Community building and expanding — Communities 101
Intro — Matkonia case study
2 year ago I got a call from a good friend who is a baby nutritest, she told me that she wants more customers, and that her profession is a niche.
During that time I was at the peak of learning the art of growth hacking, and thought to myself that mothers are one of the best audiences in the world, they are trigger happy when it comes to online shopping, and I felt like this is a very good opportunity for me to practice growth for myself rather than being a consultant. We have decided to create the Matkonia.
Just to make things clear — my take on a good growth hack is that it is a tailored, one time solution for a specific company, if its good, there is no way to copy it and stay original, this is the kingdom for the ones that are not sure where the box is, let alone how to think inside it. a good growth hack should be tailored to the business or the problem it is suppose to resolve.
And so, the first thing we needed to do is to set our goals.
The main goal was to establish my partner’s status as the main authority for baby nutrition in the Israeli market.
Other goals were to create a website that will drive traffic from Israeli mothers for babies under 2 years old, and create a place for them to consult and discuss day to day issues regarding baby nutrition.
Choosing your platform
After many discussions, we have decided to create a FB group, and creating a website that will preserve the knowledge accumulated in the group discussions.
We decided that the first subject that comes to mind when talking about baby feeding is recipes, and I have designed and created an Israeli website for baby recipes to be uploaded by the mothers in the community.
This cross platform [Facebook and a website] allowed us to learn about the user’s behaviour by tracking analytics from the website, track our growth, and get insights from our users regarding their needs, likes and dislikes.
In addition, we have created a FB page, in order to be able to advertise in the future, and have FB buttons for likes and shares on our website.
Since the idea was getting to mothers, the choice was fairly easy when it comes to FB, but we also considered other social networks such as Twitter, Instagram or the one with the pictures
We chose FB due to the fact that we wanted to use my partner’s profile as a front, and she was very strong on FB comparing to other social media.
Bootstrap — how to get your community growth over the first 1,000 users?
I think one of the key factors in our group growth was its name. In hebrew, the name “Matkonia” is fairly catchy and implies small recipies.
Other then that, the growth mechanism was quite simple: we created 10 GOOD recipes on our new website, and made sure that the “add recipe” button was big enough, and well shown on the website in order for mothers to be able to upload their recipes.
Expanding your community
Value, value and more value.
The value was created mostly by users. It appears young mothers are full of questions about their newborn’s diet, most of the questions are repeating themselves in different variations, and we answered them all. At first, we had to have my partner answering the questions by herself, but soon enough we picked up the repeating questions, and created an FAQ section on the website. The traffic was flowing and we had mothers sharing our FAQ answers to new mothers who were asking questions.
Manage your community — tips and thumb rules
- Rules and regulations — do not waste your energy on getting mad with the audience when you find a post that is not relevant. if someone posts something that you think is not relevant for the community find the exact reason of why it is not suitable for your group, remove the post and add the reason to your rules and regulations.
- Manually allow registration — Once the group is big enough, you will have plenty of low quality facebook publishers that will try to join the group using a fake profile. when allowing a new member to the group check his [in our case, her] facebook profile and make sure that they are not to new, that they have friends, some images, and maybe a post or two. make sure that they are already a member of other groups. in large quantities it is a time consumer, but you will do your group a big favor and keep the value of the content in the group, and avoid spam posts.
- Block like there is no tomorrow — if you are going for a large community you will have to pick the users in it. From my experience, there is no point in reasoning with the audience and explain each and every person who posted irrelevant content why he/she should not post it in your group. in my experience, it leads to never ending talks and messaging, and not worth it. block. The other users will thank you.
In our venture I was the bad cop. Generally it is a good idea to have a good cop and a bad cop, in the few mistakes that I have made blocking innocent users, they found a way to reach my partner are were allowed back to the group in case they were removed by mistakes. - Any question is relevant — This one is very important, this is one of the main reasons for opening a group and creating a community, you want your users to ask questions and have to emphasize that every question is a good question. if someone answers in any way that might sound like they are mocking or criticizing a question, step in and maybe even remove the attacker from the group. make sure you create an atmosphere that will indulge a discussion, and that everyone with a question is allowed to ask it.
- Report to admin — users who likes your community will be happy to report spam posts, offensive post or stuff that they think should not be in your group. treat every reported post, thank the reporter and if it is inappropriate, remove the posts and possibly the users.
Personas
For many years I used to give lectures in front of large audiences, and while not being the face in this particular group the rules are the same. When you have a group of people in the same room you will always have the same personas: The smart ones, the stupid one, the ones that are asking questions that were asked 10,000 times before. you will have the people that have to show how bright they are, and the people who will cheer them [in FB, like]
Rock stars — in our days, people already have a social rank and it is called “clout” — this will provide you information about the personas that treats their social profile like a career, they are members of many groups, have a solid opinion on many fields, and have many followers. make sure that you treat them well, answer their questions and create a good user experience for them. Listen to what they have to say, and put your ego aside.
Next step — Measure and sell
As mentioned above — the community was utilizing FB as a platform, but soon enough we realized that in order to preserve the knowledge we need more tools. For this, I have built our website, our shop, many landing pages and a large mailing list for our weekly newsletter. The measuring was mainly done on our website, that provides more then 1,500 Israeli mothers every day.
The best way to measure traffic from your group is to use UTM links. It takes some time to create a special utm for every link you place in your group, so if you want to be persistent about it use it only for campaigns and repeating content that you have in your answers or posts.
In order to create a sell in your website or on FB you will have to create the engagement and expose the potential customer to your brand for a period of time. In my example, the Matkonia, I have noticed a huge difference in customers who came from Google search and customers who reached the website from the group. With mothers who came from Facebook we have reached the trust level that positioned my partner as a proffesional and thus making the sale was rather easy. Mothers who came from googles looking for a new recipe had to be directed to the FAQ section or the FB community, boil some more and only then be offered to buy one of our products — consulting, videos or our baby feeding manual.
We created several funnels involving paths on the website, FB exposure, and maling lists. One tool we never used was funded advertising on FB by our business page.
