AP 0518: Will a Facebook Page Limit My Personal Connection with Fans?

AskPat 518 Episode Transcript

[Editor's note: We no longer use Facebook for our online communities. We use Circle.so to host our membership platform, SPI Pro, as well as our Academy community for online course students.]

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 518 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

All right, here's today's question from Ron.

Ron: Hi, Pat. Hope you're doing well. My name's Ron McKeefery. I'm a strength conditioning coach that's worked in the NFL and major college programs. I have a website, ronmckeefery.com, a podcast that's ranked pretty well, and a book that just recently became a number one international bestseller as a paperback.

I have tons of questions for you, I appreciate so much of what you do and answering these questions for everybody and I've learned so much. My question is, with the success of the podcast and the book, my Facebook personal page has grown exponentially. It's at 4,900+ and the question I have is regarding a Facebook page. I have a Facebook page but I've typically used my Facebook almost as a default address book and concerned by going to a Facebook page if I'm not going to be able to have the same type of interaction through messaging and things along that line.

Just wanted to get your thoughts on a Facebook fan page. Whether or not you think that will continue to allow me the opportunity to have a good relationship with my audience and stay connected that way on a personal level. Thanks again for all that you do, looking forward to your answer.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Ron thanks so much for the question. First of all, just congratulations on your success. I checked out your book on Amazon “CEO Strength Coach,” looks like it's very well done, 98% five star rating which is awesome. Keep up the great work and your Facebook page is blowing up.

I just, man, this is so exciting. I think it's cool that you're asking about a Facebook fan page because you're looking for ways to better engage with your audience. Here's the answer, if you have a page already and it's a personal page I would keep that and have that be your hub, have that be like you said your online business card that you drive people to where you then are able to share information. You're going to get more interaction on your personal Facebook page than you would on a fan page. The only benefit of producing a fan page which I believe is still possible with your personal page is the advertising. If you ever get into Facebook advertising there's some things you can do with Facebook pages that I believe you might not be able to do with a Facebook personal page.

But again, you're setting yourself up very nicely. Obviously, you've done very well and just continue to do what is working for you. Now, with that said, if you want to increase the interaction that you have with your audience, I think something you can do really really well is create a Facebook group. Now, a Facebook group allows your community to really start to get involved in talking with each other, in addition to talking to you too.

I have a Facebook community which you can find at Smartpassiveincome.com/community again, that's Smartpassiveincome.com/community. [This link is no longer valid.] If you join there you'll see there's almost 20,000 people in there all helping each other out. Like, literally people who are in the SPI audience are there every single day, adding information, helping people out. But, also getting a lot of information, having a lot of their questions answered too. And not just by me, I'm actually very, I'm not outside, I'm inside and involved. I'm looking in but I'm not actually answering and engaging quite a bit because they're all engaging with each other. I do go in there and interact from time to time, which you can do. But, it's cool because your audience starts to do it on their own. What this does is that it allows you to build raving fans. Because, the third stage, actually the second stage in the evolution of building raving fans involves getting people to feel connected to each other.

This is where you get, for instance, fans of certain musicians who can then identify themselves as fans of that person. For instance, Taylor Swift, their fans are called Swifties and fans of Star Trek they're called Trekkies. You're going to have your own fans do that and that happens when your fans start to interact with each other. It's like a convention, but online. And, a group will enable you to do that better than a Facebook page.

A Facebook page is more you kind of shouting information out at people and people can interact with you but it's very difficult for people to interact with each other. They can interact with each other but a group, people are more likely to see those posts and feel more involved and feel more like an insider, which is what I think you want. And, will obviously help with sales and marketing and getting affiliates and all this stuff that happens later.
So, that's what I would do.

The things that I would recommend you do when this forum, this Facebook community which is obviously very easy to set up, you just go and set up. Go to Groups and create New Group and you can go from there. The nice thing about setting it up on Facebook as opposed to your own forum is everybody's on Facebook they can get those notifications and feel very involved, it's easier to share and that sort of thing.

So, some things to keep in mind as you begin to create and then grow your group here is that you want to set some rules. You want to set some rules because people tend to abuse their ability to communicate with one another on these particular platforms. For example, a lot of people like to spam if they have their own things going on. You need to set rules in terms of when it's okay and when it's not okay to mention something or send a link out to something that they're using. Or, is it okay to put affiliate links in there and all that sort of stuff. I have it where every Friday I have a post that goes out. I use a tool called Edgar, a social media tool to create these posts automatically which everyday I go in and have sort of a different theme where people can then communicate about that particular theme. On Friday, it's kind of a free for all. So, people can promote and I give them permission to do that on Friday and that way people know that they aren't supposed to do that on the other days.

But, they do get a chance and that is on Fridays under this post and there's hundreds of comments where people are like, “This is my thing that I'm working on and click here to get it.” And again, I allow that there but nowhere else. You'll also want to set some rules in terms of keeping it friendly or whatever your style is. It's your group, you can do whatever you want with it, that's one thing.

The next thing is sort of related because you want the the spam – there will be spam. You can want that to be reported quite quickly and you want people to take care of that. If you're in there all the time you're going to be not doing other things that you have to do. So, what I would recommend is I would create admins once you found that there are certain people in the group who are outspoken, who are great, and they're serving the rest of the community. Promote them as an admin. You can easily do that find them in the members area and turn them into an admin and give them the right to delete comments and approve people when they want to join and all of that stuff.

It makes them feel very special, it makes them feel more connected to you. It gives them a little bit of role and responsibilities. No, you don't have to pay them, but you do want to make sure you thank them for that work. What I did for my groups, the different groups that I own. I sent some gifts during Christmas to those people for the work that they do. And again, they do them on their extra time and I wanted to just let them know that I appreciate it.

Just keep those things in mind moving forward Ron, as you build this group. I think you're going to see that it's going to be a great place for you to facilitate conversations, to talk about different things related to your content. And also, tap into the minds of your customers and your community for what you can do next. What's your next book? What's your next product? What is it that they're struggling with that you can then provide a service for or solution for. Man, it becomes a great place for you to get ideas from for what else to do. So, it's definitely an important aspect of the lifeline of your businesses is creating these communities and like I said a Facebook group is a great place to do that.

So, those are my thoughts, Ron. Again, I would keep your personal page and continue to move forward with that. I know a lot of personalities like Chris Brogan, Amy Porterfield, Chalene Johnson they have pages, but they also know that their personal pages is where it's at for them specifically. Me, my personal page is for my friends and families, that's it. I have a page specifically for the business stuff which you can find at Facebook.com/smartpassiveincome. So that's that.

Ron, thank you so much for the question today, I really appreciate it. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. I look forward to more of your questions and hopefully I'll be able to get to them in the future too. And for those of you who have questions that you'd like potentially featured here on the show just head on over to AskPat.com you can ask right there eon that page and I want to thank you all for that.

Thank you so much, I appreciate it and I wish you all the best. Again, my book it's coming out February 1st, it's called Will It Fly? Head on over to willitflybook.com to check more out about that. And of course here's a quote to finish off the day by Farrah Gray. She said, “Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs.”

Take care guys I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat, thank you so much, bye.