AskPat 319 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 319 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Awesome, now let's go to today's question from Josh.

Josh: Hey, Pat. Josh Kerns here, and I'm building an online fitness website called The Power of Pedometers at BestPedometerReview.com. I'm trying to build my social presence and I noticed a new trend with Facebook. I saw you, Chris Ducker, Hal Elrod, all have gone over to a community page in a closed group. I was wondering if this is a new trend. Do you think this is the best way to start, or would you recommend a traditional page? I appreciate everything, and I'm looking forward to your thoughts. Cheers, and have a fantastic day.

Pat Flynn: Josh, thank you so much for the question today. This is a great question and a popular one I've been hearing a lot about. Because you're right! A lot of people are creating these community pages or what they call group pages on Facebook. That's the technical term. Group page. There's a specific thing that group pages could do versus a traditional business page, which can have a lot of other things to do. There are pros and cons to each.

Just to give a quick background story, I started my Facebook page I think around 2009 or maybe late 2008. A lot of things have changed with Facebook pages over time. But Facebook business pages are essentially a place for you to talk about your brand, to talk about what it is that you're doing. This is where you normally would put status updates and people would comment on those things, and you would get into people’s news feeds. Over time, the ability to get into people’s news feeds has become much harder because of Facebook going public and then wanting to have you pay. It's interesting because people have to like your page first. Even if they like your page, they then have to interact with it to kind of tell Facebook, “Yes, I want stuff from this page,” even though people have clicked like. Because some people won't engage, at which point they wouldn't even get those status updates unless you were to pay and boost those posts.

The nice thing about a Facebook page is it allows you to collect people who have liked your business or your brand, who you can then target through Facebook ads. This is one of the main reasons why you would might want to start Facebook pages like this, because you collect people who have said they liked you, and then you can get really highly targeted with the people who have liked your page. You can target them specifically in your Facebook ads for products and things like that. You can also have friends of people who have liked those pages, or pages similar to yours that you can target as well. If you're going to do Facebook ads, you absolutely should be creating a Facebook page like that, a business page down the road. If you have a brick and mortar business, for example, this is a page that would have the telephone number, the reviews and things like that. If you have an online business, this would be a place where you can tell more about your business.

Really it's where you are the focus. You are the focus on that particular page. There is conversation there on your page, but it's more between you and your audience where you get to kind of facilitate those discussions based on your posts and status updates. If people post something up there, it's going to be hidden because those conversations are not the most prominent thing on those particular pages.

Now groups, that's a whole different situation. Groups are where you actually feature the community. The community feels like they have more of a say, they can post their own things. People will respond because people are going to see those things more so in their feed, because they said that's a group that they want to get stuff from. It's much different than a page in that way. I started the group just a few months ago, actually. It's grown to over 7,000 or 8,000 people now. But I have noticed there's a lot more conversation. A lot of people have commented to say that they love hanging out in that group, and people can talk among each other much easier than on Facebook page. Again this is where the community lives now. If you want to check that out, you can go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/community, and you can check it out there. It's awesome. You can see how it feels much different.

It's not about me, it's just about me facilitating these discussions. I do post every day, once a day, to get conversations started. A lot of people comment on those, but when anyone really posts a good question or a comment or a win for example, the rest of the community will be in there and really active. I've noticed that on the page, somebody will post onto the board and nobody sees it. Nobody sees it because those don't go on people’s news feeds. But people who have access to the group can see conversations that other people have started too. I've noticed the same thing on Hal's Miracle Morning group. I've noticed the same thing, and Chris has even told me over at his Virtual Freedom Alliance, which is a group that he started for his people. You know, it just provides more value to the actual person, the group does. I think a page which can be important, it provides more value to you as the owner really in the long run I feel.

Really, it's up to you which one you feel would be best. I mean, it also depends on your goals and why you're creating it in the first place. The Facebook page is probably going to help you more so for exposure, because a lot of the conversations that happen in those groups only happen in that group. Depending on the settings, which if you want the group to thrive, you want the settings to be somewhat private so people can feel comfortable in there and not worry that when they talk that other people who aren't in the group are going to see it. Yes, that could help for expansion of people in the group, but you might get the wrong people in there. Because people who follow others aren't necessarily the same people who you would want in that group.

The page, that's going to go a little bit more through social sharing and stuff because you might post a picture for example, people would share it because they want to share it with other people. There's a lot of pros and cons to each. Again, there are similarities, but there are a lot of differences like I talked about too.

Kind of imagine your avatar and where they might find the most value. I feel like if I had to start over, I would probably go with the group right now, which is the one I've been more active in because I've seen more activity in there. Besides my posts on the Facebook page, it is pretty much a ghost town in terms of the community, except for when I post things and I definitely have to keep that on the regular to keep engagement on there. But obviously I've built that page to over 100,000 people now, so when I do ads, it'll be really easy to target at a large chunk of people. You know, I have sort of both things in mind. Really the group page was a reaction to Facebook saying that it was going to be even harder to reach people on the page, and I've noticed that. I've noticed it's been a lot harder because I have 100,000 people who like that page. This is my business page. Some posts only get 7,000-8,000 people viewing it. Other ones that are more viral images, 20,000 at most. Maybe there's one or two posts that get up to 60,000 because they just get shared like mad. But it's hard, it's hard.

But with a group, everybody's participating and it's great. The only thing you have to worry about with the group is the control of the span. You would very much benefit from having admins in there. I have assigned a number of admins in my group to make sure that if there's anybody spamming, I give them permission to just easily take those down. They also help approve members too, because I don't just have people in public join. But you know, by them clicking join and having to wait for us to approve, there's a little bit more sense of membership in there. Again, it really does feel like a community more so than the page. Again, it's up to your goal.

But Josh, hopefully that answers your question or at least gives you some things to think about. Anybody out there who has anything to say about this, use the hashtag #AskPat319 on Twitter and we can talk more about this on Twitter. #AskPat319. Again, thank you to Josh for having your question featured here on the show. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way for that. For those of you who have a question, you can go over to AskPat.com and potentially get featured just like Josh did today. Thank you so much.

Thanks again so much for all the love. I appreciate it, and we'll see you next week in the next episode of Ask Pat after this quote from Leo Babauta. He says, “Each of us has some kind of powerful story. Tell it.” Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks guys.