
Case Study: 30 Days of Posting on Facebook with AI – What I Learned
In this case study, Zach Hammer shares his learnings from a 30-day Facebook posting experiment. The goal was to build a consistent posting habit while testing various factors that impact post-performance, such as:
- Do pictures matter and what matters about them?
What types of posts work or don’t work? - Does engagement actually matter for post-reach?
- How much content can be generated with AI?
Here are the key takeaways and surprising results from Zach’s social media experiment.
Building the Habit of Consistent Posting
Zach used a tool called stickk.com to add stakes and consequences if he failed to post daily.
If he didn’t post, $5 would be donated to a charity he found abhorrent. This motivated him to stay consistent.
Having an “army” of people, like his kids, wife, and friends, reminding him also helped reinforce the habit.
Engagement Matters, But It’s Not Everything
Engagement does correlate to increased reach, but it’s not a guarantee.
Some posts with very high engagement rates (27%) still had lower reach compared to others.
So while optimizing for engagement helps, it’s not the only factor in post-reach.
The 2-Day Engagement Lift Window
Zach tested whether a high-engagement post could lift the reach of subsequent posts.
He found that posts about 2 days after a high-engagement one often got decent reach. But by day 3, the correlation went away.
This suggests a 2-day window to capitalize on the engagement lift from a high-performing post.
Pictures Matter, But Not How You’d Think
The relevance of the picture to the post content made almost zero difference in performance.
What did matter was:
- Having Zach himself in the photo
- Photos that felt personal/selfie-style vs professional/stock-like
- Eye-catching, interesting photos in general
People seem to engage more with posts that feel personal rather than ad-like.
Crafting Posts That Perform
Some key elements of posts that performed well:
1. Offering clear, desirable value
- Communicate a dream outcome that’s achievable with minimal obstacles
- Prompt engagement by asking people to request the valuable thing you’re offering
2. Hooking interest in the first 3 lines
- Think of the first 3 lines as your headline
- Open a curiosity loop that makes people want to click “see more”
- Story-driven posts hook interest by opening with a dramatic, unresolved situation
3. Stating a strong, contentious opinion
- Even a short post that takes a stand on a debated topic can strike a nerve and spread
Leveraging AI to Personalize at Scale
Zach was able to infuse his posts with personal stories and perspectives by:
- Having transcripts of conversations, meetings, etc.
- Prompting AI to pull out relevant stories/ideas and craft posts around them
- Giving AI his point of view to flesh outposts that felt authentic to him
This allowed him to turn everyday interactions into multiple post variations quickly, while still keeping his voice and experiences front and center.
Key Lessons Learned
- Stick with it for at least 30 days to see relationship-building results
- Optimize for engagement, but know it’s not the only factor
- Make photos personal, eye-catching, and featuring you
- Hook interest fast in the first 3 lines
- Take strong stances to strike a nerve
- Use AI to extract personal stories at scale
By applying these takeaways, you can build a consistent posting habit that keeps you top of mind, sparks conversations, and ultimately drives real business results.
AND MORE TOPICS COVERED IN THE FULL INTERVIEW!!! You can check that out and subscribe to YouTube.
- Connect with Zach: https://zachhammer.me/
https://realestategrowthhackers.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachhammer
- Connect with Charlie: https://www.referralswhileyousleep.com/
https://realtorwaitinglist.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliemadison/
Tools that were mentioned: https://www.stickk.com/
Zach Hammer: [00:00:00] To the AMP Intel show. I’m Zach Hammer with me. I have Charlie Madison today. We are going to be talking about a case study of some tests that I’ve been running for the past 30 days. I’ve been posting every day on Facebook with a goal to build that habit. But in the process, I wanted to test some things.
I wanted to test do pictures matter. And if so, what matters about them? I wanted to test what types of posts work, what types of posts don’t work. I wanted to test things like Does engagement actually matter. Does how much people comment on something or engage with a post? Does that matter for the sake of how well a post does?
I wanted to test how much can I generate with AI, right? I wanted to see how much can I make that habit easy for me and all of that. And there were some really surprising results. So I’m excited to dive into this with you, Charlie. What do you think about this topic?
Charlie Madison: I want to learn some stuff because that’s the magic of the world that we’re in. We can reach our audience in ways that we never could. For how many centuries will when you grew up, you never extended [00:01:00] two miles past where you lived. Now we can reach the whole world.
But the question is, how do you do it in a way that’s unique to you draws the right people repels the wrong people without hiring a whole team like Gary Vee does, right?
Zach Hammer: exactly. Exactly. And yeah, I think that’s key to it is, I’m running this alongside some other things at the same time too. So this is in my overall Facebook optimization that I’m working on and running right now. This is specifically the content portion. So alongside this, I’m also doing activity around growing my outbound connection request.
Seeking to grow my network through a friend request, seeing who’s engaging, how much I’m increasing the overall size of my audience that’s engaging with my posts. So I’m tracking all of that too. In this case, my ideal goal is that I grow the amount of people who want to be learning and hearing from me who are in my ideal market, right?
So like I’m doing that. If I’m going to do that, I better have stuff that I’m putting in front of them that they want to engage with, that they want to see, right? [00:02:00] And so I knew if I’m going to have a strategy to go out and grow my connections, and that’s a completely separate topic. But if I’m going to have a strategy to grow up, go out and do that, which has also been working well I need to alongside have a strategy for what am I putting in my feed that I’m trying to, make sure that I’m driving engagement with.
And that’s where this 30-day test came from. I’ve always struggled to like, have a habit around this. Anything that requires consistent action. I typically struggle with, I’m much more the kind of person who gives me a problem to solve that takes a lot of thought and takes a lot of creative new ways to solve it.
And that’s my fun zone right there. Knots like that. That’s perfect. But if the job is to just press the button every day and it’s figured out, it works, the button works, but you just keep doing the same thing. I struggle with that.
And really, that’s probably the first thing that I want to dive into. This is a sub-note takeaway, but like, how do I, a person like me that struggles with doing things consistently, how did I successfully post every day? I think answering that question is actually pretty powerful.
And the key was that I used a really cool tool. [00:03:00] That added added stakes and added what’s the word that I’m looking for there, there was consequences. If I didn’t post every day I used a tool called stickk S T I C K K. com. And what it does and how it works is you assign some sort of goal or outcome that you’re looking to achieve.
And then you bring on a combination of either referees slash people who could just support you in your progress. And then they get to determine, did you do the thing or not? So I had to submit a report every day saying, did I do the action that I was looking to do in this case, it was post daily on Facebook.
And I mentioned some of the ideas, like what I was looking to convey. They get to say, did you do it or did you not? Now here’s the key.
If I did it, nothing happens. And this is at least the way I set up this up. You could do it in a couple of ways. If I did it nothing happens. Nothing bad happens.
I get to see like how successful I’ve been, what percentage successful, et cetera. If I didn’t do it, then $5 would have been donated in my name to a charity that I find abhorrent. So if I didn’t post, [00:04:00] I would be contributing to something that I hate right? And I found that for me seems to be very motivating where it’s like literally I’m not going to go into the cause because it’s either here or there for sake of what actually matters for people.
Note, like the way that they have it set up, basically for every everything. They give you, the option to donate to pro-choice organizations and pro-life organizations, right? It’s so it’s like either side of that. They give you the option to donate to the George W. Bush Library versus like the Clinton Memorial Library or whatever. So it’s so the whole thing is that they give you likely contentious issues to do anyway, and so you could find something that you’d likely connect with that. You’re like, all right, yeah, if I donated money to this and it was in my name like that would just be horrible.
And but it worked like it, it was one of the few things I was like, I did that. I told my kids that I was doing that, my wife, some friends. And I was like, Hey, I’m doing this. If I don’t post, then this horrible thing happens. So make sure I post. And it worked really well.
My kids were asking me constantly about it. My wife was reminding me, my mom was reminding me. And [00:05:00] I got like this army of people who were like, all right, you got to do this so we can not wreak destruction on the world. And I’ve done it in the past and it worked really well.
For me this time as well. But any thoughts or questions on that?
Charlie Madison: That’s the willpower doesn’t work forced function concept. It’s much cheaper than paying 2000 a month for an accountability coach,
Zach Hammer: Exactly.
Charlie Madison: That does the same thing, right?
Zach Hammer: Exactly, exactly. I think things to make it work. So for one, you have to set it at an amount that feels like something that would matter to you. Either that, or the cause has to be so abhorrent to you that any amount would feel, damaging and there’s other ways to do it too, where it’s, if you don’t do it, then like you’re giving the money to a friend, right?
Like you could do it that way too. I found that less motivating just because it’s Oh, we all get something out of it. It’s eh, okay. But man, if I’m supporting, it’s like the equivalent, it’s like I’m writing checks to Nazis. I’m like, ah, no, I can’t be doing that. Anyway so, yeah, and [00:06:00] it worked well. It helped me definitely very specifically remember times where it’s like it would pop into my mind. And I’m like, Man, I’m at like, I’m sitting down to watch TV with my family. I haven’t done my post today. I got to go over and do my post.
And so like it normally it wouldn’t even be in my mind if it entered my mind. Yeah, it was super helpful for me. So, that by itself is useful. If anybody’s looking to build the habit, no matter how easy you make this process, sometimes doing the same thing over and over again, Is what’s necessary.
And if you’re like me, that might be hard. But let’s talk a bit about what I actually learned in the process. So where would you like to start? I mentioned some of the things that I wanted to test. What, where do you want to, where do you wanna start?
Charlie Madison: What was the most surprising result?
Zach Hammer: Yeah, so probably for me, I almost took it as a given how much engagement would impact my post reach, right? So the basic idea is this, the more engagement you have the more your post should be shown to people, like that’s the basic [00:07:00] idea. And I collected all the data including my post reach and my engagement and thus I could drive my engagement rate.
I uploaded that into GPT 4o and did some data analysis on it. I did linear regression on how those correlated. I also used a Bayesian confidence interval in order to see how strong of a correlation some of that stuff is.
And I was surprised that in, in. In a couple of ways. One, the good news is Engagement does correlate to increased reach. So if you’re, if you are optimizing for engagement, that does help, that is something that is worth paying attention to. But I was surprised that there is at least a number of times.
That I got super high engagement, like for me, one of my examples of really high engagement got me, it was like 27 percent engagement rate. Okay. Which if you’re shooting for kind of a baseline of anything above 10 percent is an indication that like you’re [00:08:00] doing decent, right?
So 27%, which is pretty high. And yet it was one of my lowest on post reach. Not the lowest. It wasn’t horrible, but it was a lot lower than some of the others that had high engagement rates. So that at least tells me. Engagement rate by itself isn’t going to guarantee that you get high post reach.
So it’s not the only thing to be thinking about or something that you could guarantee. And it’s not if you figured out a post gets really high engagement, it’s going to get you post reach. So that was really interesting, but it does correlate enough. There is they would call it a moderate correlation, that higher engagement rate does tend to correlate with higher post reach.
Something else that I had as a working theory was that I could potentially gain the Facebook algorithm by doing a post that was almost exclusively for high engagement in order to make the following post. So maybe not that one, but the following post also get a lift.
So I do a post that it’s a really easy question to answer. Do my [00:09:00] following posts get a lift in engagement as well? Now what do you think? Do you think that worked? Do you think that it didn’t work?
Charlie Madison: I would think it worked.
Zach Hammer: It did. And it didn’t. Here’s what I found.
Charlie Madison: You’re telling me I was right.
Zach Hammer: Engagement post about two days after that post often got, decent engagement.
Or decent post reach. But then by day three, Correlation goes away, right? So there, yep, exactly.
Charlie Madison: [00:10:00] Okay.
Zach Hammer: information or if this is useful, then what that would tell me is if I have a post that got high engagement and I’m two days later, that’s a great opportunity to potentially drop a post that I want to get higher reach.
Because the post that I put out two days after a high-engagement poster are more likely to get higher post reads. Does that make sense?
Charlie Madison: Yeah.
Zach Hammer: But I don’t want to do it immediately the next day and I don’t want to do it three days. It’s, Two days is that window where there’s at least a decent correlation.
Now it’s not a super strong correlation but there is at least a moderate correlation there.
Charlie Madison: And this is probably one of those things that is very susceptible. It may work this week, but not next week.
Zach Hammer: Exactly. And my sample size on this is super low. All of this, take it for a great assault, but these are at least it at least doesn’t seem to hurt engage post reach, right? I don’t see a negative correlation there, right? So, that I thought was really interesting.
So, that’s engagement. What do you want [00:11:00] to do, what do you want to go into next?
Charlie Madison: What so that was the most surprising thing, right?
Zach Hammer: That was the most surprising to me because of what I had believed going into it. There were some things that I think might be surprising to other people like where and how pictures matter. You want to go into that one?
Charlie Madison: Yeah.
Zach Hammer: Intuitive at all, right?
I think what we would typically think is we’d think I do a post. My picture should probably be related, right? Like my picture should probably connected to it some way. Maybe I referenced the picture. I found it matter zero as far as I could tell the amount of times that my top performing posts had a picture that was like the post was about the picture versus the times that the picture was completely unrelated and maybe either just an interesting picture or whatnot, I got that it made almost zero difference.
There were things that made a difference on the pictures. But it had nothing to do with relevance to the post. We’ve talked about this a bit, so that [00:12:00] may not be surprising, but is that surprising to you?
Charlie Madison: It’s not to me because we’ve spent a long time talking about it, but I know a lot of my Referrals While You Sleep clients, it’s still like scrambles their brains. Like, why am I using a picture of me at a Seattle Seahawks game when I’ve got a testimonial from someone who I helped relocate to New Mexico?
Like why? So like, why do you think that works that way?
Zach Hammer: So let me tell you what I found for what seems to work versus not. So here’s here’s the way that I’d describe it. What does work matters more than the connection between the photo and the content, right? If there is a connection, I think that can be useful. It might have a slight uplift, but it doesn’t seem to make a big difference.
So as, for instance, I did a post, one of my higher reaching posts was me talking about. Like getting angry with my wife and figuring out that I was just tired, right? And so then I’ll talk a bit about the post structure and why that one [00:13:00] mattered. But for that one, I had a picture of my wife and I, when we were like in college dating.
And so there was like, there was mild relevance to it. It wasn’t exactly about the post, but it was at least related. That one did well. And it’s possible that picture helped because it was like, hey, I see Zach. I see Heidi. These are people that I may be familiar with.
And they look like little babies in college, right? Compared to what we look like today. And so that might have helped it a bit. The post itself, I think, would have stood on its own too. But like other posts other posts that did really well. There was one where I was talking about, this similar topic of, Hey, I’m going to be doing some experiments on Facebook.
If you want to follow along what I’m doing here’s what you do. The picture I had on that was just a beautiful picture that my wife took about hood in our travels, right? I think that one didn’t even have us in the shot. It was just a pretty shot scenic shot that wasn’t relevant at all to the posting.
Was it like, it was just a nice-looking picture? So like that tells me. It doesn’t matter if it’s connected, but what did matter, I did see a pretty decent correlation [00:14:00] pretty consistently and not always, but pretty consistently. If the post had me in it, if there was a picture that had me in it, that made a big difference.
Charlie Madison: It turned everyone away.
Zach Hammer: No. Surprisingly, they say what is it? There’s no such thing as bad news or bad PR or what is it?
Charlie Madison: No publicity is bad or there’s no bad publicity.
Zach Hammer: There you go. So I think it’s like, people are like, They’re going through their feed. They see a picture of being like oh, all right, let me read right
But yeah, and what that tells me is at least for some portion of my audience, especially, they start to develop a familiarity with you and your face. And we are connected to faces. And when it’s a picture that has me, somebody that they recognize. It’s fairly clearly not an ad in the sense of it’s less likely to be an ad.
Most ads typically lean more toward being, stock photos that sort of thing. And by the way, surprisingly, real photos that my wife has taken of our kids that maybe looked a little [00:15:00] bit more like stock photos did poorly. Which is something to be said because my wife does a good job taking photos.
So some of her photos, they feel like more like a professional kind of thing. And so when I leveraged those, some of those didn’t do as well, even though they were real photos of like me, our family, our kids, et cetera. But the ones that felt more obviously either selfie-style or what’s the word that I’m looking for?
It starts with a, it starts with a C. Yeah.
Charlie Madison: Consentimonial.
Zach Hammer: Sorts of photos. I, they tend to do well, right? Because I think people subconsciously look at them. They see them. And even if it is technically an ad, it feels a little bit more likely to just be, this is a friend sharing something from themselves personally.
So it like, it slips into that like it gets you past that wall of my brain is just tuned to ignore the ones that look like ads. But it’s not to ignore the ones that look like people, right? Does that make sense?
Charlie Madison: Yeah, I think, Dan Kennedy, he always said, what market media match, and people get on Facebook and Instagram not to get sold to. [00:16:00] There’s a bunch of buying and selling that happens, but they’re trying to just pass the time, feel a sense of community, feel a sense of social.
And when they see people they know, they’re like, Oh, like it’s almost like when they see the picture Oh, I can relax. This is not an ad because there’s a lot of them that look like it. And I skip those as soon as possible, and it makes a lot of sense.
Zach Hammer: and like the way that it makes me think of it is people may not even realize that they’re doing it consciously, right? What it brings to mind. So I lived in Vegas for a while and there was a Boulder highway. There was on this highway. A constantly flashing light at a crosswalk, right?
And I noticed I became conscious of this where I was like, this is actually a little bit dangerous because I noticed myself ignoring that light because it’s always on and most of the time it’s irrelevant information. And so like there were times where it’s like somebody starts walking across oh man, like I wasn’t [00:17:00] even aware of it because they had actually trained to be on the exact opposite by constantly putting the signal in my brain they tuned my brain to say, this isn’t relevant information.
And so I think that’s almost what happens where it’s like people see an ad and like fairly instinctively, a lot of the time, those ads aren’t relevant. You’re not looking to buy. You’re not interested in the product. It’s not something that you’re captivated by.
Charlie Madison: Or your wife tells you to stop buying courses.
Any more, no.
Zach Hammer: I’m a coachaholic but yeah exactly. I think that’s part of what happens is that it’s less that people are like, Oh, like another ad, I think it’s worse, which is, they are literally blind to it, they see the real photos. They don’t even see the ads unless there’s something about it that really feels relevant to like what their Raz is actually looking for. Like they’ve got something on their mind that’s looking for something like that, or specifically interested in it, then that might get past like the ad filter.
But yeah. Going back to this idea of what worked or what didn’t, [00:18:00] so photos that felt more just me and personal and having me in it seemed to make a difference. So photos that had me in it that mattered. Photos scenic photos still did pretty well, but it made like zero difference.
If it was relevant to the post, right? Just not at all. Yeah so I wasn’t super surprised by that, but I think a lot of people would be surprised. It’s something that I’ve tested before. And so I already knew that. But yeah, like things that didn’t work well shoot I did some where the image was incredibly relevant to the post and those were some of my worst performing posts.
And I don’t think it’s specifically because the image, I think it actually had more to do with the copy itself. And we’ll go into that in a second. Like what I actually posted. But that being said, a relevant image was not enough to overcome like the post itself. So yeah, that was that one.
So the key takeaway to me is, if you’re going to post photos first and foremost are they interesting enough that somebody would stop at their feet? Like it, it does that. Like, one of my, that did really well was a picture of me with an [00:19:00] overlay of cloud makeup from like an AI overlay thing.
So it was just a normal picture of me, but I looked like the Joker from like the Joaquin Phoenix Joker. I think that’s actually where the overlay came from, but so that one did well, and then otherwise, just Standard selfie shots, like, When we’re posting things to capture memories, like that stuff worked well.
But things that didn’t work well Photos that were very much trying to be relevant to the content that didn’t seem to matter. Again, I think it’s more about the post, but but yeah. Any questions on that?
Charlie Madison: think all that makes sense. Thanks. Yeah.
Zach Hammer: really surprising for what didn’t matter?
Do that blend of leveraging AI while still being personal, still capturing my own stories, making it clear that it’s not, hot garbage or what?
What’s the word that that you’re Generic slop. Yeah, exactly. [00:20:00] So that does matter. That does matter. But it being crafted by AI didn’t make a lick of difference. That was perfectly acceptable as long as the posts themselves were done well. And there were some things that made a big difference, whether I was using AI or not, but if I steered AI to do this and I massaged it to get this result, that was, That made a big difference.
You want to hear what some of those structures of what mattered. Perfect. So one of the first types of posts that I noticed really works well is, when you were telling people that you have a clear thing that they want. And that could be any sort of thing that could be what I’m conveying right here.
This is an example of the kinds of things that people want and what seems to add up to that? It’s the same ideas as what’s in a hundred million dollar office. It’s the value equation, right? Does it get them to their dream outcome? Does it feel like it’s highly achievable?
Does it feel like it’s going to be quick? It doesn’t feel like it’s, the the obstacles are minimal, right? If you’ve got [00:21:00] those things and it feels valuable. The better it is on a value equation and that you’re offering it, the more likely people will engage with it. So knowing your market, knowing what they want, knowing what matters to them, all of that matters, right?
That still matters. There’s no shortcut for that. There are, but you’re not just going to be able to ask AI post something great and they’re going to understand that you have to know your market. So like examples like this, where I’m dissecting actual hard one, Learnings from running this test and what I’m seeing from it that worked well my recommendations for tools and things like that, where it’s hey I’ve got this tool that does this thing.
If you want me to send you the link, let me know, right? Where it’s yes, I do want that. I want that thing. And those did get high engagement. They also got high post reach typically.
Charlie Madison: Just, I saw some of those. Also, you did build in kind of a self reinforcing mechanism with there, in that you said, let me know below, and so they would let you know. You would then give them the information and then you’d respond and say, I gave you the information. [00:22:00] Once you do that once, it shows you more people, you do it a second time.
I noticed that’s worked well for me in the past, and I noticed you did that quite often, and so those worked well.
Zach Hammer: Exactly. So that process, that, again, that goes back to. We see a high correlation of posts that have high reach also have high engagement rate, right? It’s all about an easy bump to maximize for that. So as opposed to saying, I did this really great thing. Here’s the link to get it.
Which would show a lower engagement rate compared to potentially triggering a conversation, getting some interaction, going in the comments, etc. Yes, I’m able to amplify my reach at least a bit by being ready to interact in the comments, send people DMs, do that kind of thing. Again, when they ask for it, when they want it.
I’m prompting the opportunity. People either want it or they don’t. Now, here’s what I found. I could do something that I think is something that people would want, but if they don’t, it doesn’t get reached and it doesn’t get engagement. So you’re able to test, do people [00:23:00] actually want this thing? Does this thing that I think people might find valuable, do they want it?
Cause if they don’t, then, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you structure it well. So it always goes back to that, right? Does your market actually want the thing that you’re putting out? Do they actually want that information? That thing that’s helpful. But pretty consistently, if I did something that hit on what people wanted and I structured it in that way where I’m making it clear, what the key outcome is, making it feel like it’s going to be easy, like all those kinds of things, and I prompt for engagement in the posts.
That really makes a big difference in terms of how likely a post is to succeed. So that’s one type, right? Like the way that I think about it, is there tangible, actionable value out of the information that I’m sharing where somebody has to essentially say, yes, I want this in order to get it right.
So that’s one clear type. Now do note, this is a side note on this strategically. It does seem to matter as well. Don’t ask people to comment. Say, let me know. Say, let me know below. Say, drop an emoji. Don’t say comment. Facebook seems to we’ve known this for a [00:24:00] bit. But when you’re asking for people to comment.
They know that it’s engagement baiting and they actually will throttle your reach as a result of it’s going to have the opposite effect. If you use other words like let me know or hit me up or like those kinds of things that seems to get you the same benefit without running that, the risk of Facebook throttling.
Does that make sense?
Charlie Madison: Their AI isn’t smart enough to read between the lines.
Zach Hammer: Like they are, but they aren’t, I think like it’s an interesting thing. I think part of it might be literally both systems coming in line to do the same thing where you’re asking for the thing that Facebook wants, which is to drive engagement on their platform, but you’re doing it in enough of a way that people do meaningfully need to engage in order to get that result.
Does that make sense? As opposed to just, they’re not smart enough to see it for what it is a part of it is that you’re actually doing more in line with what they want, which is driving meaningful connection on their platform and not just arbitrary comments that don’t matter, but you’re trying to get people really [00:25:00] involved.
I don’t know if that distinction makes sense, but I think that’s the way that I see it in terms of what seems to matter. You want to hear one of the other ones that I thought was really interesting and powerful as well?
Charlie Madison: Yep.
Zach Hammer: Knowing how to set up an intriguing hook Okay. matters greatly.
And this actually goes for really both of these, which is that the first three lines of any post on Facebook matter drastically more than any of the rest of it. It’s we know that the headline matters on like a blog post, your first three lines are essentially your headline on a Facebook post because that’s what people can see before they click read more.
Sometimes they can see a little bit more depending on the platform, but your first three lines, especially really matter greatly. And I could tell just by looking at the ones that did well or the ones that didn’t when they like, cause I did a lot of story driven posts. You probably saw that where I was diving into things from my life or diving into things that I’ve experienced.
And so I did a lot of those. And so it wasn’t that everything that was story driven did well, right? I had a number of story driven things that didn’t do well at all. Some things that I would have thought I feel like people are going to [00:26:00] appreciate this.
I feel like that, I wrote something good here. I I feel like people will find this valuable. It’s wah. It stunk it up and didn’t go far at all. But some of them did go far. And typically, it wasn’t whether or not it was a story. It was whether or not the first three lines opened a loop that was interesting to people, right?
And so like an example of that, let me pull up some of these examples just so I could show you the kind of hooks that seem to matter. So, one of them was this one did really well. This is how I started it. I slammed the door, stormed into the bedroom.
My mind raced with a flood of negative thoughts. That one, was one of my best performers in terms of post reach engagement rate, it actually wasn’t super high on engagement rate, but in terms of post reach, it was really good. And that was the one where I flowed through, like how I realized I was just hired, and gave people some takeaways around that. So that one did well.
Another one that was similar, my eating habits were terrible, I never paid attention. So in that one, it’s the same thing. I opened this idea of I was in this negative state. But I’m also talking about it in the [00:27:00] past, so I’m just by saying it this way, I’m opening the idea that it might have gotten better.
And I’m making people interested in it. Now, compare that to one of these posts. Let me see. Real quick. Let me find one of these story driven ones that didn’t do so well. Like I remember, yeah so like this one didn’t work well, I used AI to solve my 11 year olds writer’s block unexpected, right?
It worked and it got me thinking. So that one didn’t work well. I think that one potentially was an interesting enough hook, except that it may have not connected to what people were interested in right there, right? I didn’t make it clear enough how it applied to them. Another one that, yeah, so this one I think is a great example of how to do it wrong.
Tonight I rediscovered a truth we often forget true wealth isn’t measured by your bank account. Okay, can you detect why that one was wrong?
Charlie Madison: It just seems boring there’s no hook.
Zach Hammer: It’s answered in the first two lines, right? Like I like there’s no open loop I essentially gave the takeaway in the in those first two lines [00:28:00] It’s so like I may have had an interesting story around it. But they didn’t need the story in order to have the takeaway. So it wasn’t enough to draw people in.
And yeah. So anyway, that was one of the big lessons that I learned in this process is like really thinking through am I teasing at something that’s interesting and it doesn’t always have to be like a clear business takeaway. Sometimes it’s just an interesting story like the hook about like I slammed the door and all that, right?
Like I didn’t give people any idea about like where I was going with it and why it mattered so it wasn’t that it was purely the story but in others like, the story itself, there wasn’t an open enough loop. So anyway, so stories do work really well. And some of my top performing posts definitely were story driven.
But yeah, that opening hook, that open loop at the beginning, that made a big difference. So if you’re going to spend any time, whether it’s in developing templates or working on your posts. That first three lines and really asking yourself the question, did I set this up so that people feel like there’s something that I need more information on in order to dive deeper into this post?
That mattered a ton. That mattered a ton. Does [00:29:00] that make sense?
Charlie Madison: Okay. Yup.
Zach Hammer: Now does it always matter? One of my posts that did really well, and this was also one that that was straight out of AI. Essentially, here’s what the process was for this post. I had a template and I gave it my point of view.
And then had it flesh out the template from my point of view. So where I showed up was that I had an opinion. I had a line in the sand around what I wanted to talk about with this, but it was able to flesh out that template with my point of view, very effectively. Okay. But it was a really simple post too.
So this post was one of my top performers. It was actually my fifth highest performer. Is recklessness disguised as productivity. That post, that’s all it said, it was purely a text post. It spread far, it got massive engagement.
Part of what that tells me, if you’re saying something that sort of strikes a [00:30:00] nerve with people and you know, you know what Like just from knowing your market and knowing what they’re hearing. And maybe where what are the contentious opinions and what are those things, if you could play into that contention and make a point, and again, this is something, this isn’t I just asked AI for random posts about AI or anything.
This was, I believe this. I believe the idea like people typically are trying to say I want like automate everything, make everything automated and they’re not stepping back and thinking about what is a I good at? What can it do? Where does it fit in?
And so you end up with, generic slop when people are trying to try to automate everything. And I do believe this point. But anywhere where you have that, where you have an opinion that’s a bit contentious, that seems to work well. And that’s whether you’re doing a short post, or a long post, any that seemed to make a difference as well.
Now do you want to hear some of how I made these posts in terms of making them feel really easy to create.
Charlie Madison: Yes, of course.
Zach Hammer: So what am I taught performing posts that I slammed the door, [00:31:00] stormed into the bedroom, that one,
Charlie Madison: Yeah. Yeah.
Zach Hammer: I did to create that post. I had just gotten off of a book club meeting and at this point I record everything and have transcripts for everything that I can. So, run a book club every two weeks or so.
And so we were just discussing the book and a story came up that was relevant to the topic of what we were talking about for the book. And that is that story. And what I did is I took the transcript, the entire transcript, that whole log thing. I said, write a post for me.. And I have some standard things in terms of how I tell it to structure it.
I tell it to think about the hook. I tell it some of that stuff. Write a post for me that pulls out this story and this idea to leverage that transcript. That’s one of the things that I saw is very often being able to leverage AI.
I was able to take the things that I was doing anyway, the work that I was doing anyway, the conversations I was doing anyway. Take the transcript from that and with a combination of templates and or just you know structuring the prompt [00:32:00] I was able to very quickly go from this thing just happened.
Let’s turn it into a post drastically quicker than I would have been able to like, let me sit down and write out this story, right? Like it was able to do most of the heavy lifting for me. I just had to massage it a bit. Just had to rework it. I was able to do that with sales pages, take a sales page and create something more content driven around it.
I was able to take meetings and create posts from it. I was able to take just sales pages and like generate lots of variations, some high performing, some low performing, but I was able to get a lot of tests done that way. And so the key was like, none of what I posted, non of it would have been very doable without me being there to guide it, right?
Like, it had to have that spark of me to actually work. And everything that I posted, honestly. Even for sake of just my own beliefs about how I’m going to be representing myself on Facebook. I like, I have to have some portion of me there, but also like it was important to me, I just know intuitively the longer we go the more [00:33:00] I think it’s going to matter that your stories, your beliefs, something being tied to nobody else could say this because.
This has this person’s story in it. Now they could lie about it. They could pretend that it’s their story that like that could happen. But over time people will be found out. But like the more that I could make it plainfully like obvious that isn’t, this isn’t generic slop. This is Zach.
This is Zach saying what matters to him either through his experience and case study and stories like that kind of thing. The more I think we start being in that zone where people are going to be able to detect. If this feels like it could have been completely written by AI, I’m probably just going to start assuming that it was, and not trusting the information, right?
If it feels like, man, this person’s, staking their claim that they did this thing and got this result I at least have that to go off of. Now, they might be lying, and that’s always possible, and so there’s signals that you do to build that up over time, but I think that’s part of what we’re looking for.
That’s part of what I was testing here, too, is making sure that I’m [00:34:00] clearly communicating. Even if I’m using AI in this process, I am still present. My stories are still present. My point of view is still present. Nobody’s going to be able to tell the same story that I did, at least authentically, and say they learned that plaster walls have a very specific thing that you need.
If you’re going to be mounting things on plaster walls, You don’t want to just be driving a nail into it because you’re going to get big chunks of it chipping off. I’ve learned that through experience, right?
And so, people may pull that story up, other people may have that experience, but like the timing of how it fits in my life and all that’s part of what creates that authenticity, right?
Charlie Madison: I’ll say. I’ve seen a lot of the posts. I don’t know if I’ve seen them all, but I’ve seen a lot of your posts and I think that me and you do this show, so I know you’re using AI, secret and what I loved was it didn’t feel like AI. One, it wasn’t like, there wasn’t just like one template and so every post looked exactly like the other.
And which I think we actually talked about that last week. That’s the issue I’ve been [00:35:00] running into. But then also it always had your spark of life. It always sounded like it came from you and that like they were enjoyable, good stories that made sense. So that’s what I really have appreciated watching the experiment from this side.
Zach Hammer: Yeah. And honestly, this is potentially another takeaway on this. I wasn’t willing to experiment with, could I just let it have free reign, right? Let’s be honest. If I wanted to run an experiment like that, I can’t personally do that with my own Facebook profile.
They are hard enough to come by, it’s easy to get shut down. It’s not something I’m willing to risk. I have to feel like this is something that I do feel like I could tie my name to that. I could say, yes, this is me. This isn’t garbage. This isn’t lies. This is authentic based in me and my stories, in the levels that I’m comfortable with.
It’s possible somebody could run something completely with AI, but man, I was using AI for everything in some way, right? I don’t think there was a post [00:36:00] that AI didn’t touch in some way, at least. And I still had some posts that did drastically better than others.
So you can’t tell me that AI is just going to post it for you and it’s going to be great. No, it’s like, I know what I’m doing, and not all of my posts did well. Now, that being said, I did double my reach. I did more than double my engagement rate across that 30 days compared to what I have been doing.
So like me running the test, I was able to get results, but it wasn’t all AI. If I didn’t have, what I was testing, what I was learning from in that process, like AI wouldn’t have fixed that for me, right there. I haven’t seen a way that it fixes itself, that it does that well.
And that some of that might come over time. But yeah, right now you still need to be an expert. You still need to have your presence. You still need to show up personally and there isn’t an AI tool that eliminates that. So people need to be ready to do that if they want to keep getting results. There was something like if I wouldn’t have run the test for as long as I did, I probably would have been somewhat disappointed.
I’m [00:37:00] glad I stuck it out and did it as long as I did because I got a result toward the end. That for me where did I start with this? Do you remember what did I start for sake of why I was running this experiment? Do you remember what I said?
Charlie Madison: I do not.
Zach Hammer: new people that I don’t know from anyone else in this world.
I’m connecting to them because I think that they might be a good fit for the kind of information that I’m putting out. They might find value in what I’m doing and what I’m up to and the hopes that over time I build influence. And yeah like ultimately find customers, find clients, et cetera.
But knowing that I intend to lead with value, lead with good information to win people over to my way of thinking and hopefully drive results from that. So early on in the test, I was feeling a bit discouraged. I was getting results, [00:38:00] but I was pretty much only seeing results from people that I already knew.
People that I already had some level of relationship with people that I’ve developed that relationship with over time, but toward the end of this process, and this is the other big takeaway to me, I ran this process for about 30 days and only at the end of the process that I start seeing people that I had been connected with toward the beginning of the process now started engaging on the posts as well and getting involved in some of what I’ve been up to.
And literally it’s The last two days of the process is where I really actually started seeing that noticing it where it’s I know that I connected with that person probably about 30 days ago before I saw the results. And I think this is really powerful for you too, Charlie, because I think it makes a big difference for what people should expect with Referrals While You Sleep and like when and how and where it makes a difference.
People need to be seeing your stuff for a while before they even start to notice it. And you don’t know whether any given post is going to make a difference, but it’s that consistency that seems to actually add up to building influence. And for me, [00:39:00] I love that I have been able to see, I reach out to new people and by posting consistently, putting this content out, people are starting to At least start engaging it with my world, asking me for things, potentially becoming clients.
There’s been some good opportunities that have come out of this as a result of just people seeing my stuff, I’ve got a couple of people who’ve reached out, like tagging other people oh man, we need to be doing this. We’re, like I’ve been working on a recruiting project. And so some people have seen some of that and then reaching out oh yeah, like we need to know how to do this because we’re interested in the same thing.
Other people have seen some of what I’m doing, experimenting with N8n and GPTs, and they’re like, Oh man, I know I need to do that. So they’re reaching out in order to talk about how I can help them on that sort of stuff. And then other times, it’s people just yeah, that sounds interesting.
That sounds like something that I want to do. And so they’re requesting the thing that I’m putting out. And these are people that I don’t know. And so that’s been really exciting for me to see. People, names that I don’t recognize. actually engaging with this and the process has worked. And why that I think that matters a ton for you is that, you’re you with referrals while you sleep, this process [00:40:00] that I’m running is like it is a somewhat automated way to be doing that in the background, right?
It’s geared toward people that, so you don’t have to overcome that, but there is the expectation of you running this process in order for it to really be noticed. It has to just Be there and be present and keep running in order for it to work. And if you don’t keep running it, if it doesn’t keep going that’s what I’m seeing.
If I would have stopped too soon, like I wouldn’t have seen the impact that it was actually making. And by running the process and forcing myself to, for me, do the 30 days, it’s like only now am I detecting the work that I was doing for 30 days on those people that would have been at the beginning of that connection and process.
Does that make sense? And so, man, that was one of the big takeaways. I’m glad that I ran the process as long as I did, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen really what I was hoping for, which is that I could connect to new people and use this system in order to build influence with people that didn’t know me before.
And it’s been really exciting to see that result happen. So anyway, anyway.
Charlie Madison: That makes me [00:41:00] think, one 30 days seems like a long time, but it’s also really short, and I studied some people in the dating scene, the pickup scene and because they’re amazing at building trust. That’s really in relationships, right? And one of their things was.
We hear about in marketing. You people need to have a lot of different experiences. And of course they’ve got to see you over and over because what’s cool about the way you’re doing this, you’re using AI to really 10 X who you are. And what’s cool, you are now able to build 10 X the relationships, it takes time, but you’re getting compound interest, which that’s the power of social media. Like it’s not just, the people in your town, it’s people worldwide that you have the same connections with. That’s really mind blowing. You’ve got the thousand true fans concept. As this increases you can have more than [00:42:00] that.
Zach Hammer: Right. Exactly. And that was really key to me. Like some of the people that I built influence and relationships with honestly like you and I, for instance, we’ve never met in person, right? And I am familiar with building relationships from a distance. But when you think about us building influence with each other has taken lots of time, right?
We’ve had lots of conversations. We were open to it. We came through connections. And in the past for me, what I have seen has worked well for me is The relationships that come from me doing webinars or something like that. I wanted to see, can I do that same kind of thing without it being a one off event that like I have to forge the relationship, create the thing and kind of have the complexity and sporadic nature of when I can make it happen.
I was like, can I control this to an extent where daily action can be happening that slowly but surely builds momentum and builds influence. I put [00:43:00] out a message and that message builds the influence rather than me having to coordinate a webinar, coordinate something like that in order to ultimately result in those relationships and phone calls and that sort of thing.
That’s what I was looking to test here because I know I could build influence with some of those higher touch sort of tactics, I wanted to see if I could do a lower touch tactic and still build influence. And I’ve been super excited to see that I can’t. I know it’s possible that other people do it.
It’s been fun to see that I can, right? That, like putting these things into practice. It’s it’s been really rewarding to just see. Yeah, like I could do this. This is a skill that I’ve developed. I’m able to do it. I like for me, the potential obstacles are figuring out that consistency.
And I will have to figure out, is it long term sustainable for me to do something like the stick method to keep doing it? Or is there some other way that I need to be able to build the habit of being able to do it consistently? Because that consistency matters a ton. But at least in this result, it’s like I validated the process works.
I do have an understanding and a [00:44:00] point of view of what kind of posts matter or don’t. These are things that I was able to figure out myself. I didn’t need somebody to hand me exactly the solutions. Like I was able to, I was able to go out and internalize from my point of view, how this would work and redeploy it out into the world.
Anyway, it’s been a fun experiment for me. I hope this information is useful for anybody else. For you, what is either your most surprising or most impactful takeaway from me doing this that’s been powerful for you?
Charlie Madison: I think just for me, it’s the freedom of scalability webinars work, but you’d only be on so many stages, it’s that thing like everything works mean you’re really good live. You got a simple one, two punch. You’re reaching out to people that may be a good fit for you.
And then you are sharing, you’re like divine spark. The other thing is, 25 years ago to be able to run a test on whether your market likes what you like, it might have take cost [00:45:00] $25,000 easily. You gotta buy a list. Hire a copywriter, mail to the list. You’re probably not even doing an AB test.
Maybe you are.
Got to wait for the calls to come back, the responses, the fact that over 30 days, you’ve gotten 30 AB tests and like it’s phenomenal. Like for me to break my brain from old school, I want results to like everything is a test long as it’s got me.
Zach Hammer: right.
Charlie Madison: The scalability and again, the test.
Like, how cool is that?
Zach Hammer: Yep, yep absolutely. Yeah, it’s been fun. I think something else that would be worthwhile as we wrap this one up. Where do I go from here, right? What do I see on the horizon? So I learned some cool things, but there’s more things that I haven’t tested. And there’s things that I think I could get better data on, I could experiment with.
I didn’t do a ton of video, but that was intentional. I often show up in [00:46:00] video and I wanted to see, can I show up in video in my life? But show up written on Facebook. And my theory was that I could get more reach that way from what I’ve seen. That seems to be true. I do seem to be able to do that well, but experimenting a bit more with video might be worthwhile.
Another thing that I haven’t developed the way to get the data in order to see what the impact is. But I talked a lot about engagement rate and how that impacted things. What I didn’t talk about is what I would call engagement velocity. Would be not just how much are people engaging, but how quickly are people engaging compared to when I post and how much does that impact the post reach and all that.
And, I have a theory that engagement velocity is probably the thing that matters more. When I post, how quickly do people start engaging? And when you get good engagement velocity I imagine that helps a ton with your overall post reach something else that was a little bit of a takeaway that is worth testing to me, some posts are more suited to my business audience. [00:47:00] Some posts are more well suited to my general audience.
And what I’m curious about, and one of the things I want to test is how much does it matter for me to have a mix of that? Like I always will personally. I imagine I will but does it help me with my business people to still have the personal stuff in the mix? Or does that hurt me? Does it potentially make Facebook think that more of my posts should be going to the personal audience that maybe doesn’t care about the business stuff. Or does it help me that the more business minded people are seeing the personal aspects of my life and a bit of a way to dehumanize me.
And maybe it has long term benefits. So that’s something that I’m interested in looking at and testing. I’ve got a lot of what I did here was a little bit more intuitive. I leveraged the flow, but it was very often. I took a thought and then a thought in a general framework and had a I build it out for me.
I would love to see how much I can do to really take something like a recording like this or, recordings for my meetings and really float through a structure where a is giving me most [00:48:00] of the options and I’m just selecting and refining from there. In this case I went into this where I had an idea of what I wanted for the post for the most part.
And I was using AI to get me from blank page to, to post a lot quicker. Like I want to extract this idea from this template, or I want to, or from this transcript, or I want to extract this. I want to test a little bit and see what I could do to see if I give A video and a transcript. Can it come up with a lot of good options for me without a ton of input?
I haven’t tested that a ton yet. I think it’s possible, but I have to build out the systems to do it. So those are some of the things that as I’m going like that’s where I see future tests and what I’m doing from here. I don’t have answers on them, but those are some of the things that I’ll be experimenting with.
And if people want to know how those kinds of tests go, I highly recommend that you subscribe@zackhammer.me and make sure that you’re on my list, that you can be aware of those tests that they’re coming out. If you found this valuable, you like this information, you wanna see how some of that other information comes [00:49:00] about, I recommend that that you go to Zack hammer.me, Z-A-C-H-H-A-M-E-R.
Do me and get signed up to to stay on my list and, and see what I’m coming out with on this information. Anything that I create or share, if you get registered there, you should see it should get access to it and be updated as we come out with new tests and new information Charlie, thank you again for coming, for being on the show, boom, roasted The the some of the, we mentioned it briefly.
Definitely check out what Charlie is up to with referrals. While you sleep. com, a lot of the principles that we have talked about here while not exactly, and not always exactly the same a lot of the lessons, a lot of the things that, that I’ve been experimenting with, Charlie is also deploying in more of an automated scalable way.
On people’s behalf in order to make sure that you’re staying top of mind whether you are a podcaster, making sure to get get your content out to an audience of people to encourage downloads, encourage subscribers, encourage action, or whether you’re in the real estate space and you’re looking to make sure that you have an a [00:50:00] ready ready, excited audience of people that, that, your world decides to pick up the phone and say, come list me, or I’ve got a referral for you.
It’s all about creating more of those connections. Those more of those opportunities on autopilot, check out what Charlie’s up to with referrals while you sleep. I highly encourage that you do that. But otherwise again, Charlie, thanks so much for for joining me for another one and until next time, we’ll catch you guys in the next one.
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Zach Hammer
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Real Estate Growth Hackers Founder

Zach Hammer
Zach Hammer is the co-founder of Real Estate Growth Hackers. Over the last 36 months Zach and his team have managed ad budgets well over $100,000, generated over 25,000 real estate leads, and helped create over $50,000,0000 in business revenue for their clients. Zach is also a highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted some of the top Real Estate teams and brokerages across the country.