Hey Dino, sorry for the slow response. I was off for the weekend. 

Engagement will include any engagement, be that a click or a like. So it should grab everyone, but keep in mind that some of those reactions could be negative ones, so it's not going to be as targeted as people who like your page, though it will be broader.

To my knowledge there is no way to clean up your page and remove those dead pages. However, most of them will be outside of the US, so by targeting western countries that will exclude many, if not all, of those accounts. Another alternative is to only target people who have engaged within the last year. You will leave some people behind that way, but let's face it, if they haven't engaged with your page in a year, they are probably not fans.

Thanks Karen, that means a lot.

Some times I kick myself because in recent years others have come into this space with bigger teams and some pretty impressive presentations while I just clunk a long with a pretty un-glossy approach. But I've been at this for more than a decade. When I launched MMM in 2009 (the first version of MMM actually came out as an ebook in 2007), there was almost nobody else teaching direct response marketing to musicians. Nor had anyone really developed a system for doing so. Now the space extremely competitive. For what it's worth, I know my stuff. At the risk of sounding arrogant, you'll be hard pressed to find someone with as much real world experience and success in both the music marketing space, and as a musician. I'm a bit of a control freak and tend to do most things myself, which means that I don't have the flashiest presentations. And I do rely on "substance over shine", and really try to take care of people who spend money with me through a good customer support experience. So it's nice to hear when people see that. Thanks 🙂

I think you absolutely should promote those blog posts (just so long as you can afford it). It's a long game investment in your fan base and you won't see the direct ROI, but I think it's important. I promote every blog post I ever create. I have created a custom audience that includes all of my lists, all of my web traffic, and anyone who is engaged or visited my FB page in the last year (Facebook doesn't make it easy to add Facebook likes to a custom audience). And then I spend a small amount of money (about $1/day for every 10,000 people I have in my audience. Sometimes a bit more if it's important.

I tend to try and spend about 10% of my cold traffic budget on general retargeting, and then also promote each post for about 3 days (or until the price starts to bump up), based on the outline above. But calculating ROI is tricky.

I'll give you an example of how confusing it can be to calculate one's ROI...

Take MMM for example... I spend about $100/day on advertising to cold traffic. I spend about 10% of that budget on retargeting to the sales page. I also promote posts whenever I create them, like I mentioned above. BUT, each day, I loose money on my main funnel. In other words, according to FB conversion stats, I am spending more acquiring my leads then I am making in sales.

HOWEVER, every single day I make sales from either new people, or older subscribers who have been on my list for a long time (sometimes years). With those sales added to the equation I make a nice profit every day. But they don't show up as conversions because they are well outside of the conversion tracking period. BUT, if turn off those ads, those extra (seemingly out of nowhere) sales all stop.

I'm sure that some of this is just imperfect tracking on Facebook's part. But I do always search these people to see when they come into the funnel. And about half of my sales are either older subs or not in the funnel. So my conclusion is that with my ads, and the audience that I have, there is a ripple effect that grows and grows and brings in a very high quality lead that dramatically impacts my bottom line. 

The point to all of this is that, while in the beginning all we can do is go off of conversion stats, what we need to be aware of is that we are creating an eco system of sorts. So it's really important that the content we put out (beyond the automated funnel) gets seen, because each time we do we create more ripples. I should add, that when I publish less content, I also see less sales. 

Hope that made sense. The simple answer is just yes, promote those posts if you can swing it. But there is a bigger point to be considered there.

Hey Karen,

I'm always interested in anything that gives me insight into the community's perceptions. I want to stress though, I wasn't trying to single out any one person or company. There are a lot of new players in the last couple of years.

Sorry, I missed the question...

The biggest difference is that you have a lot more options when creating an ad, both in terms of targeting and placements, as well as the look and appearance of the ad as well. You can promote a post from within your ads manager as well and have access to those options, aside from the design elements.

Aside from that, it's what you pointed out, the post lives on your feed. This gets you a bit of social proof as people browse your feed (pretty small impact), but it also allows you to go back to that post and run it as an ad again later, without losing the many comments and likes that the post has (the post social proof can be fairly valuable).

I usually create a post on my FB feed but then promote it from within the ads manager, rather than just boost it.

Thanks Karen, it does definitely help to understand perspectives like that.

Talk soon 🙂