I'm changing the niche of my Facebook page

this is probably a stupid idea but ...

What’s up content goblins? Today I’m going to talk about my latest experiment: attempting to pivot a Facebook page to a new and unrelated niche.

I’ll reveal the page url below.

Why would I do this?

It sounds a little crazy. Maybe a bit stupid, but reasoning makes sense to me. The current page had over 40k likes. That’s great.

The real reason to pivot is that the niche is dying and the page has not been picking up speed, BUT the page is already in the Facebook bonus program.

This means the page can earn money for posting content to facebook. However, it hasn’t been earning anything yet.

Current Page State

The current niche has been on a downward trend over the past 5 years

  • I’ve had this page for several years and built it to 40k+ followers.

  • At some point within the past year it was invited to the Facebook bonus program.

  • I accidentally built the audience with a huge percentage of Nigerian and Pakistani users by using broad geo-targeting in my page-like campaigns.

    • Unfortunately, these users are not easy to monetize.

    • I was optimizing for cheap likes, but mistakenly targeted low ad earning countries.

  • I’ve made $0 from the Facebook bonus program thus far.

  • This page was branded to match keto website.

    • That site is completely dead and actually died before Google’s helpful content update.

    • The site no longer has any use.

  • Keto has been trending down in search volume over the past 5 years.

The plan

  • Re-brand the page to a home design niche.

  • Start posting a bunch of images and see which ones get the most reach and engagement.

  • Buy US page likes using Facebook ads at a target of <$0.05 per like.

  • Possibly even pivot again if I find that some other type of content works.

    • Who knows I might end up publishing BS memes.

  • Once I figure out the content that resonates to my users, I can generate and schedule a month’s worth of content in a couple minutes including my time checking the AI images for errors.

What I’ve done so far

  • Renamed the page from Ketolog to Crazy Home Design and Decor

  • Blocked Pakistan and African countries

    • Sorry homies the ads don’t pay and Facebook will continue to push content to these users if I allow them to access the page.

    • Facebook approved the name change, but I think there is some risk that it has issues since I switched to such a drastically different niche.

  • I’ve scheduled 648 AI image posts over the next 27 days using a software tool I created.

    • Basically, 1 post per hour per day to see what sticks.

    • These are mostly interior and exterior home design images in different aspect ratios.

  • Setup a couple different facebook ad campaigns to see what works

    • I tried to get creative, but that resulted in a cost-per-like of $0.17

    • I went back to my most consistently successful ad format and I got that down to $0.06.

      • I’d like to get the costs down a bit more if I can.

    • Pro-tip, you can spy on the ads facebook pages run using the ad transparency tool

Current state

It’s been 5 days since I’ve made the change. In those five days, the bonus program did start showing a trend in the right direction. It went from 0 to $0.14 in earnings

You’re probably thinking “WTF 14 cents?,” but this was the first signs of life for this page in over a year. The bonus month has ended today, so I’ll get an idea if the page has any potential in the next 30 days.

What’s next?

I plan to keep you all updated on the experiments i run, whether they are successful or not. I’ve been focused on Pinterest lately and the page I share is still trending in the right direction.

Facebook pages are newer to me. I’ve had pages for years, but mostly just to share links from my websites. The bonus program is a new approach for me.

I’m already noticing some differences from Pinterest and Facebook. On Pinterest, it seems like you can post any kind of content and get potentially get exposure. Facebook seems to be much more rigid. It seems like I need to keep the content on topic to the page like campaigns I use to build the page.

I’ll have some more updates in the near future.

-John