Why Facebook Isn’t Best For Building Community

Tara Bryan: 00:00:05

Hey, everybody, it's Tara, Bryan, and you are listening to the course building secrets podcast. Whether you're a coach or a CEO, the success of your team and clients is based on your ability to deliver a consistent experience and guide them on the fastest path to results. This podcast will give you practical real life tips that you can use today to build your online experiences that get results and create raving fans. Why? So you can monetize your expertise and serve more people without adding more time or team to your business. If you're looking to uncover your million dollar framework, package it and use it to scale you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Tara Bryan: 00:00:50

Hey, everybody, welcome to the course building secrets podcast. In today's episode, I want to talk about community. And I want to talk about building your community and where to build your community. So often, people start by building a community on Facebook or some other sort of social media platform, which is great, it's a great place to get started, it's where your people are hanging out. But when you get to a certain size, it actually is ruining your ability to grow. When you have everything in a group like Facebook, for community. And I want to talk a little bit more about that today. So here's the thing is when you are building your online program, your online course your course experience, whatever you want to call it, one of the best ways that you can help people become successful is by helping them engage with you and with other people, where they can ask questions, they can share different ideas and techniques, and just different ways of doing things. And the challenge with Facebook groups, there's a couple One is you're actually pulling people off of the platform that you're putting them on, right. So if they're coming to you for a course or some sort of experience, and you have a community aspect every time you want them to go into the program. And then you ask them to actually have a conversation outside of the program, you're asking them to go to different places. So while it's great, if people are on Facebook, that they are just sort of stopping by and adding value to to your group, the challenge is that you have to get them back into the program. So they can take the program, they can take the course and get the results that you have promised them and that they're actually looking to have. So the more that people log in to different things or are in different places, the harder it is for them to stay engaged. It's interesting, I had a conversation with one of my agency partners today. And they're like, oh, we have this whole big platform for our agency partners to go to and get information and, you know, find out your links and find out all these things in your commission and all the things. And so that's great. I said, but I never go out there. Because I don't know where that is, it's not on the main platform where I spend all of my time, is there a way that we can just add that to the one place that I'm hanging out all day. And they're like, Oh, that's a super good idea. It's the same concept with Facebook is you're asking somebody to learn and interact with what you have going on. And then you're saying, well, great, let's learn and you're gonna do all these things, and we'll have coaching calls, and the videos will be put up and all these things, and then want to join the conversation somewhere else. And so you're, you're actually disconnecting that particular experience. And so in order to have a seamless experience, you want them to interact in one place one place to go where they're logging in, they're participating, they're, they're being a part of the community and, and, and getting into that habit of coming in all the time. So so that's one thing is just the the the experience and the ease of use for someone, if your course your platform is in a mobile app, that's even better, right? Because then they're interacting and they're able to see notifications and different conversations that are going on right from their phone. And so in, you know, sort of

Tara Bryan: 00:04:32

to be able to play that is a great way to be able to kind of mimic that experience of ease of use is to you know, kind of wrap up your experience in into a mobile app, which is a whole nother conversation that we could have. But let's just look at Facebook groups as an example. So one of the biggest challenges with a Facebook group other than it's on a platform that you do not own, right, so you're actually at them Mercy of what Facebook is going to do on a regular basis, they could shut it down, they could shut down your account, they could change their, the way that they do things, they could just say no more, no more communities, no more groups and shut that down, you actually have no control over the platform. And so you're, you're at the mercy. So if you have a really active group, which is great. And Facebook decides to change something, then you could literally lose not only all that content, all that rich discussion, but also your ability to connect with those people. Right, so. So that's a huge factor. The other huge factor is the content. And the conversation isn't organized in any way, shape, or form on Facebook. So if you're not part of, you know, seeing the post as it comes in, most likely you're going to miss it. And it's it's not something that you can, you know, organize around a topic, organize around a community, organize around a group, have people be able to join it when they want to, you know, connect with others. It's, it's just, it's just not user friendly. It's not easy to navigate. And, and it's just not manageable from from the perspective of creating an awesome experience. So say, you start a Facebook group, let me just give you this example, you start a Facebook group, and you do some training, and you start some conversations, it's all going super well. And you know, you have maybe your first group in there, maybe have 20 to 50 people in this community, and it's awesome. And you've done all of these things. Well, you know, a year or two down the road, if you were to just to be like, yeah, just go back and watch that video that I put on the Facebook group or go back to this conversation, you're not going to be able to do that, because that's not the way that Facebook is created. So you're really starting over each and every time you're not able to leverage the conversations, leverage the training and organize it in a way that helps people really just kind of cut through all the crap and get to what they're looking for. So that's why you know, when we're recommending creating a membership site or core site and having that community layer on top, to actually create that community layer in the platform that you're using. And so, you know, be at sort of a forum or a group scenario, just somehow, where you're able to engage people in conversation, either with each other with you, with other instructors, or whomever, you can organize those conversations that are around a topic or around a particular question or around an expert, or what have you, is because it's, it's easy to navigate, it's user friendly, it gives you way more control over all of that content and what's being what's being talked about, and how to capture all of that. And it really provides the ability for what you're what you're giving people to be sticky. It's it's a self contained way to help with engagement and community and having people learn together with each other and around each other, and encouraging people to go in, because so often that one of the biggest hurdles that people have when they create a course or membership site is getting their members and customers to not just go in at one time when they first get it or maybe at the end, but really to go in over time and interact and do different activities and learn different things and engage in different ways. And so it's really cultivating that community in there. So when you look at growing, when you look at sort of scaling your course, what is sustainable, is it sustainable to have a community a thriving community on a platform that you don't own? And that is really hard to navigate and kind of figure out? Or is it better to have your community and kind of the learning and, and whatnot on the platform that you own that allows you to grow and scale it and look around and see what's valuable for people?

Tara Bryan: 00:09:27

My guess is it's the latter. And really, as you look at how to how to transition and do this, it's really looking at how do you get more people into your program? How do you make it sticky? And how do you make it something that people are able to get success with? And that's really building a community around your topic, really providing them a place to go to get the answers that they're looking for. So there you go, that is my quibbling secret tip of the day, is really look at on how you're building community and where you're building it, and what is sustainable and realistic for the long term, because you really want to be able to gain the attention and the attraction of your audience. And at the end of the day, everyone really wants to connect. Everyone wants to be part of a community and know that they're not in it by themselves. And and so how can you build that? How can you look at that, to really build that community within your platform and not outside of it? Alright, there you go. Have a great day.