Hey everyone,
Over the past 3 years, I’ve managed to build a community of marketers on Facebook Groups (non-English) and recently it passed the 6k members milestone. However, ever since I reached 5k members, the results, in terms of reach and engagement, started becoming terrible. Less than 5% organic reach, same old story…
Long story short, I’m trying to figure out the next steps for this project, as it doesn’t seem to have any future at all if I stick to Facebook Groups, while also monetizing my efforts.
So far, I’ve thought about these 3 possibilities:
* try moving the community on a third-party platform for communities – Circle – and charge a fee for membership or put a paywall for some sections of the community
**pros:** it’s basically a place for such things, offers a great way of organizing content, being a mix of Notion and Facebook.
**cons:** $50 monthly plan, which is a bit expensive, just for hosting the community here, and, most important, it involves registering on a new platform (extra effort for members), and each time you want to see updates you should open the platform in a new tab. On the other hand, most of them spend time on Facebook, so it’s easier to access a Group.
* stick to Facebook Groups but create a new, paid group. Payment through Patreon or something similar, members are accepted manually, only after paying for membership.
**pros:** it’s easier to move a part of the already existing Facebook Group to this paid group, as it involves just a few clicks. Lower effort for users, no new accounts that need to be created.
**cons:** it’s still on Facebook (a ‘location’ I don’t own) and a lot of paying members can miss content they paid to see due to the algorithm. On the other hand, they might as well check the group for new content daily, by going directly to the group, knowing they paid for membership. Also, even though Groups give you a few options in terms of organizing content, they’re way behind Circle from this point of view.
* Try LinkedIn groups, maybe? No idea about the pros and cons, it’s just an option I started exploring but still don’t fancy the idea of building something on a social media (at the core) platform.
* A 4th option would be trying to promote my newsletter heavily and announce that all the work put into the Group until now will be put into the newsletter, which will be sent weekly. (I’m sending it 2 times/per month currently). After growing my list – 600 subs so far, 35% average open rate – I can consider monetization through sponsorships, for example, and selling Resource packs (made in Notion), for starters.
And this would be pretty much it. Which one of these options would you go for and why?
Thanks in advance for any input on this and sorry for any grammar issues, if any. Sometimes, my English is not flawless. 🙂
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