K atie c ouric

Emerging Markets First

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A highly effective strategy to build up your following or engagement on a
post is to focus on sending it out to emerging markets first. Emerging
markets are cheaper and have a propensity to like and share at a higher
velocity. Then, once the post has picked up traction in these regions, you
reroute the post to your target audience in domestic markets.
This works because of perceived value and credibility. Imagine you
have two pieces of content that come into your feed. One has ten thousand
likes and the other has five likes. Which one are you going to take more
seriously? You’ll probably be more attracted to the one with higher
engagement, even if it was the exact same post. Generally, it’s easier to get
people to engage with a piece of content that ten thousand people have liked
because the content looks more valuable to the viewer.
I tend to build engagement in less expensive markets first. I’ve been
able to get a hundred thousand people to like a photo in the emerging
markets because of low costs and high engagement. Afterward, I go back
and retarget people in the higher-cost countries. This also allows me to get
more engagement at a much lower cost in the competitive markets because
I have found that this helps reduce the cost in the auction. If a piece of
content generates a significant amount of engagement, the Facebook
algorithm sees that the content is good and allows one to bid cheaper in the
United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, regardless of where the
original engagement comes from. (This may change in the future if people
working at Facebook read this book, so get on it while you still can.)
Inexpensive Yet Valuable Countries
On the Facebook advertising platform, India and Indonesia are the cheapest
countries to target that drive significant engagement. Many countries in
Africa are also very inexpensive; however, I don’t put a lot of focus there
because it usually hasn’t been as valuable for returns for my clients. With
that said, there are large brands that are investing heavily in Africa because
of the tremendous scale. Brazil and Mexico are also cost effective with high
engagement.
I find that India is a country that presents tremendous opportunity. Even
though it has a low GDP, the population is very large with more than 1.3

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billion people. It’s the country with the second-largest population in the
world. Seeing the same opportunity for growth there, IKEA is investing $2
billion over the next fifteen to twenty years to open twenty-five new stores
throughout India. And Rupert Murdoch’s company just paid $2.6 billion to
win against Facebook’s bid of $600 million for exclusive rights to broadcast
India’s cricket games. Facebook also announced in 2017 that India has
become their number one country audience in the world with 251 million
users.
2
 If Facebook can acquire the other billion people in the country over
the next five to ten years, that would represent 50 percent of their total user
base today. As you can see, some very smart people have their focus on
India since it presents large growth opportunities at a cost-efficient rate.
If you want people to really share your content, however, I recommend
testing in Brazil. While working with professional surfers, I learned that
Brazil has a very big sharing culture. Brazilians online seem to share
content like no other community. Tim Greenberg, chief community officer
at the World Surf League, agrees. When Brazilian professional surfer
Gabriel Medina won the world title, the World Surf League generated a lot
of followers and growth because of Medina’s home fans.