I Love Podcasts – Engineering Podcast Success

LISTEN UP

“We called off the paid Facebook adspend. In the end, I don’t want to invest in a facebook group. They will change their algorithm at some point. Once they do that, all this could be undone. Therefore, we no longer pursue a strong presence on Facebook as a group.” – Ian (November 2019)

This post is left her for archival purposes and so that others can BEHOLD!!!! ( i.e. learn from our mistakes).

What is I Love Podcasts?

Lot’s of people want a popular podcast. How do you make one? The best way we know is to be a famous person before you start the podcast…

But what if you’re not already famous?

Well, engineering success is our sport at Freedom Podcasting. It would be invaluable to our clients if we could wield a tremendous audience and promote their shows with it. So that’s what we plan to invest in. Here’s the plan:

Building the World’s Biggest Community of Podcast Lovers

*LIKE* Our Facebook Page

Please click the link above and like the page.

This Facebook page is where we will showcase the world’s top podcasts. We will share podcasts from our clients as well as the other top podcasts in the world. Of course, it’s Facebook so if you see some click bait, “share this” type stuff, it’s likely a growth effort. We will use Facebook Ads to get the first 10,000 likes.

I’m using Post Planner, a tool which empowers us to automate the sharing of our clients shows. We will fill the feed with viral content when not promoting client shows. This tool is amazing. It is like setting up an asset that pays forever.

Goals:

• Own the Facebook.com/ILovePodcasts June 14th, 2016
• 100 Likes June 15th, 2016
• 1,000 Likes July 19th, 2016
• 2,000 Likes September 13th, 2016
• 5,000 Likes
• 8,000 Likes
• 10,000 Likes
• 20,000 Likes
• 30,000 Likes
• 50,000 Likes
• 100,000 Likes
• 200,000 Likes
• 500,000 Likes
• 1,000,000 Likes

Growth of Page Updates:

Periodic updates on the growth of the page:

• June 14th, 2016 – We earned our first 100 likes and we were able to secure the Facebook.com/ILovePodcasts URL. It’s now officially a Freedom Podcasting asset.
• June 27th, 2016 – We’ve got 431 likes for $33.41. Here are the growth charts:

We’re currently running at $0.129 per like which isn’t great or awful. At this rate it will cost us $1,290.00 to get to 10,000 likes. That price includes the cost of testing ads that didn’t work great. For example, we know mobile news feed ads are the cheapest. So we’re focusing on that.

Through testing, we’ve found ads that get targeted likes for $0.0503. That’s not bad. If we keep costs at or below $.0503 per like, we’re looking at a cost of $500 to get the 10,000 likes. That makes it a no-brainer.

• July 20th, 2016 – We hit 1,000 likes today:

Despite another milestone, I’m not so happy with these results. Notice how tiny the Organic Likes are. This tells me that if we haven’t found engaging content for the audience. We need to find engaging content so the page grows organically.

The problem is that podcasting isn’t visual and visual content is engaging on Facebook. It’s hard to develop content that shares well on Facebook. We need some ideas…

• September 13th, 2016 – The 2,000th person clicked like today! Huzzah!

Sure, a milestone is a happy thing to hit, but we’re still acting the same way as we did when we hit 1,000 likes. Paid like cost is high at $0.07. We’re getting more unlikes than organic likes. That’s a really bad sign. We’ve got to turn around the content part of the page, or else this is going to a sisyphean task.

• Project Ended

“We called off the paid Facebook adspend. In the end, I don’t want to invest in a facebook group. They will change their algorithm at some point. Once they do that, all this could be undone. Therefore, we no longer pursue a strong presence on Facebook as a group.” – Ian (November 2019)