The tools I use are Post Planner (mentioned above) and Strevio.

All of these links are affiliate links, of course. But I’m not making money from them. Any commissions I make during July and September will be donated to the Web Publishers Association.

So, if you buy anything through Yeys this month, the money will go towards that goal. I will share the commission numbers next month.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the WPA is a non-profit (status pending) that other publishers and I established this year. We need more funds to grow and flourish, so any contribution helps.

By the way, if you’re an influencer who can help us raise more funds, please let me know.

I hope you found this idea helpful. I’d love to hear more about your Facebook tips and tricks, so leave a comment below if you have any to share!