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In today’s Q&A, we are helping you determine whether or not your online business requires a Facebook group.
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Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to today’s Q&A mini-podcast We are going to answer a question today from Beth Philips. Beth says:
“I’m hesitant to start a Facebook group for my site because I’m afraid of the time suck plus I don’t want people to answer questions incorrectly if I don’t constantly jump on to monitor. I’ve heard of people jumping into Facebook groups once a week or so to answer questions, but I don’t want to have to contradict people, etc.
On the other hand, I want to be able to help people. How do you manage Facebook groups and/or forums on your site without it consuming all of your time? I do get questions via email through my site but I’m trying to figure out a more efficient way to answer questions that are repetitive, and FAQ page is not helpful because while issues can be similar, each situation is slightly different.”
SHANE: Okay, the first thing that you have to do when you’re tackling your question, Beth, and you do have to be careful because when you start a Facebook group, you can open kind of a Pandora’s box. I’ve got a Facebook group that I started for a certain football product I’ve got and it has got like 1,800 coaches or something in it now. There’s no possible way that I can answer every single question and that does take a little bit of effort to monitor.
You do have to be careful when you’re starting a Facebook group because it can kind of get unwieldy and it can kind of grow out of control. You also have to remember this – we all want to help as many people as possible. That is something that we want to do in our niches with our products and in our website, but there is no way, no matter what system you create that you can possibly help everyone.
We were talking to Cliff Ravenscraft and he gave us some great advice. He told us that you can’t help everybody so you have to do for a few what you wish you could do for everybody. So right away before you go into any Facebook group, before you answer another email, before you do anything like that, just remember, you cannot possibly answer every single question especially if you are doing it in a free avenue like a free forum or on your Facebook group, or on your email list. Make sure you’re looking at it from the right mindset before you actually go in to creating these groups and realize that even though you can help more people, you’re not still going to be able answer every single question that get asked to you.
JOCELYN: Beth, in your situation, I would really recommend a Facebook page. This is what I have for my Elementary Librarian page and the reason that I recommend that is because you control all of the content. On a group, people can put posts and they will surface up to the top when other people visit the group. On your page, the only thing that’s really going to show up prominently is posts that you post yourself. Everybody else’s posts are going to go kind of over to the side. It’s not going to be front and center where everybody sees it.
One thing that you could do is take a reader question so many days a week or maybe once a week, whichever your schedule allows and you might just put first name asks, and type their question out, and then you would put, “My response is this.” And then maybe you would throw another question back out there, “Does anyone have additional questions about this topic?” That’s where they could put additional questions or maybe some commentary things like that. That way, it stays all within your control but then you’re also putting it out there for other people who might have similar concerns.
SHANE: Let’s say you’re getting 15 questions a week or 20 questions a week. You probably are going to have to group those questions. Maybe five of the questions are similar therefore you can give a general response to one of them and you could just say, “You know what, I’m going to schedule out on Sundays. I’m going to answer seven questions. I’m going to release one a day on my page. You can go into Facebook and you can schedule that out where they release every night at 8 o’clock or whatever.” That way, you’re answering a lot of questions, you’re helping people, you’re giving people feedback, but you’re eliminating some of the extra questions. You’re getting some of that off of your plate and that’s helping you do that.
As for Facebook groups, what Jocelyn and I have shifted toward are premium groups. There’s no way that Jocelyn and I can sit here 24 hours a day and just completely offer free advice to everybody that writes in. We manage that by charging for it. We have premium groups like if you’re a member of our Flip Your Life eCourse, you get an accountability Facebook group where Jocelyn and I interact with that group and give people advice and kind of guide the discussion a little bit.
What it does is by creating that barrier to entry where you actually charge to be in that group, they get a product with that too. It’s not like we’re just charging for the group. That’s kind of like, I don’t know, an extra thing that people get when they take our course but it eliminates a lot of the bulk of the questions because only the people that paid come into your group, Jocelyn actually also does that for a product on her Elementary Librarian site.
JOCELYN: Yeah, if you purchased my full year of lesson plans, you automatically get access into a premium group where you can talk to other people who have purchased the product. I do kind of keep an eye on that. I mean, I go into it maybe once a week or so and just make sure nobody is putting any kind of spam or competitor product links or anything like that. For the most part, it usually stays right on topic. People talk to each other about concerns that they have in the elementary library and that’s exactly what it is there for. That might be another option for you if you wanted to start a group.
SHANE: The last thing you can do too is all of us in our communities have super users or super fans, or maybe people that are really experienced and we trust their opinion and we’ve talked to them a lot. You can make those people administrators on your site. It doesn’t have to all be from you. One thing that we do in the Flip Your Life course is we’re implementing a self study model where people can go in. They still are going to have a Facebook group, they still are going to have that accountability, but Jocelyn and I are not quite as involved in that group as we are with our limited group. We are actually taking people that have been through the course, have been successful, and we’ve identified five or six super users.
We have made them administrators of that group and they are in there, they have been through the course, they know our material, they’ve had consulting calls with us live and they are in there helping us answer some of those questions, driving some of that discussion for us. That way, they kind of act as a filter between us and the larger group so that we can come in and we can answer the really broad, really general questions that seem to be coming up a lot, but then they can handle some of the smaller things.
If you’ve got a website already and you’ve got some traction, you’ve got some visitors and you’ve got people in your comments, you’ve got all these people emailing you, take a couple of those people that you’ve built relationships with, put them in the group or partner with someone if you have another person in the space.
Invite them to operate the group with you and that way, you can create this forum where people can ask these questions and then you control the flow of information but you’ve also got some help. There’s nothing wrong with bringing people in. You’ve got to be able to let go a little bit and trust people in your Facebook group and in your community to kind of work together and help each other through the issues because there’s absolutely no way that you can answer everything. Jocelyn and I strive to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible but at the end of the day, there is going to be a limit with how many people we can interact with.
That’s one reason we started this Q&A podcast. We were getting so many questions and it was impossible for us to email back every single person. We started taking some of these general questions like, “Should I start a Facebook group?” and we put them into podcast form, that way we could answer that question, we could reach out to someone like you, Beth, and just talk to you personally but we could kind of let everyone else listen in to the conversation because I’m sure if one person has a question like this, there’s going to be a lot of other people out there like that.
JOCELYN: We hope that was helpful, Beth, to you and to anyone else who is struggling with, “Should I start a Facebook group or should I not?” There is no real clear cut answer to this. I mean, you just have to look at your, audience, your product and what you’re doing, and just determine for yourself whether or not it makes sense.
SHANE: Always remember this, you control your schedule. You control your time. When Jocelyn and I interact with our Flip Your Life groups, we only get on and check the group at 9 AM and 9 PM during the week. That is our schedule for getting on and checking. We are very clear with that upfront that we are not going to be sitting in front of our computer every minute of every day in our Facebook group. We are going to come in, we’re going to be very focused from 9-9:30 twice a day during the course on our limited group and we’re going to answer questions, but those are the time periods that we’re going to come on and that we’ve dedicated to that.
You do not have to answer questions in real time if you do start a Facebook group. If you only want to get on and answer questions at 8 AM three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, that’s what you do so it doesn’t have to be a time suck. That only happens if you let it be. Go in and turn off those notifications off. Don’t get notifications from the group. Let people come in and ask their questions. You log in for 30 minutes, answer as many as you can, and move on. You are always in control when you have an online business of your schedule, your time, and how much effort you put into it.
JOCELYN: All right guys, thanks for tuning in. That was a great question today. If you have a question for the Q&A podcast, don’t forget to let us know. Hopefully, we will feature one of your questions in the future. Thanks.
SHANE: Until then, catch you on the flip side. See you all, bye.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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David Henry says
Hey Guys – I’m trying to start a private Facebook group for an upcoming product. Facebook only lets me choose people I am friends with to put in the group.
Is there a way around this or do I have to become friends with everyone who buys my digital product?
-David
Shane Sams says
Yes, you can add them by email. When you sell the product, tell them you need the email they use to log into facebook. Or you can link them to the url of the actual group and they can request to join on their own. Hope that helps!
David Henry says
Very much so – thanks!