This One Strategy Helped Me Build Thriving Online Communities

Episode 59: This One Strategy Helped Me Build Thriving Online Communities

In this episode, Holly Hibbard - Social Media Consultant & emotional intelligence nerd - shares with you...

• how to tell if audience engagement with your content is happening right under your nose even when you don’t notice it
• how she built not one but two huge online communities organically to thousands of raving members without running ads or being salesy
• the simple content-creation plan she created and implemented that attracted future clients in these communities

Mentioned in this episode:
Holly as a guest on "Tori Dealing With": Making Friends At Any Age
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WORK WITH HOLLY IN OCTOBER, 2024 //

• Ready to launch your social media brand quickly and finish your 2024 with elevated impact? Hire Holly as your social media strategist and coach! Book a quick call with me here: https://tidycal.com/thehollyhibbard/quick

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Transcript

Hey friends, welcome back to the Holly Hibbard Show. Today, I'm going to be sharing with you this one strategy that helped me to build thriving online communities, communities as in plural as in, I've done this more than once, and if you are just getting into the groove here with the holly Hibbard show, I'm here to support you in building your online presence, creating that digital presence that's going to help you, one, feel like, okay, I can do this thing. And two, once you grow this online audience, this community, it's going to transfer into attracting great clients, people that you want to work with in your business, as a consultant, as a service provider. And it helps make I feel like our work that much more fun and rewarding, because we're getting that engagement in return. We're having answers when we are putting this content out there and not feeling like we're speaking into the void. And of course, like I said, I want this all to feel very doable and authentic and practical and realistic for you. So let's talk about building your online community. Okay, by the way, this is only my, I think, third episode that I'm doing this on video, so sometimes I feel like a little little bit glitchy, and I just need to practice getting used to this. So if you are not listening to this on YouTube and catching the video with this. Know that that is an option and also in advance, thanks for just playing along with me as I figure out my best way of being comfortable recording this and putting it out here and in both formats, the audio and the video. Okay, if you are someone who struggles with building your engagement online, it may be yes, because you're not engaging with your audience enough just yet, or in a way that they want to be engaged with or talked to, but maybe your online community is not quite there yet, or you're trying a lot of different things to get them to engage with you, and it's just not panning out. So this is especially for you, if you want that following, but more than just a following and a numbers count and a head count on social media, people who actually want to get to know you. They like you, they trust you, and then, yeah, they want to hire you. They want to work with you. So I started my online journey, like I've said in previous episodes, way back in 2014 2015 where I had a real insecurity about showing up on camera, but more so about showing up on camera, it had more to do with I didn't feel like I had anything important to say. I didn't really feel like I was rooted in what my message was going to be, and as a result of that, I just didn't put myself out there on social media. When it came to my business, my coaching, right at the time, relationship, coaching and leadership practices, I didn't do that. I was a little bit scared, so once I took the leap and started putting content out there, I didn't really notice my follower count uptick, and that felt a little bit discouraging, because here I would be getting these moments of courage. I would be going and recording Facebook live streams and putting myself out there in my mind and having some people have conversation back with me, but this wasn't immediate. And shout out to my mom, because my mom attended every single one of my live streams from the minute I started until the minute she was no longer on the start. Like at least I always had my one raving fan, right? Who would talk to me? But what if you don't want your mom to hire you, you don't want your mom as your client, then what do you do? Well, while I felt like I was putting myself out there and speaking into the void, yeah, the numbers were not showing the uptick. But here's something really interesting that happened that gave me this aha moment of, oh, I need to keep going. Okay. So at the time, I was teaching and leading workshops for a transformational Training Center in South Florida, a four month program, pretty intense. I didn't facilitate the whole four months, but I had chunks of. Here and there. And people knew me sometime because they were students in those workshops. And when people would finish a workshop, we would have a graduation for the people who had just completed the four days or the five days or the three months program. And one time, I was at one of these graduations, and in the middle of I don't know, hundreds of people in the room, someone came up to me who I'd never met before, and she said to me, oh my gosh, I love your videos. I watch them all the time, meaning my live streams on Facebook at the time, because that was the only place that I was recording videos and having video content, so it was my first moment of, wow, someone's watching this. But here's the kicker, nobody was engaging with it online. Sure, I had a views count. I saw how many people had watched it, but I didn't have people commenting in the comments, I would do all the things that people like me, a social media consultant now, would tell you, ask the audience questions all the way down to you know, where are you to? What state are you tuning in from? Or press one, like press one. Type one, if you're watching live with me, type two if you're on the replay, and I would see that maybe four or five people were watching when I was going live, but no one would comment. And I didn't know what it was gonna take, but this person said that she enjoyed the videos. I had never seen her, I had never met her, and she had never commented. She'd never engaged with my content, but she was watching, and I share that with you because I want you to know that one of the strategies in building a thriving online community is to chuck that thought out of your mind that tells you that a comment is The only evidence that you have that somebody is really watching and listening your content. And that is not true. Even the number of views that you see, you might look at that and say, oh my gosh, only 30 people watched my video, or whatever that number is for you. Okay, some people, it's hundreds of people, and it's still not enough for them. I get it, I get it, I get it, I get it. But somebody is always watching, and once you have somebody who even watches a fraction of your content, they're more than likely, if they enjoy that fraction of your content, they're more than likely going to come back. They might follow you as a result. They might bookmark your content, if it's short form or on a different platform, and you'll never really know every single time unless you're being hyper aware of it. But who has time for that? I mean, I'm here all about leveraging your time and making sure you can have a digital presence in a way that fits your life, and we don't want to obsess over little things. So anyhow, that's the first story I want to share with you. Know that if you are showing up consistently, people are watching, even if they are not commenting, do not panic. This could go on for a very long time, where you will have a feeling perhaps, that people are not engaging with your content. But really they are very much there. They are very much paying attention. And it led to, in that moment I just described for you, a total stranger coming up to me and saying, I've seen your stuff. I love your stuff. And I went, oh my goodness, I'm on to something. Now what I was consistently doing in every single live stream. This is another key to building thriving online communities, is I was showing up consistently despite not seeing the kind of result immediately, like that immediate gratification of, oh, look, all these people are here live, and they're all commenting, but I showed up consistently, and when I did, I started every video with something that I think was more for me than for them, and I would say to my audience something like the purpose of this live stream is to give you something to think about. You might agree, you might disagree, but I want to live in a world where people can form an opinion and have a new perspective introduced to them, and they can try that on and see if they like it, apply it to their life or not. But this is purely something to consider and think about a new concept, a new way of looking at the world. So you don't have to say anything like that verbatim. But for me, I had to remind myself of that, and I did so out loud for my audience, that I was there to teach them something, but I was unattached. It was detached from how they were going to then use that information. I was there to provide value, to give a. Active, and then whether they utilize it or not was totally up to them. So I was consistent. I was there providing value. I was showing up, even when the comments and the engagement were not totally there yet. And then the last big way I'm going to go a little bit heavier on this topic, that I built thriving online communities was using Facebook groups. So remember, back in the beginning of this episode, I said that some of my online communities were very much by accident, and some of them were very much intentional. Well, Facebook groups are the ways that I did this back in oh gosh, I won't even try and name years at this point, because it's all a blur. But this is a little bit prior in the timeline to the time I was just describing to you where this I was facilitating workshops. This is, this is way before then, like I was still a student in said workshops, intern mode, if you will. And I remember my coaches at the time, giving me a challenge to grow something that would help me know that my message meant something. And I thought, Okay, well, Facebook groups are kind of fun. I had been members of Facebook groups that I enjoyed. I had met people through them. I loved the dialog. Back before Reddit was a thing, and we just called them discussion boards in general. Like I loved discussion boards, and I think that just morphed into my enjoyment of Facebook groups. And so I decided to set myself a goal. I told my coach, and I told my peers at the time, I want to create a Facebook group, and I want to have 100 women in this Facebook group, and 100 women. I think I probably made it, like, 30 days or something like that, and I figured, cool. I'll just go through my friends list on Facebook. I can invite people that I know I'll do so per person personally, where I'm not just going to shove everyone in there or get this random invite kind of like I do today, where people just invite me to random groups, and I'm like, Who are you and what is this for? And I never expressed interest in this. So I made a commitment. I wanted to have a Facebook group of 100 people in 30 days, and I knew that it was going to look like organic invites of people that I knew that I wanted in this group. I also knew that I would probably challenge myself where I was crossing paths with people that I had just met, and ask them to join and my intention behind this Facebook group was to give, in this case, women, a safe place for them to open up and have conversations with each other about relationship related things, whether it be family or dating or friendships or just things topics that I want to be able to talk about, the stuff that felt a little bit touchy, because just because you have, you know, other women friends, doesn't necessarily mean that they're all on board with talking about some of the real stuff, you know, like the nitty gritty stuff. And I wanted my Facebook group to be that kind of place, that kind of vibe, that kind of energy, like, yeah, you can come here and you can talk about, get some things off your chest and get some loving, respectful input from people who would also want that in return. So it was very it was very intentional about the types of interaction that I wanted, the types of interactions I didn't want. I knew what that was. That doesn't mean I included it all in the description of the Facebook group, but like that was the feeling that I wanted. So I ended up not only reaching my goal of 100 women in the Facebook group in that first month, through organic messages like DMS to friends and say, Hey, I'm making this group, and I love you, and I think it'd be awesome if you're in here. But that group grew beyond that, I think, by like 200 or 300 people, and then it hit 500 people. I thought, wow, this is, this is pretty bananas. And the reason it was growing was because from day one, I was in that group, either doing another live stream in that group. And I think I was only doing a live stream in that Facebook group, maybe once a week, but I definitely, on a two to three day a week basis, was using the schedule feature to put a question of the day up in the group, and it was relationship related questions or friendship related questions, because I wanted everyone to share their experiences. Now, for a while, I would put these questions up, and it was crickets. I mean, not everyone wanted to be the first to comment and respond, all right, which goes back to my story about people are always watching who don't even know so they didn't respond immediately. But I kept putting the questions up there, and I always made it a point in the comments to go first. Whenever I saw it right, or be a person that at least would reply, even if I was the only person, because I was trying to, as a leader of that group, create this community that was open in the way that I wanted the community to be about this little this little group on the interwebs, and in time between my facebook live streams in that group and the couple of scheduled posts a week, and showing up and answering the questions myself. Engagement started because I was going first, and I think it was showing them that I was there, I was present, I was listening, I was commenting back, and this was not hours and hours and hours and hours of my time, okay, like, I can Doom scroll with the rest of them and be on social media an hour a day, no problem. It was just a matter of when I would open Facebook. In this case, I was going to my notifications and if I saw something had been posted in the group, like, that's where I was going first, right? So I really made this something that was time effective for me as well, because I didn't have time. I was so busy with the the training job that I was doing, and the workshops and the internship and like whatever, so minimum effort to grow a full, thriving, engaged Facebook community. Well, what ended up happening is that group, over the course of a couple of years, grew to be over 6000
women. 6000 women. I never ran ads to it. I never, I didn't do any of that junk like the only and that's fine. Ads are great, and I'm gonna run ads at some point next year, but whatever. But I'm sharing this because this thriving community purely came because of word of mouth. So I was giving them their own Facebook Live Stream just a couple of minutes, maybe once a week. I was posting automated questions, get to know you, or question of the day, kind of questions two to three days a week when I couldn't think of anything to ask in those questions, by the way, they they're, you know, like you can get them at the bookstore or Amazon or whatever. They have these little question decks. Okay, actually have one in my desk right now. I can see if I can here, I'll actually pull one out. If you're watching on video, you'll be able to see this. But this deck that I'm holding is called the tonight. It's called tonight's conversation, and tonight's conversation. There's different editions, and this one I'm holding up is the perfect date night questions edition. It's really fun not saying that you would necessarily use this in a Facebook group, and you might, but when you pull a card out of this box, what ends up happening is you can use that as your question of the day, and that was prior to AI. Now, if we tell with access to chat, GPT, and I think it's proximity and tons of other AI programs, you can have aI generate questions for you. So it doesn't even have it doesn't have to be that hard, it doesn't have to be that hard, like you don't have to go above and beyond. A lot of this stuff can be so time efficient and get a big return on your investment. Time wise, energy wise, community wise, engagement wise, okay, so I grew this group to 6000 members, so part of that, like I said, was the live streams the Q and A's Question of the day. I was answering the questions and replying to comments when they were there. I was also when every I don't know, maybe, like, once a week, I would put a post up that would invite the women in the group already to invite their friends, and I might have incentives for that. So I think I would do challenges here and there. So maybe one incentive was, if you invite five of your friends and they join, or three of their friends or one friend, keep it super simple, I'll enter your name in a raffle for a $10 Starbucks gift card if you want to go that route, or, you know, a 30 minute consultation or coaching call with me as a thank you. And it's not something I did all the time, because I didn't want to be in the habit of investing dollar dollars, and also, I didn't want to be in the habit of giving away my time for free with these coaching calls, but what was important was I wanted to consistently ask the group to grow the group so I was giving them value. I was giving them an opportunity to talk with each other. I was giving them an opportunity to get to know themselves. I was teaching them tools through those live streams, because that was a little like mini lesson every single week. And the last thing that really grew that group pretty wildly, in addition to the little the little contest I'd have here and there about inviting a friend I would have maybe once or twice a year, I would hold some. Sort of challenge in the group, and the challenges that I hosted were what grew the group the fastest. So I'll give you an idea. So at this point, I think it started because of COVID, and we were home so much. I was home so much, and I because I was working from home, and that was not what I always did, but I really, because I didn't leave the house or go anywhere, I really didn't want to get dressed up. I didn't want I just lived in, you know, workout gear, and I remember just feeling really gross like this. This wasn't great. And I remember posting in my group about it, like Question of the day, right? Like one of the questions of the day. Anybody else here feel like, ever since we've been in this lockdown situation, we're just not feeling like our sparkly selves, like we used to do. You miss leaving the house as much, because you got to have that feeling. And I had a lot of people say yes. So when it comes to the challenges, if you decide to ever go this route, notice what question in your question of the day, content people are responding to, which are they engaging with? Which do they seem the most interested in? Really, just engagement, right? And people were like, yes, yes, yes. That's me. That's me. So I decided, You know what I'm going to challenge myself to for the next seven days? I think it was five days I didn't even make it the weekend. I'm like, let's just do Monday through Friday for the next five days. Monday through Friday. I am committed to feeling better. So I'm committed to, you know, after my workout or what I'm going to work out, I'm going to shower and I'm going to put on a real outfit, and I'm going to doll myself up in some way, whether that be do my hair and or my makeup, or put on some jewelry, I'm going to make myself feel good. And I challenged myself to do that for five days in a row. And during this challenge, I was putting a live stream in this Facebook group for five days in a row, and part of the challenge was I invited the women in the group to do it with me. So there was a day one post where I would put a post like a selfie of here's what I look like today, and here's how I feel, what about you. And then I would challenge them to post in the group their picture of the day, how they were feeling and like hashtag day one, and the people who finished all five days I tracked in on a Google sheet or something. But again, it took a little work, but I did it with prizes, and I did it at some point just for funsies and no prizes at all, but the amount of camaraderie, and because I built into it, like, let's hype up one another when we post these pictures, because that's difficult to do. And these are also selfies that we might not be posting on our regular profile because we don't want to be vain or weird, or maybe we don't post there. But again, it was a safe place for my audience in this particular group to do this. And by the end of the five days, the people who had completed all five days I was I had an online course I had released, or was about to, and I gave away a scholarship to my online course to one person. So a lot of people were like, gun in for this, for this course, they wanted to take it. They knew it was an investment. But again, my group had talked about relationship. I mean, I had the group for a couple of years, okay, but I had talked about relationships and communication and all these tips and friendship and data, and my course was related to that. So by the time they completed the challenge, and they'd seen all my content for a while, and were getting to know me, they're like, I want to take this course with Holly. And if they didn't get the course for the scholarship, for the prize, they wanted to sign up for it still, or they wanted to sign up with me as a private client at the time. So this one little thing that started with a challenge to myself, of I'm going to create a Facebook group for women and have 100 women in there by the end of 30 days, turned into this beast like and it went on for a long time, a long time, and it generated a lot of new followers, audience growth, connections on social media, uh, work opportunities, one on one, clients, students in my courses, friends of friends of friends, referrals, right? Because somebody would take my course, and then they would say, Wow, this Holly lady. I really love her. And then they would invite their friend to my group, because my group was a free place for them to come and learn about me and what I offer. And then I just had to keep doing my thing, right? So that was one of the online thriving communities. The other one, I have a whole episode, actually. You know what? I don't have a whole episode
or. Retract that I have a episode that I did about this other Facebook group, on another podcast that I was a guest on. I will link that podcasters episode in my show notes with this episode today so you can go and listen to me talk about the friendship group that I created locally, but in a nutshell, okay, in a nutshell, I had moved to Michigan, and this is my last story of the day. Okay, I know this one's a little bit long today, so building a thriving online community. I just told you how the one translated to business, and it was totally by accident, right? Not my intention from the get go, but definitely a big generator of business for me and for my online brand. Well, when I moved from Florida back to Michigan in 2020 I was single, and I just had my animals, and I did not have any kids, and in the Midwest, where I was moving to like, everyone was in a relationship, and everybody had kids, and all the like, get to know you groups and make new friends. Groups were moms to moms, or they were couples to couples, and I was neither. So I didn't know what to do. So I went in a local like, buy, sell, trade Facebook group in the city that I live in, and in the middle of everybody commenting like, I need this service. I need that everyone have this I just popped in there and said, Hi, I'm 40 and single, and I don't have kids, but I'm I just moved here, and I'm looking for some new friends. Are any of you here looking for some new girlfriends? Because just I don't know, I don't I was. It was so short. It was so such a short post that it fit in, like, the color boxes, the colorful boxes on Facebook, okay? So, like, not that many characters, not very long winded. I had over 80 people reply to that Facebook post. I thought I would like go to lunch with two or three people, okay, like, over 80 people replied to this. And as a result of that, I ended up I didn't know what to do. I mean, the Michigan at the time was still under some kind of lockdown. This is still like COVID in 2020 right? And I shoved them all in a Facebook group because I didn't know what to do. And I'm like, when the world opens again, I'll have this Facebook group. So what ended up happening is, sorry, my printer is going off, and I'm very thrown off by it. Okay, so I created this Facebook group and did nothing with it, and then when it came time to generate something, I was in that group, and I said, Hey, remember me. I'm the one that put you all here, and let's have a get together. Well, I just started one of my friends who I met because of that post, we decided to have a gathering at her house with like, 25 of the women, and it was so great. And then friendship started being formed, and people were networking for their own business, but more so it was only for friendship, because that was what my original post was about. It's a place for women in that city to make new friends. I was, again, very intentional with the group. Once I did decide to go and do something with it, very intentional. Of this is not for selling your stuff. This is not for any like promoting a business. I was just purely friendship, but I knew those other things would come from it okay? Because when you have a friendship as a base that leads to referrals, that leads to business, and it wasn't sneaky, it wasn't sneaky. It wasn't anything I was trying to do, you know, like in the underbelly of this group,
it was purely a friendship group,
and now we're at, I mean, we just crossed the four year mark of that group existing, and there's over 2500 women in that group. I did not like the first group I told you about. I did not invite all of that like they they were once we had a certain number Facebook just started saying, Hey, here's a local group for you. But more importantly, the women in the group liked that. It was a safe place for them to say, Hey, who wants to go for a walk at this nature trail today? Or hey, who wants to have go to this comedy show together? I'm going to book us a table for 10 people who would like to come, and I gave permission to the others in the group to be a part of building this community. And, you know, spoiler alert, a couple years later, I moved out of that city. I don't even live there anymore, um, but it was good, because I think I talked about this a little bit in my first episode of this season now let me think about this, but anyway, I share the story again, because building a thriving online community can look a couple different ways. But what is important is that you put something together, that you know what your intention is. Okay with the community. Yes, we want to grow our. Audience, yes, we want to attract these dream clients and great people to work with. Yes, we want to do this in a way that leverages our time and gives us more time to do things that we really want to do in our life. We want all those things, but when you start the group, you want to make sure that you are very clear what your intention is for that community. And you want to make sure that in the description of the group, and when you're presenting your content in the group from the beginning, that you are hammering that home with everybody in a graceful, short lived kind of way. Alright, so those are the thing that helped me to build thriving online communities, the Facebook group thing was so big, but the video component that I talked about at the very beginning of today's episode, even comments that you get on your short form videos on your reels, on your tiktoks, on your YouTube, videos on your Facebook like on Your Instagram. Carousels, every single comment don't just like it, comment back and ask them a question in return, offer to engage with them. The more that they will comment back with you, because you want to learn about them. Well, A, the more you're going to learn about your person that you want to work with, or what they actually want from you. So you can learn that and B more engagement means the algorithms on most platforms will continue to show your content to more people, so that will also help you to build that online community. Listen, I know this was a long one. I kind of do the long ones on Tuesdays and the shorter ones on Thursdays, but I want you to know that you absolutely have what it takes to build a thriving, engaged online community for very little time, if you have a plan and you implement it, and very little to no dollars as well, without advertising and that sense of community. People buy that, people buy that. You might think, today, okay, well, maybe I'm listening to this. I'm a service provider, but I'm not a coach, or I'm not a consultant, or the service I provide is I'm a massage therapist. What does this do for me? You would be really surprised. You'd be very surprised when you are giving value to people, and also you are taking your time on the regular to show people that they are seen and they are heard, and that you want to understand their come from. Oh my goodness, that's it. That's it. You're you're in, and that goes so so so far, and it's way more fun. It's way more fun than feeling like you're speaking into the void with no return. Okay, so thank you so much for tuning in. I love you. I mean it for real, and I will talk to you next time.