What's up? I'm Rachel Spiewak and this is Rock Your Tribe Radio where community, fun, social media and business collide. I firmly believe that parties are the answer to all of life's problems. Seriously. Building a community, bringing people together for a common purpose and serving them, that's your mission as a business owner. Let's make it happen. It's time to rock your tribe.
(00:28): Welcome back to the mad tea party. We're in the middle of a two part series where I'm sharing my secrets. I'm telling you exactly what I'm looking for. When we first start working together to rock your digital community. I want you to have the tools to understand whether your community is on track for success. And if you're hanging out with me, I'm willing to bet that you're a thinky kind of person, maybe academic, maybe self-taught in any case, you're a smart person who perhaps thinks yourself into a corner.
(00:58): Sometimes did I nail it? And what I find is my people that's you, my people want to know not just how to do things, but why, and whether they're doing it right. I feel you because business is messy. You're supposed to fail sometimes. What a mind for us, recovering gifted kids. And our last episode I shared the first half of my digital community evaluation. And we started with the most important question of all. Do you know who your tribe is? We imagine the caterpillar and Alice's adventures in Wonderland, demanding. Who are you? That caterpillar? What a Dick asking poor Alice, these difficult questions when she feels so lost and alone and confused turns out this is the best thing anyone can do for Alice. She needs to know herself. If she's going to make it out of Wonderland without losing her head. That's what a good evaluation does.
(01:55): It holds up the mirror. So you can see the truth in this case. It's the truth about your digital community. The only way to create a powerful digital community that's engaged and profitable that grows on autopilot. That's truly meaningful and impactful is you need to know the truth about it. And it's not really about doing it exactly right? It's about doing it in a way that makes sense for you and your tribe. So that's what we're doing here. Did you listen to part one of this evaluation? How did you do, how many points did you get? If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go back to the previous episode of this podcast and listen to that one first. Here's the recap question. One is your community, your brand world. Does it match you? Is it like going to your house party or to your Wonderland question number two, is it a pity party or is it a joy and question three.
(02:52): What is your promise? And do you really fulfill it? And now for this episode, we're going to have questions four through six, and those are number four. Do you have a Bulletproof onboarding process? Number five? Are you shading relevant conversations and number six, are you information dumping? Let's start with number four. Do you have a Bulletproof onboarding process? This is something that gets overlooked a lot when it comes to free digital communities. And it's a crucial step for a whole bunch of reasons. Member engagement and retention for market research. And I think what happens most of the time is that there's so much to learn and execute when it comes to getting a community up and running. That's a really big job. And so I can see how the onboarding process does get overlooked. And I think that because this work is online, we forget that we're still interacting with humans.
(03:48): There's a real person behind the name and profile image on a screen. It's still real human interaction. So hang on, let's back up a sec. What do I mean by boarding process? When you have a new client or a new subscription service member or an employee or a volunteer at a nonprofit or a student at a school, when someone new comes into your organization, you onboard them, you welcome them. You give them a tour, you introduce them to the crew. You make sure they're settling in and they know where to find everything. One of the biggest complaints I hear from community admins is people don't engage enough. And I have to ask every time, well, how did you welcome your new members? How did you onboard them on Facebook? You can create a welcome post that automatically tags on discord. You'll have a welcome channel.
(04:39): And if you're a platform offers a mailing list, integration hit new members with a welcome sequence, whatever you do, don't do nothing. And the main message you want to convey is you belong here. So let's double back for a second. Talk about engagement. Now you've got your bullet proof onboarding process, which sets the stage for engaging. How do you keep it going? This brings us to question number five. Are you starting relevant conversations? It's not the secret that digital communities rely on daily questions to drive up engagement. This is the beating heart of my community. Brock your tribe on Facebook. But the criticism of this is it's boring. Everyone does it. And they're only doing it for the engagement. And that's fair. I see this a lot. How many Facebook groups can you go to on a Monday for some motivation and how many can you go to on a Friday to share your wins for the week?
(05:32): What can you speak about for 30 minutes? Without preparation is a question we have seen about a billion times, but if we look at the engagement insights from my Facebook group, almost all of the top posts, if not all of them at any given moment, our engagement posts asking questions, isn't the problem asking boring, no personality, having irrelevant questions. That's the problem. And then sometimes I get pushback, but I can't think of questions. So my advice to you is this, thank you for your community. Like it's a bunch of awesome people that you like, and you're talking about your favorite topic for 80% of the time, the other 20%. Well, you have wiggle room there. If you build your brand world first, remember question one from this evaluation is your community, your brand world. If you build your brand world, then you can pull from your origin story, your brand values, your hobbies and interests associated with the brand.
(06:31): You can draw from those things, those topics and categories and interests to bring in other interesting and entertaining questions into your engagement posts. So for example, in my community, on Valentine's day, I started a thread where we pick songs for a mixed tape. What's your favorite song for a playlist for Valentine's day? Because I can do that in my brand and my brand world, which is all about my DJ career and nightlife and music side note. I love the 80 20 rule. If you ask me how often to do one thing or another, or how much or how little one thing or the other chances are, I'll tell you to 80 20 rocking a digital community. That's the future of marketing. Do you want to get ahead of the curve? Let me show you how to use real life, community building strategies to grow your brand, your authority, and your army of marketers.
(07:22): Head over to rock your tribe.com to send me a message. Let's get this party started member digital communities thrive on conversations because real life communities thrive on conversations. Conversations are the expression of people building relationships with each other. And that's the big priority here. Building relationships. That's the foundation that everything else sits on. So now you understand the concept behind creating great engagement questions in your community, and here's how you're going to do it. Especially if you're having a hard time getting started, set a timer for 20 minutes and get a pad of post-it notes and brainstorm engagement questions. Don't worry if they're any good, it's better to jot something down than to sit there and overthink it. Just write them down in your post-it notes. Stick them to a wall tomorrow, pull one off and try it. Maybe it needs some light editing, but just do it and see what happens.
(08:17): And let me know how it goes. Starting conversations by asking questions makes running communities so much easier. I see the stress evaporate when I show my clients how to do this, because there's this big assumption that we need to write and share tons of air quotes value in your communities. If you listen to the episode here, it's a community, not a classroom. Then you already know how I feel about writing lectures in your community, but there's something else I'm looking for when I evaluate your community. And that's question number six. Are you information dumping, as in, are you reposting information? Are you resharing articles? Because this is a huge mistake that I see brands and organizations making in communities or our business pages or across social media. I see that all the time. And the problem with info dumping is it's lazy. It's a major missed opportunity.
(09:12): It drives traffic away from your community and not towards one of your assets like your website or your blog or your podcast. I'll give you an example. I'm working with Amy Fazio, the most incredible nonprofit fundraising coach and consultant. Her Facebook group is called big hearted. Bad-ass nonprofit executive society now is the perfect time to get in her world if you're from the nonprofit sector, because a ton of funding is on the way and you need to know how to access it. Are you familiar with the American rescue plan of 2021 also known as the COVID-19 stimulus package or the American rescue plan? And so $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill with plenty of support for nonprofits, it would be tempting for Amy to simply post a link to an article and call it a day in her Facebook group. And then what would happen? No one would read it, or if somebody does want to read it, they're going to leave the community and end up on somebody else's website to read that article.
(10:13): And how does that benefit Amy, her business or her community? It doesn't. So what can Amy do? And what can you do instead of info dumping instead of just resharing an article, start a conversation by pulling out key topics from the article, see how the conversations go. And depending on what kind of responses you get from your community, you'll know how to write about it inside your community. So you keep the conversation going in a way that's interesting to your members taking this approach. Amy now has content ideas for days that can naturally lead to say a free workshop with an upsell to a consulting contract or an upsell to a paid workshop where she'll walk her community members through accessing the funding. She'll have a better shot at helping her members get this money and get these results than she would. If she had just dumped the article ran.
(11:08): This one is simple info dump. As in reposting articles, instead of using those articles as a jump off point for starting a company, are you doing that? That's what I want to know when I'm evaluating your community. And now it's time. We're recap, and we're going to get your total final score. So just reviewing questions four through six that we talked about here in this episode, number four, do you have a Bulletproof onboarding process? Yes. Number five. Are you initiating relevant conversations and number six, are you info dumping? Since we just went over these, let's get your score. If you welcome your new members through a post or a channel, depending on your platform, give yourself one gold star. If you send them an email, give yourself one gold star. If you initiate relevant conversations in your community every day or almost every day, give yourself one gold star.
(12:03): And if you are not info dumping, give yourself one gold star. So that's a possible four gold stars here. Now let's go back and recap the questions from part one of this evaluation and get your score again. Maybe you bumped it up from last week. Number one is your community, your brand world. Does it match you? Is it your house party or your Wonderland? Number two. Is it a pity party or is it a joy and number three, what's your promise. And do you really fulfill it? If your community is your brand world, give yourself one gold star. If you're a brand that fuels your brand world resonates with you and your tribe, give yourself one gold star. If you're a community is a joy for you, give yourself one gold star. And if your community is a joy for your members, give yourself one gold star.
(12:51): If your community makes and keeps its core promise, give yourself one gold star. So that's a possible nine gold stars. If you've got eight or nine gold stars, congratulations your community rocks. But did you get seven or less head over to rock your time? Dot com is shoot me a message so we can bump your scores up. We can work on this together and now, you know what we're going to talk about when we work together and this is why I love to work. One-to-one because your community, the way you execute it, it's all tied to your brand and your brand should be unique. There are no cookie cutter answers, and I want to help you find your super special approach. If you're looking for the schematics for setting up a Facebook group for a business, a guy you covered, there's a Facebook group, success masterclass available for purchase on my website, Brock your tribe.com.
(13:40): It comes with a Google doc handbook that walks you through everything. Plus my workbook to help you nail your ideal tribe member. The reason why I created that masterclass is because while I do help businesses with their digital community strategy, I have done so much work helping solo, preneurs, rock their Facebook groups. I did a whole lot of one-to-one work and found myself repeating a lot of the same information to everybody. And I thought it would make a lot more sense to put that information together in a place where everybody who wants help with their Facebook group in particular can access it. So by the time I get on a call with you and we do work one to one, you already know all of that stuff. And so that gives us plenty of time to take this deep dive down the rabbit hole so we can build your Wonderland. Thank you so much for being here. And of course, as always You rock
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