Starting from scratch on Facebook is not easy. Although I have had previous success building Facebook accounts in the past, this was before Facebook cut down organic reach and emphasized on ad spend.

I first started Diez FC a year ago on Instagram and on Twitter shortly after. Using our growth hack strategies, I was able to quickly grow those accounts to thousands of followers. A combination of posting great, unique content to our niche (Soccer news, videos and photos) and interacting with the community was the key. However, last month I decided to expand Diez FC to Facebook as i knew there was a different audience there waiting to consume the content. I had previously avoided Facebook as I knew the difficulties to gaining an audience organically. If you wanted to grow your account, you had to pay for it. Seeing as Diez FC was started as a hobby, I did not want to spend money on ads at that moment.

I took the leap and begun to experiment with ads. There were a few videos I was proud of and decided to boost those. The ads did work and a few dollars helped me get a few hundred likes. Facebook has a very useful tool that allows you to invite people who have liked your post but don’t like your page. It is a very useful tool that should be used by every Facebook admin looking to grow their page. I used that feature and enjoyed about a 20% conversion rate of people liking our page through invites.

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After seeing success, I began to experiment with different post boosts and targeting people that would like that post. For example, if Chelsea FC won an important game and I made a post about it, I’d target Premier League fans and Chelsea fans. This invite strategy was helping me go from 0 to 300 likes in a matter of 2 days. Then it got crazier.

Shortly after Qatar won their first ever Asian Cup, I made a post congratulating the team. I decided to boost the post and target Asian fans, particularly fans of/from Qatar. I threw in $3 just to experiment. The post quickly caught fire and our Facebook boost seemed to be working better than anything I ever experienced. Naturally, I was excited about all the new likes and began to implement our invite strategy. Until it stopped working…

Unbeknownst to me, it turns out that Facebook sets limits to the amount of invites a user can send out. This was very disappointing as I could see the massive opportunity to invite all the people liking our post fading away. Then, a solution came! I would simply create dummy accounts and add them as admin to the page. Since the temporary ban is put on the user and not the page, a new user started off on a clean slate in terms of invites. But the likes kept pouring in and I could not keep up. I kept on making more and more accounts, simply to invite those users to like our page. In the end, I spent the entirety of a day creating new account and inviting new users. I also decided to throw in an extra $10 to reach more people. The results were overwhelming!

I ended up paying less than $0.001 per engagement and amassed over 2,500 likes in the process! I had discovered a gold mine of a strategy and were excited about it. Who knew that posting content and targeting people bound to like that content was the way to go? (sarcasm). I knew it worked, but I did not know how cheap it could be! After that viral post, Diez FC had a decent amount of page likes and followers to get a decent amount of organic engagement per post. The original plan was just to experiment with a few dollars and see how fast the page could be built with some targeted ads. However, after seeing the success, I pushed to see how much more I could grow Diez FC using ads. There was another type of ad that I had yet to try, but was curious about. This ad was simple, but would go on to elevate the page even more!

To be continued in part 2..