My theme for 2020 is Points on the Board.
One of my primary areas of focus is the topic of sleep. I think it’s so important that I’m writing a book about it as you can read in my Writing a Book collection.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to start to grow an audience and use Facebook as the platform. My choice was driven in part by a podcast episode featuring an interview between Jon Morrow and Rachel Miller. Rachel offers a course on how to grow an audience on Facebook. I signed up for the course Friday night. I have a Facebook profile, but I had never created a page or tried anything remotely business-related on Facebook (okay maybe a little monkey business ?).
The course provided value immediately by walking me through how to create a Facebook page, create some content, and boost the content using Facebook ads. The end result is the page Improve Your Sleep. So far the page has accumulated 17 followers. If you are on Facebook and interested in anything I’ve written about sleep, this is the page for you. I don’t have anything to sell. It’s all about providing value and sharing what I have learned from the research I’m doing for my book. I hope to grow an audience of people who find this content valuable.
The irony is last night I was wide awake at 3 AM thinking about content for my page. Even if you have mastered the sleep lion, he still gets out of the cage occasionally.
1-25-20
It’s been two weeks since I created the Improve Your Sleep Facebook page. In case you are curious, here is how things are going.
Page Summary:
82 followers
75 page likes
173 page views
All post reach: 39,726
All post engagement (like, comment, share): 5,499
Ad dollars spent: $71.77
My very first add was a picture quote “Sleep is the best meditation. –Dalai Lama.” I found a royalty-free picture on unsplash.com and then used Canva to add the quote to it. It cost $15 and ran for 10 days. It reached 4,874 people with 1,180 engagements. According to Facebook, it received an average relevance score of 9/10, which means it’s getting more positive feedback and is costing less to deliver than most ads on Facebook. This is all beginner’s luck by the way. I still don’t know what I’m doing but I’m learning.
I have been resisting the urge to grow my page quickly. One of the rookie mistakes is to invite all your friends on Facebook to join the page and invite anyone who likes a post to join the page. This is a mistake because these people may not represent your true audience. This isn’t a billboard where you want as many eyes as possible. My goal is to build an engaged audience of people who are genuinely interested in improving sleep. These are people who may even go so far as to buy a book about sleep.
I’m behind in the course. This is the end of Week 2/Module 2, and I am just now finishing up Module 1. Oh well. That’s the challenge with some of these courses that are self-directed yet have a live component. People who are already doing this for a living have all day to live on Facebook. I am squeezing this in when I can. That’s fine because I have increased my energy and mental capacity to do more in the free time I have.
Onward!