Grow Your Own Profitable Online Tribe Today

With over 1 billion group users and continually growing, Facebook is the place where everyone is hanging out and that’s why they’re putting millions of dollars into developing the community and group side of their business.

This presents YOU with an ideal opportunity to get on board this growing and exciting trend, build your own passionate community, attract more leads, and ultimately sell more products and services.

Grow Your Own Profitable Online Tribe Today

1. Facebook Groups and Pages

A community isn’t platform dependent, but Facebook offers the ideal free solution. Also, all the top businesses are building communities and Facebook are currently putting a lot of time and resources into them. When set up correctly they can quickly grow organically without the need for paid advertising.

It’s a good idea to have both a group and a business page. A business page will allow you to create a brand and will also be visible in the search engines. Whereas a group is easier to search within and allows you to build a true community.

2. Define Your Purpose

Establish why you want a community. There are numerous reasons, for example, to increase brand awareness, support communication or to monetise it.

Also decide who you want in your community and who you don’t.

3. Community Success

Describe what your ideal community should look like and the kind of value it creates for its members.

How will it be deemed successful? Will this be based on the number of members, the reduction in support calls, the amount of sales or something else?

4. Leadership

• Write down your core values, ensuring that these align with those of your community.

• Write out vision and mission statements for both your company and community.

5. Community Culture

Decide on this from the outset – what’s acceptable and what’s not.

Use “We are… but not…” to list 5 or 6 traits that you want to apply to your community.

Choose an appropriate name for your community.

6. Business and Social Impacts

• Determine the business and social impacts you can have through your community.

• Look at the various ways you can increase revenue, reduce costs and innovate products.

• Use “My Facebook community helps… (member persona) do… (need, want, desire)… by… (what you do to fulfil that need)” to work out your community’s unique value.

7. Members

Examine several successful communities in your niche to see how active they are and what the members’ collective characteristics are.

Build trust for your members with the community as a whole, with other members, and with yourself as the leader so that they’ll share and participate. You can do this with consistent posting, taking a genuine interest in your members and making them feel their contributions are worthwhile.

Introduce new members to the community to make them feel welcome. Familiarise them with all guidelines and help them make their first connections.

Decide whether or not your community will be open-ended and how to deal with members who reach a particular state where membership is no longer beneficial to them.

8. Content

Produce regular, consistent content for every level of member. Introduce rituals such as birthday and community shout-outs to increase the level of engagement. Also reward members for actively participating.

9. Growing Your Community

• Get a clear idea on how big you want your community to be and how you can cope with the increased size.

• Use FB Insights (and other paid-for tools if required) to monitor your growth.

• Focus mainly on engagement rather than membership numbers when looking to grow.

• Never add people to your community without their permission.

• Promote your community from your own website and your own personal Facebook page. You can embed an invitation into your website to assist with this.

• Participate in other Facebook groups, but only promote your own if and when appropriate.

• Put details of your community in your social media descriptions and speak to people about it both online and offline.

• Always engage with your active members to encourage them to promote your community for you.

• Partner with others in appropriate niches.

• Run Facebook Ads.

10. Monetising Your Community

• Connect members and run paid events.

• Sell exclusive member-only merchandise.

• Set up affiliate links.

• Reach out to potential partners for sponsorship.

• Create a paid membership site.

11. Running Your Community

• Add extra admins.

• Consider making super users into moderators.

• Outsource tasks to a VA.

• Use questions and polls to collect data on members to find out what their exact needs are and how you can better meet them.

• Measure frequency and quality of the various parameters – answers to questions, ideas and feedback shared, referrals and signups, content contributed, purchases.

• Keep a close eye on the costs involved, for example, any paid-for monitoring tools or hosting costs for membership site.

To Your Success!