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From High Hopes to High Costs: My Journey with Facebook Bonus Program

This is a newsletter I sent to my subscribers last week. I publish the newsletters on my website; however, I edit out some information from the public versions.

If you’d like to receive these updates in your Inbox in unedited form, sign up for my newsletter:

Ever heard of Facebook Bonus Program?

The Facebook Bonus Program is a Meta initiative that offers financial incentives to page owners with high engagement, requiring 10,000+ followers. Specific qualification metrics remain unpublished.

I regularly watch the Niche Pursuit podcast, and around six months ago, I came across this episode:

Later, I received an email announcing that the podcast hosts had released a course about the Facebook Bonus Program.

Rather than directly teaching how to get into the program, it was focused on building the groundwork needed to qualify. The Facebook Bonus program remains mysterious—no one knows exactly why some pages are accepted while others aren’t.

I bought the course and started working through it.

The course provided clear, organized instructions on engagement strategies and creating cost-effective Facebook ads.

My page grew with high engagement. I happily paid for ads while waiting to reach 10,000 followers—the minimum needed for the bonus program.

Then, I noticed concerning comments from fellow students in the course.

Many expressed worry that Facebook wasn’t accepting them into the bonus program, even though they had met all the official and unofficial requirements.

It turned out many had already been waiting for months without results.

The course creators couldn’t provide any clarification. They hypothesized that the program might have been paused before the holidays and suggested applying through Facebook’s newly created form and waiting until after Christmas and New Year.

We had no choice but to follow their suggestion.

By that time, I was in red for at least… ***edited out***

☝☝☝ I left out some details from my original newsletter. If you’d like to receive these updates in your Inbox in unedited form, sign up:

Later, I discovered through forums that Facebook stopped inviting people to their Bonus Program in the summer of 2024. Nobody from the course managed to get in. Some of the students lost much more than ***edited out***… 😬

This has been my biggest and most expensive flop so far.

I don’t fully regret buying the course (maybe slightly 😅) since I did gain valuable knowledge about creating low-cost ads and understanding engagement drivers.

After realizing that the FB Bonus Program may never come to fruition, I pivoted to driving the Facebook traffic to my website. I will talk about it next week here in the blog, while my subscribers have already received the newsletter 😉

What do you think of the Facebook Bonus Program? Have you tried to get in?

Go to the comments, and let’s chat!

Otherwise, have a wonderful weekend ❤️