Community Building and Engagement - The What, Why and How

The Digital Slice Podcast is brought to you by The Friedman Group, LLC

To grow your business, you have to build a community of engaged supporters. People who will Like, Share and Comment on your content. People who will leave 5-Star Reviews. Facebook Groups could be the best place to do that right now.

Rob Balasabas is the Social Media & Community Manager at Thinkific, a platform where you can host and market your online courses. Rob manages Thinkific’s daily message curation on social media. Rob engages with Thinkific’s private Facebook online community which comprises more than 14,000 course creators online. In this Episode, Brad and Rob talks about developing and managing you online communities. Rob is also into livestream video creation, social media marketing, and video and content strategy. He mostly speaks about these same topics on webinars, podcasts, and live streams. When he is offline, he enjoys a good taco and lots of coffee.

In this Episode:

• How to get started with building a community
• How to make people in your community stay engaged
• How content is a driver for engagement in your community
• How the community can be an extension of your email list
• How the value of your content should make it interesting for your audience
• The value of live video versus a static post in a community
• How long it will take before your community takes off
• How you have to be clear about your goal in building the community for the benefit of your audience and not for self-promotion
• How engaging in other groups help attract members to your community organically
• How to promote your group in other places, channels, platforms online
• How questions, timely replies, and conversations is key to engagement
• What questions to ask for those wanting to join your group

Quotes from this Episode:
“The nice thing is that everyone helps each other. There’s no egos or anything like that. So it’s a great community.” - Rob Balasabas
“It just grows organically at this point. People are discovering us – it’s on our website, it’s on our on-boarding email.” - Rob Balasabas
“Online community, I’m thinking Facebook. Facebook is the king – Facebook groups.” - Rob Balasabas
“It’s really important to understand what they are looking to get out of your community so that you can then create content and engage with them in a way that brings value for them to be part of that community.” - Rob Balasabas
“We give space for people to share their wins so that we can celebrate that as a community.” - Rob Balasabas
“The more niche you are, then the more successful you are when it comes to groups.” - Rob Balasabas
“I think live videos are really good for community because it just gives access to the people behind the scenes.” - Rob Balasabas
“Getting the conversations started, that’s the really biggest key.” - Rob Balasabas

Resources:

Rob's web and social links
Website: https://socialclub.thinkific.com
Instagram: @RobBalasabas
LinkedIn: @RobBalasabas
Twitter: @Rob_Balasabas
YouTube: Social Media Club

Thinkific's web and social links
Website: https://thinkific.com
Instagram: @Thinkific
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thinkific”
YouTube: Thinkific
Twitter: @thinkific

Linktree: Linktree
Quora: Quora

Brad Friedman

Twitter:

@BradFriedman

@FriedmanGrp

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thefriedmangroup

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bfriedman/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-friedman-group-llc

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/friedmansocialmedia

Website: https://friedmansocialmedia.com

Books
“Brad Friedman on Digital Marketing,” by Brad Friedman
“The Small Business Owner's Guide To Inbound Marketing,” by Brad Friedman

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