Back in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg was hanging out in a Harvard dorm room putting together Facemash, a website that would put pictures of girls’ faces side-by-side and allow users to play a game called “hot or not”. Soon after, it morphed into an actual social platform and changed its name to Facebook. Today, there are more than a billion people hanging out in this space, making it by far the gorilla of all social networks. Anyone and anything that has a BILLION has my full attention. With five new profiles created every second, the audience you want to reach here is still growing.
Facebook had been around a few years before I got on and made my first post. I was a little late in the game but today I have more than a million fans and I’m adding to that almost 1,000 likes daily. I post about once an hour on this platform. With all my posts and people who shared them, I reached more than 356 million people on Facebook in 2016 with more than a billion impressions.
Some people have a strategy to only post during peak usage times, but I post around the clock without leaving empty space for someone else to fill. The average user on Facebook is mostly passive. They scroll through their newsfeeds and let information come to them. You don’t want that. I’ve always said it’s better to make the news than watch it. You want to be active on Facebook. Be the giver, not the receiver. Let others be passive. You need to get posting.
Picture yourself on Facebook like a locomotive. It takes a lot of energy at the beginning to move a locomotive at all, but once you have some momentum it’s difficult to stop. In the beginning, it’s going to take a lot of time and effort. You are going to need to put a ton of energy into it to see any kind of progress at all. You have to get momentum and it will start working for you. It used to be difficult for me to get 100 likes in a week. Now I get 100 likes between breakfast and lunch.
The average Facebook user has hundreds of friends and likes probably about 50 pages. That means there are a lot of updates in their newsfeed, which is why Facebook throttles the number of people who see any given post. If you find yourself being throttled like me, don’t blame their algorithm — take responsibility for it. Your reach is whatever you want your reach to be. Most people won’t make enough effort to make their posts engaging enough to the audience they’ve built — or more common, they never bother to build a large audience in the first place.
I’ve worked hard to build an audience on Facebook. The success that I have created on my Facebook page was not the result of one thing I did right, but rather a continual commitment to omnipresence on the platform. I went from no Facebook following in 2008 to being among the most followed business experts in the world — a true celebrity in every sense of the word. I want you to become successful on Facebook just as I have. I’m still not where I want to be on Facebook, but I’m still pushing every day to get bigger on the biggest platform there is. Here are some beginner tips for you to get started:
1. Create a fan page for yourself. Create a “like” page for your business.
2. Add images and create a look and feel for your page.
3. Be clear on the page’s purpose and what the viewer will expect to get when they visit the page.
4. Commit to posting throughout the day.
Notice that I didn’t say posting “each” day but rather “throughout” the day. I post 24 posts a day around the clock, 24/7/365. My problem has never been Facebook throttling my page, my problem is obscurity and I’ve taken full responsibility for it. When Facebook started throttling me – as they will you — trying to get me to advertise with them, what did I do? I kept going full throttle — beating it to…