LAS VEGAS – Conor McGregor is a brilliant self-promoter with an innate sense of how to manipulate public opinion.

View photos It would be hard for Conor McGregor to take a page out of the Floyd Mayweather promotions playbook. More

Since last Tuesday, he has posted six times on Twitter and twice on Facebook. The first Facebook post, which hit about 10:40 a.m. ET on Thursday, has gotten 726,000 likes, 265,347 shares and 131,730 comments. The second Facebook post, which went up about 10 hours later, has 182,000 likes, 6,135 shares and 5,688 comments.

His six tweets have combined to receive 405,000 retweets and 454,000 likes.

That is a mind-bogglingly effective use of social media. He’s forced the UFC to scramble a bit.

Few, if any, other fighters could accomplish what he has in less than a week. The UFC 200 announcement news conference on Friday was overwhelmingly about McGregor, as was most of the media coverage last week, which no doubt will wind up lessening the sales of UFC 197.

For more than a year, McGregor has hinted that at the very least, he’d like to co-promote with the UFC, if not one day outright promote himself by creating McGregor Promotions.

This is the path that boxing star Floyd Mayweather took, and for just $750,000, it helped set him on his way to becoming the highest-paid athlete in sports history.

Mayweather paid Top Rank $750,000 to buy his way out of his promotional contract in 2006. He created Mayweather Promotions and, with the mantra “I’m my own boss,” found a way to make himself the biggest draw in boxing.

He holds every significant pay-per-view record and his 2015 fight with Manny Pacquiao sold an astonishing 4.6 million units. That is almost certainly more than all of boxing will sell in 2016 and 2017 combined, unless Mayweather comes out of retirement to pursue a 50th fight.

McGregor is a brilliant young man who not only is aware of his value but has the courage to fight for what he feels he’s worth.

He’s going head-to-head with the UFC in a way that no athlete ever has before. Oh, there have been plenty of fighters who have taken on the UFC, most notably Hall of Famer Randy Couture, but his methods mostly meant using the courts.

McGregor is instead trying to turn public sentiment against the UFC and in his favor as he battles over the company’s insistence that he attend promotional and marketing events.

McGregor last week essentially asked for a one-time exemption from promoting and marketing so that he could focus on training for a planned bout with Nate Diaz at UFC 200 on July 9 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Diaz submitted McGregor in the second round of their March 5 bout at UFC 196, the company’s biggest event ever, and McGregor has said promotional duties took away from his ability to properly prepare for that event.

There has been speculation within the MMA community that McGregor would eventually try to break away from the UFC and become its version of Mayweather: Booking, promoting and distributing shows himself, all the while keeping the bulk of the money for himself.

The fact that McGregor is under contract to the UFC makes it extraordinarily unlikely that such a venture would ever get beyond the wishful thinking stage.

But suppose for the sake of argument that McGregor completes his contract with the UFC, becomes a free agent and instead of signing with another promotion, creates his own promotion a la Mayweather.

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