Wondering how some people rise above the noise and get a high following on their social media accounts? Let me show you how I grew Gavin Lira’s account from 12 followers to 18,000 using the “Facebook for a Dollar-a-Day strategy.”
I used the Dollar-a-Day strategy to boost his best tweets. I boosted any tweet that I felt had a lot of value for his core audience for $1 a day, just to generate engagement.
He was in Pakistan speaking at a conference, so I boosted his video to the attendees there. On Twitter, people follow what’s popular. So, I shared crowds following him plus shots with well-known people.
When you start to go viral, you can rely just on organic growth. But to get the initial conversations going, I had to spend $70 to boost 10 tweets for $7 each over a week. I boosted 10 tweets because I wanted to let the algorithm tell me which ones are winners since we are always wrong as humans.
Your audience wants to relive highlights, so boost those.
Who would have thought that this picture with @darrylleeisaacs would get a lot of personal injury attorneys following him?
Tweets that got over 20% engagement are winners— meaning 2 in 10 people clicked on it, viewed his profile, commented, etc. Normally, he got 2-3% engagement, which is why I needed to tweet 100 times to find approximately 10 winners.
This is his best post, getting penny engagements, and 5% of people who saw it followed him. @sunnyaliEC is the most loved entrepreneur in Pakistan.
I’ll bet you have dozens of pictures on your phone with someone well-known, where you can honor them with gratitude. The most connected people in any industry are the conference organizers— honor them!
Some people think Twitter is only text. But his videos often get over 50% of people stopping to watch. And then when I boost, my cost-per-view is fractions of a penny.
I literally grab pictures and videos straight from my camera roll. For example, this book was given to him by @kfreberg–the #1 PR professor in the US. I tagged her and boosted it to her followers- super relevant for both of them.
It’s just as hard to go from 10 followers to 100 followers as it is to go from 1,000 to 10,000. Use $1 a day to speed up the beginning of that curve. Promote a friend’s company like @blusharkdigital so they share you.
A week later, he hit 15,000 followers and also got a blue check. This increased his engagement rate by 30%–more trust. If a post would have gotten 100 likes, he’d get 130 likes.
Unlike other networks, no extra cost to post a pic.
I also found content that worked elsewhere and repurposed it into Twitter. Reddit is my favorite source, followed by blog posts he’s written, snappy things I overhear friends say, and Facebook. Build threads like this to stack engagement.
I invented the Dollar-a-Day strategy 15 years ago and works on all social networks.
You might say it’s like “throwing raw meat to the dogs,” which is partly true. Yes, I’ve shared posts that received a lot of attention (for example, 1,000 likes on a post honoring freelancer friends in Pakistan), but if I didn’t also tie these posts to his expertise, his followers would be low-quality and random.
I used high-engagement posts to break through the noise, allowing people to see that his expertise is worth looking at and listening to.
It is a relationship-building strategy called FGF— Find, Give, Friend.
You may be posting really good tweets, but when you have no followers, nobody will see your stuff!
Darryl Issacs, a Personal Injury Attorney at Issacs and Issacs– The Hammer, needs a business person to help him drive more cases to grow his law firm using Content Factory.
Google “Dennis Yu Content Factory” or “Digital Marketer Content Factory” to understand these four stages.
Darryl’s producing a ton of content as a figurehead, but he has other partners and attorneys, and he needs to create content in Spanish.
The firm handles various cases nationwide, including truck, motorcycle, and car accidents.
One way to manage this content is by using a team of virtual assistants to capture the stories of clients who have experienced life-changing accidents and share them to help more people.
When producing content, it’s important to have a strategy and repurpose it for multiple channels, not just TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook.
Then we will boost it using the dollar-a-day strategy– Which is the last stage in Content Factory.
The beauty of managing this content factory is that you can show that you’re managing and growing the firm, provably and analytically.
This position has the potential to be very well paid, especially if you can show that you can drive results and understand the different stages of the content factory.
When applying, it’s important to show that you understand the business side of things and can generate results, not just list your resume and years of experience.
If you can prove you can drive results and understand the process, you might be eligible for bonus compensation.
Your social media is failing because you’re not showing yourself doing the thing you actually do.
If you’re a garage door technician, show yourself working on a garage door.
If you’re a health and wellness practitioner, show yourself treating patients.
You can certainly have talking-head videos as voiceovers on top of the actual doing.
Use “Authenticity” to Succeed on Social Media
Recipe to Succeed on Social Media
Showing what you’re doing is trickier for digital marketing agencies. Because who wants to see Zoom calls and emails?
So my agency friends do the following things:
Show high-authority content on social media. Show yourself hanging out with leaders that people in your industry respect.
Publish a book, interview people on your podcast, and then turn it into a book.
People fear that AI will ruin marketing, but only for those who write generic articles that a robot can write.
Therefore, show real stories of what you do with your clients on social media.
AI uses a sample of the world’s collective knowledge to create content. I learned from interviewing top AI SaaS founders that AI is not fundamentally designed to map relationships and events.
Facebook is closest to this approach, but they are trying to beat TikTok by showing users the ‘best’ content instead of just what your friends are doing.
I believe that Facebook will continue to outperform TikTok in generating local leads because it lets friends and neighbors know what other people are up to.
Huge corporations suffer from bureaucracy– well-meaning SOPs that are actually a strait jacket, preventing progress.
On the other hand, start-ups suffer from a lack of organization— hoping to move quickly but getting in their own way.
While these stereotypes of large and small companies are mostly true, there is a 3rd category that is so dangerous that it kills most agencies and startups.
It’s the debilitating collecting of tools and formation of random spreadsheets– giving the illusion of organization.
But really, it’s to serve the personal preferences of those who have a tool fetish.
The organization structure and tools should always serve the people— not the other way around.
My mentors, who ran two Fortune 100 companies, explained this to me– that org structure should be flexible to adjust to the company’s needs.
Otherwise, we have blind obedience to something that may have seemed like a good idea or worked back then.
A CEO’s job is to reduce the friction and obstacles in the way of getting results.
Do you have processes and people that are RELENTLESSLY focused on your client’s success?
Positive Thinking Drives Your Beliefs, Actions, and Destiny
Wise men have told me about “The Secret,”… the idea that positive thinking drives your beliefs, actions, and destiny.
That what your heart desires is limited only by your beliefs.
And for decades, the engineer in me stubbornly clung to the safety of proof— repeatable science.
The woo-woo of manifestation sounded more like healing crystals and chakras than something I could rely on.
Darryl Isaacs told me how he gets the benefit of electricity without needing to understand how it works.
With Darryl Isaacs (to my left) and Gavin Lira
I look back with sadness at my life and see how many times I had massive opportunities placed in my lap, only to be rejected by me because I didn’t think it was possible or, more commonly, because I didn’t think I deserved such a good thing.
I scoffed at entrepreneurs who paid $50,000 to attend mastermind groups, mainly to up their “mindset”.
Now that I’ve tasted success, I realize I was the idiot all along.
++ Why hire only 20 people just for me when we can create a million jobs for all our friends?
++ Why believe I’m “too busy” to help a friend when doing so will pay me back 10 times that in ways I’d never imagined?
++ Why not give generously not because you want the attention but because it’s the right thing, which God will reward you handsomely later?
++ Why not drop the grudge against that jerk who screwed you over, not because you’re a saint, but for your own well-being?
++ Why not openly share everything you know how to do, even to direct competitors, since you know there is more for everyone?
++ Why not be willing to learn from everyone around you, especially young adults, since we don’t know everything?
My hope is that you realize and reap the rewards today of what has taken me a lifetime to finally be open to accepting.
