In this lesson, we're quickly going to talk about how to grow your community, just to give you the
ideas of where you're going to find your community members if you're starting.
So first is existing customers.
This is the easy one.
If you already have a business or a brand, if you have an online presence, if you have a social media
account like a YouTube channel or an Instagram channel or TikTok or whatever it is nowadays, if you
have an existing brand, of course you're going to want to invite all of your existing customers to
your community.
So this is great.
If you have been collecting community or customers information, for example, if you do have a brick
and mortar business, hopefully you have people's email addresses.
If it depends on what you sell, I'm imagining my local bike shop.
They do take people's email addresses down, so they've built their email list whenever someone buys
products from them.
Now, if you're buying something from your local bakery, you might not have given them your email address,
but maybe you follow them on social media, and that's where they would reach out to you to invite you
to your their community.
Or if you're the bakery owner and you have an Instagram account, of course you're going to want to
invite your existing customers to your brand new community, then of course, your new customers.
But this is something that a lot of people forget to do who have a community they're not aware or not
thinking about having it built into their process of sales to invite customers to their community.
So again, whether it's brick and mortar and you are selling cupcakes or you are online and you are
selling beauty products, whenever you make the sale, you should follow up with an invite to your community.
Again, using the in-person bike shop example if you're selling a bike to someone.
And they lived near you and the surrounding area.
If you sell them a bike, you should definitely be letting them know that you have this awesome online
community that they can join, where they can learn about group rides and things that are happening,
or discounts and sales or promotions going on in the store.
If you sell beauty products online, if you ever sell anything, you should have an automated system
where in the receipt email or in a follow up email, people should be being invited to your community.
Like I mentioned, this is also a way to separate yourself from your competition by mentioning that
when people become customers, they are invited to a community.
You might not want to have your community be exclusive to only paying customers, but that is one way
to make your your group feel a little bit more exclusive and automatically make it more engaging, which
we'll talk about in a future lesson.
And then lastly, if you have already invited your existing customers and you are already going to invite
all of your new customers, social media and search are the other places to get people.
So if you have a Facebook group, if it's a public group, people can just find it on Facebook.
And this is something I definitely recommend doing for people starting from scratch.
If you want to grow a group and you're not concerned about it, only being paying customers of yours
put out a Facebook group, make it public.
You can still make it so that people have to request to join and people aren't automatically able to
join your group.
But there are so many people on Facebook searching for all sorts of topics, and I've done this in the
past myself, and I imagine you have to just looking for communities out there for whatever your passions
are.
So this is a great way to make it, to grow your your group fast and easy.
Put it out as a free Facebook group.
This is why Facebook is a good place to put your community versus something like Mighty Networks or
a Slack channel, because those are platforms where you're not going to get really any organic traffic
from social media, from people just finding it on accident or through search or potentially getting
picked up through a Google search or things like that.
It will take a lot longer to be able to get picked up through Google search or other search engines
and things like that.
So that is one benefit to using a platform where people are already on that platform such as Reddit
or Facebook, because it's going to be easier to grow your community a little bit faster.
So if you're thinking, how can I grow my community?
These are the three buckets that you can pull people in from.