Organic Facebook Growth is Still Viable
My meme page, Living in Asia Ironically recently got the permanent ZUCC. That is, it’s been permanently deleted off Facebook after being unpublished and denied an appeal to bring it back to life. For anyone who posts controversial content, this is a constant risk on Facebook. Many public figures like Milo Yiannapoulos have been unpublished only to come back very soon. Meme pages don’t get that treatment because very few have that sought after Blue Verified check mark. As one of many precautions when posting memes, having a backup page has become a standard. Regardless of how strong your organic Facebook growth is, it’s always good to have a backup plan.
Living in Asia Ironically 2 Savage became the new main page. The old one had hit 420k likes, while this one only had 82k. How could I pick up the pace to rebuild the brand? At first, I froze up and wasn’t too sure how to move forward. Then, I took a look at how I was growing smaller brands organically on Facebook. The plan was set in place. This article will go over exactly how I was able to reach an explosive 25% page growth in only 10 days.
Constant Stream of High Quality Content
In the marketing world, content is king. It’s not so different in meme marketing; nothing beats fresh OC (original content). Consider that the average meme page simply curates the vast majority of its content. If you can even reach the 50/50 mark between curated (“stolen” memes) and OC, you’ll be ahead of the curve. Rapid growth is a balance between the quality of your content and your ability to distribute.
As you grow, you’re able to post more and more often. When you’re under 100k, I’ve found it optimal to stick to posting once every 3-4 hours or so. Any more frequent and you’ll be hurting the potential reach per post. After passing the 100k mark, you’ll have to switch to new strategies. It’s one of those thresholds where tactics need to evolve. The Facebook algorithm distributes content in different ways at different scales. Send me an email if you’re interested in learning more about this. I’d love to see what I can do for your established brand’s organic reach and weekly growth.
Send 500 invites to people who reacted to posts to like your page daily.
500 invites is the hard cap for daily invites of this type. Before you can put this tactic to good use, you need to rack up 500 reactions to posts daily. Treat it like a pre-requisite for quick growth. If you aren’t quite there at the 500 mark, you can still use this approach, though it won’t be as effective.
Note that this feature is only available to Facebook Pages under 100k likes. At 500 invites daily, that’s 15k invites per month. This is one of the most effective organic growth tactics on Facebook for pages trying to reach 100k. Although the feature disappears after hitting 100k, pending invite requests still remain active. This means that sending invites out daily until you reach 100k is crucial for growth. It can be the quickest route to 150k+ when you consider that people respond to invites quite slow.
To invite people who react to a post to like your page, start by opening up the full list of reactions. From here, you’ll have an invite option for anyone who hasn’t already liked your page. When you’re very small, it’s viable to do this manually but who wants to do that? In Chrome, right click and hit Inspect Element. Make sure you’ve scrolled all the way to the bottom of the reactions list. This script doesn’t handle that for you, unfortunately. I’m aware of other scripts that are capable of this, but found this simpler one to be more reliable. Navigate to the Console, paste the Javascript and hit Enter.
javascript:var inputs = document.querySelectorAll(‘a._42ft._4jy0._4jy3._517h’);
for(var i=1; i<inputs.length;i++) {
inputs[i].click();
}
Chrome might seem like it’s crashing (it actually might), but leave it be. Wait it out and let it do its work. You’ll get a Facebook pop-up message saying you’re temporarily banned from using the invite function. That’s a good thing, don’t worry about it. That’s how you know you’ve hit the 500 daily invite cap.
Content Meant to Be Shared into Facebook Groups
When I first started Living in Asia Ironically, I shared a lot of aesthetic retail content from China and bad translations. Both of which are content that do great in Facebook groups specifically for that niche. I would share aesthetics to Vaporwave dreams in your brain, RETAIL AESTHETICS: Environment and Objects, Vaporwave Jacuzzi Park, etc. Bad translations would go into Chinglish & unusual things seen in Asia. Before sharing my own content to these groups, I would look at the top photos shared into them to see what performs best. From here, I’d post some photos in the group from my personal account to show I’m a valued contributing member. After 3-5 posts, I’d share 1 from my page. At this point, I’d cleared any suspicions one might have that I’m a spammer. This is very similar to the strategy I use in farming reddit karma.
Performing well in Facebook groups is a great way to reach the 500 daily reactions mentioned above. Posts that do well in groups will often get it some engagement on the original post as well. It’s a small, small fraction so don’t get discouraged. Stay organized with a spreadsheet documenting when you’ve posted in groups so you don’t overwhelm people. The last thing you want to do is alienate potential fans.
Tap into Your Network: Who can help you?
I saved this one for last because not everyone has a strong network to tap into in the first place. Realistically, it shouldn’t be like this. Share for share is a tactic proven to be effective at all scales. While you’re growing your page, you should be taking note of similar brands in the space, their total fanbase size and weekly growth. Facebook Analytics Overview makes this simple enough. Reach out to these brands and do some cold reachout. Some will enthusiastically share your posts, while others won’t give you the time of day. What you’re looking for is brands that you can regularly collaborate with to help each other grow.
Until you’ve hit scale, you shouldn’t be too picky on the size of brands that want to trade shares. Everything helps. When LIAI was at 400k+ likes, I was still regularly trading shares with pages around the 100k and 200k marks. Now that I’m rebuilding the brand on the backup page, none of these pages bat an eye in helping me out with my measly 80k page. A huge part of my jump to 100k came from a handful of friends who share my page (Amphetameme pt. II for example).
Bonus: Try your hand at Facebook advertising.
LIAI has unique brand positioning, where gaining fans in developing Asian countries is viable. Page like ads are known to be cheap in Southeast Asia, notably Indonesia and Vietnam. I’ve done ads for SaaS clients in the past for these regions but wondered how cheap I could optimize for a meme page. The results were cheap. Very cheap. I whipped up a quick graphic of Indomie as Jesus at the Ascension and went to work. Starting off with 4 splits for different copywriting, I was averaging out at $0.08 USD per page like. Pretty good start, but I knew I could get the price tag lower. Over the course of 48 hours, I optimized splits down to $0.035 USD per page like in Jakarta. At a $30 budget, I gained close to 1,000 page likes. While this is more than sustainable with the revenue my memes bring in, it was more an experiment to see what costs are. Good to know for future reference.
Learn how to grow organically before using paid tactics.
While most marketers would write off Facebook as a pay-to-win platform, I refuse to accept this. Developing organic growth tactics by running meme pages has proven to be a strong force in my hat of tricks. It’s important to recognize that tactics need to evolve as your fanbase grows and as time passes. What works in this article may become obsolete within a few months. Try to analyze and process exactly how mechanics of the systems in place work. What happens if I click x? How is content distributed in relation to engagement? What types of notifications can I send people? These types of questions are incredibly powerful, assuming you know how to test your theories. I wouldn’t have known about page like invites if I wasn’t just prodding around looking for mechanics to exploit.
PS: If you’re reading this because you follow LIAI, YouTube content is on the way. I’ve had writers block recently and just started getting back into the swing of things. Motivation can be very hard to manage as a digital nomad. Thanks for all the support, Discord fam is unreal.