Episode 018 - Building & Growing Online Communities on Facebook

Foreign. Direct. This is Wednesday session. This is episode 18, which is insane. And that means I've nearly spent a whole entire 24 hour day talking to you online about building your business and a big bunch of other cool stuff in between. Hopefully you can see me, hopefully you can hear me. Hopefully everything's working. Remember, if you are using Facebook and you want to comment, you need to give Streamyard your permission. Streamyard.com Facebook, wherever that is, follow it along, check that out and make sure that you give permission to Facebook so you can, you can talk in the chat. No problem at all. If, if you don't do that, I'll still see the comments, but it's nice to know who is leaving comments. After last show, we've had a bunch of questions come through the support desk from Danny Walsh Live. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can go to Danny Walsh Live and in the corner there's a little help button. You press the help button and it comes through to the support desk. I've had a big bunch of questions on the back of the last show. So if you didn't watch the last show, just to back up and, and kind of talk a little bit about what we did there, we talked about the power of community, right? And what I was saying is that all businesses should really have a community around what it is that they're doing. And we talked about all different types of communities, we looked at some examples of communities and we arrived at this conclusion that one of the best ways to assemble or build your community is through a Facebook group. And I've had a bunch of questions and what I want to do before we move on any further and we start getting into more funnels and different bits and pieces is kind of want to just show you exactly how to build a Facebook group. That sound like a plan. So I've put together in the resources document, if you go to Danny Walsh Live, I'll show you what we're going to cover on this show today. Right? So let me bring up the resources document. You'll see this in, in the little window. It's all available on Danny Walsh Live. What we're going to do is follow on from the power of community, right? And we're going to look at some of the challenges surrounding your online Facebook community and how to build it successfully. So if you've not got a Facebook group and you've never thought about building one, or maybe you have, I'm hoping that this is going to be like really beneficial to you. And really going to give you some tips and ideas and new things you can try and. And we're going to cover quite a lot. So I need to kind of get into this and talk about the decision to build your Facebook group. I'm going to show you how to set up a group in 10 minutes or less with a big bunch of. Of technical things. Why you don't need community managers or consultants to help you do this, moderators or admin assist, and you'll see more about that in a second. How to ensure that you only get the right people in your group. It's your space, it's your rules. There's a big bunch of stuff I want to go through this with you sort of step by step in this live in the next 45 minutes. So you could take this information, you can pass it to your team or you can go and do it yourself. And hopefully you have got an amazing Facebook community, amazing group ready for you and your business in the next few hours, right? If we could do this all within one hour on the live, you can go and do it in, in the next hour and you could be up and running with Facebook group or you could be putting some of this stuff into practice in your own Facebook group, right? So we're going to go over to Facebook in a second and we're going to build one of these things. We're going to put a header in there and a profile picture and, and a bunch of cool stuff to make it look nice. I'm going to show you how to do that. I'm going to show you how to use AI to do that so you don't really even have to think. But this show should give you enough information and enough knowledge to make sure that not only are you building Facebook groups and communities, you're also building them correctly. Does that sound like a plan? So we're going to dive straight into this stuff, right? So before we do, the decision to actually go and do this, the decision to build a Facebook community, if you have got a course or if you are selling physical products or you're running funnels or you're delivering training or you've got, I don't know, whatever kind of business, right? There's not many types of businesses that don't need a community around them near enough. Every business should be thinking about having a Facebook group, right? Because you're either going to be delivering some kind of service, selling some sort of product. Maybe you are in a hobby niche or maybe you are, you know, for example, fishing. We Showed you the fishing group, right? Maybe you're doing metal detecting or maybe you're doing online business coaching, or maybe maybe you're providing a service to a group of people through email or through your website or through webinars or whatever you're doing, right? So wherever you are in your business, you will have a community of customers out there. To bring those folks together gives you a lot of advantages over your competition. And a Facebook group is a great way to do that because people can also join your group and then find out about your business. And we'll cover more about that in a second. But it's a really cool place to, to be able to communicate with your community, make offers, do giveaways, have fun, share information, give updates, you know, get people interested in what's coming up and, and all this sort of stuff, right? So there's a big bunch of reasons why you should have a Facebook community, a Facebook group, and there are very few reasons why you shouldn't. So I'm hoping that the decision has just been made for you. If you don't have a Facebook group, or maybe you've got one and you're under using it, I urge you to rethink that strategy because it's so important. And if you want to know more about the power of community, go and watch the replay from the last show, Danny Walsh Live. You scroll down episode 17, you can click that. It's a 45 minute video. And I really go into detail as to why this is so important, right? So if, if this stuff doesn't make sense, go to the site, watch the replay from last time and, and deep dive and then come back to this, this show. Does that sound like a plan? Right, so what I want to do is actually switch over to Facebook, right? So I'm just going to sort the screen out, remove this thing, remove that from there. And now I'm gonna share a new screen. This is my Facebook account and anything can happen. Somebody might messages or whatever. Hopefully that doesn't happen while we're live. But I just want to show you, when you're inside of Facebook, if you go to these dots menu and then create and press group, it will take you to this screen, right? And some of you like, oh, Danny, that's really simple. What you can do on this screen is then give your group a name and you can call your group pretty much anything as long as it's legal and ethical and as long as nobody else has got this. So it's kind of like setting up a web domain and it's super important to make this align with your business. Right? But if we go through the motions of doing this, you're easily going to be able to see just how simple it is to do. And by the end of the show, you can go away, you can copy this stuff, you can watch the replay and, and you should be able to put this into, into practice. Right, so I'm going to call this Danny Walsh Live Members and we're going to make a mock up group and I'm not going to let anybody in because we've already got Danny Walsh Live Group. Maybe I will, who knows? Right, so we're going to give it a name and then very important, we're going to choose the privacy. There's two levels of privacy, right? There's public and, and there's private. You want people to be able to find your group, but you don't want people to see what's going on in there. Otherwise it's a bit of a free for all. So if you want a free for all and you just want everybody to see your group, you're probably better off having a page. It makes more sense to have a private group where only members can see who's in the group and what their post, right? Otherwise anyone can see who's in the group and anyone can see what's being posted. So therefore you might as well just put it on, on your Facebook wall. Right? So we're gonna go private and then very, very important, is it visible or hidden? If this is a, you know, for example, your family group and maybe it's mum, dad, the kids and granny, whoever, the cousins, and you just want this to be super hidden and super private and nobody can even find it. But go for hidden. But for the majority of businesses who have got customers out there, you want to set it up like this. So you're going to be private. So people have to accept, have to ask to join you let them in and visible so folks can find it, but they can't see what's in there until you've let them in. Does that kind of make sense? So it's private, it's visible and you give it a name and you're going to press create, right? And by the magic of Facebook, da da, you've now actually got a group in like three seconds, right? So in a matter of seconds you can be set up with a place to call your own and you will see on this side that you've got a thing to invite people, invite your friends, invite with emails, you can share the group so you can get a link. But there's some important things that you want to do before you go out there and actually give this to anybody or, or let anybody in. So what we want to do first of all is on the left hand side is scroll down and go to group settings. You go to your group settings. This is where I always start when I'm, when I'm building a Facebook community. So if you look in the middle now you've got name and description, right? So what you want to do is give yourself a description so people know what this is all about. Watch the replays from Danny Walsh live and learn how to build a, an online business. That's the description, right? You could put, hey, learn more about fishing or learn more about metal detecting or let's have a book club or maybe it's a, a study group or it's a religious group or whatever it is that you're doing. You put your name and description, you hit save. So far that's not rocket science, right? You're thinking, oh, Danny, this is, this is like dead simple. Next thing, kind of go through things in order, right? New member intro. This is so important. And if you press get started, you put, welcome to my awesome online community. Please read the rules. If I could even spell read the rules. And make sure to introduce yourself in the group. So, so we know who you are and what you want to get from your time here. Notice I'm not looking at the keyboard. So you give yourself an intro message. And what this is going to do is when they first visit, it's going to give them this little message, right? So you're actually welcoming them on autopilot. So you press publish. And what's going to happen here is it's going to move down and it's going to kind of let you show you how to skip through this little process. So what, that's what it's going to show to people. And it's going to let them skip through and kind of move through a simple little process. And what this little process will do is, will say to people, hey, read this message. Then it'll give them the rules and then it'll ask them to write an introductory post in the group. Those introductory posts are preset by Facebook and there's three of them. So if you get people saying, hey, I'm new here, here's a photo that I took, or there's another one, you'll know that it's come from this sort of joining process. You've asked them to do that. So if you think people are being a little bit weird by keep saying, hey, this is a photo that I took. It's that. That's doing it. And you can go in there and turn it off. So you've put your name description, you put your new member intro. You know that the privacy is private and it's also visible, your location. If you want to put. Wherever you are, I'm in Preston in Lancashire, you don't have to do that, but you can. And then you can set your URL, which makes it dead easy to find because you can say, hey, facebook.com forward/groups forward/ Danny Walsh or whatever it is, right? So let's see if it will accept my name, which it does, which is kind of cool. And we're going to press save. Sometimes it might not. Sometimes. Sometimes people might already have. Have used that name like a website. So you might have to mess around with that. It will accept dots. So you can put Danny Walsh or danny.walsh.group or whatever it is that you need to do. You can set a group color. Hey, let's. Let's be blue. Why is it blue? Who cares? Right? And in here you can look at badges. There's a bunch of badges that you can actually give to your members to reward them for stuff, right? So if they start posting pictures, they might become the visual storyteller. If they ignite conversation a lot, they might get the conversation started. Badge. If they join within the first two weeks, they're a family member. If they're always helping people in the group, they're a valued response. You can kind of see where it going with that, right? There's ambassadors and more. You can decide if these are useful or are a hindrance and you can turn them on and off. Right? Group expert. You have to give that badge to somebody. So that's quite a good one. Moderators and admins also need to be clearly defined. And when you set up your group like we're doing here for the first time, you are the founding admin and no other admin can remove you from the group. The only way that people can get you out of the group is if you decide to leave. If you abandon your group and you leave your group, Facebook will put a thing on that says, this group needs an admin. And the amount of groups that I've actually taken over by just seeing that, like in a group one day and it says, hey, would you like to be admin? All the admins have left, you're like, oh, man, this is crazy. And you, you would click that and all of a sudden you're an admin of the group. You don't want that to happen. Now if there's affiliation between you and a company, you can add that here and you can carry on going down this list. Right? So this is very, very important, this next section. Who can join the group? And you've got a choice. Profile and pages or just profiles. And a profile is like my page that you can add as a friend. A page is something that you can only like. Now if you're. You are pages and profiles to join. That means people's business pages can join your group. And those pages might be managed by multiple people. So ideally you only want real people, individuals, your customers, members of your community. Only set it to profiles. Right? That kind of makes sense. Next bit, who can approve member requests? Change that to only admins and moderators because you don't want people just allowing everybody in. Otherwise you'll end up with a big bunch of spam. Who is pre approved to join? Originally it's set to nobody, but if you upload a file of your customers, an email list, or you have another group, you could say people in this other group are pre approved to join this group. It kind of speeds up the process of getting them in. Moving further, you can manage the discussion in your group and forms decided that it wants to serve. A reminder, even though I didn't ask for that. Right, Manage discussion. Anonymous posting, you can turn that off. If somebody does post anonymously, you would still have to approve that so you still know who they are. As an admin, if you're running a group, for example, around mental health or recovery or maybe, maybe drugs and alcohol or something that's kind of sensitive, maybe it's a counseling group. You might want to give people the ability to post anonymously so they're not putting the name to their issue or problem or whatever it is. And that means people can have that little bit extra privacy. And that means you can tackle some really complex issues without people having to put the name to it. So it's very, very useful. Who can post, right? You can post just you, which makes it a boring group or anyone in the group. Keep it on anyone, right? Post approval is something that you may want to activate when the group gets bigger. Because what will happen is undoubtedly people will come in there and start spamming. All big groups will get some elements of spam and you don't want that, right? So you might want to do that from the beginning. You Might want to wait a while. But in this instance I'm just going to let anybody be able to post. But I know that if they post some rubbish, I can delete them, right? Approve edits means that if somebody gets approved by you and then edits the post, like include a link, you might want to be able to set a thing that says re approve it. That's entirely up to you. Post formats kind of important, right? So what you can do is choose the kind of things that people can do in your group. And some of this stuff you may want to switch off, for example, files you might want to turn off, you might want to turn reels off so that they can't just post any old stuff in there, right? It's up to you what you use. But things like live, create an event, create a room, tag event maybe I'd probably turn that off. I probably turn create a room off. I probably turn file off and I'd probably turn reels off just to keep the group private and just have it like that. It's entirely up to you how you set this, but you will learn over time as more and more people join. So always remember you can come back to this stuff, right? But that's how I'm going to set my group up. I don't want people doing reels in there. They can go and do it on their own wall. I don't want people putting files in there. They can use Google Documents or whatever it is, right? So as you're moving down, you can quickly see how Facebook gives you tools to be very, very flexible with your group. So you can kind of tailor it for what it is that you want, right? This one, Next one very important sort posts. Set this. When it loads to new posts, it defaults to most relevant. And that means when people come in your group, the one with the latest comments will be at the top. You don't want that. You want the new stuff at the top, right? People have to scroll down to find the older stuff. So always set that to new post and sort comments. Again, change that to most recent. So when people are scrolling through the newest stuff is all at the top. It just makes it easy. But sometimes you might want to set that to more relevant or you want to chop and change. You want to play with that, have a look at it, see how it affects your group. That's entirely up to you. Next one default tab is discussion. And until you've added other tabs in there, that is is just as it is, right? So leave it as is and then move down the list, you can see that all of these functions are added to the group. You might want to remove files, you might want to remove polls, you might not want to let people go live. You can edit some of this stuff and, and you can go in there and check these options out. We don't need to go into all of this stuff. If you want to turn the badges off, you can. But there's also this ability to add new things. And one thing that I like to add is the guides. And, and the guide is like a little mini course at the top of your group, right? So you, even if you don't have clickfunnels or you don't have some sort of software to build a course, you can build a little guide in your group. And when you've activated a little guide, what you will then find in your group settings is where you've got your little tabs. I might have to refresh that, that you can actually drop people in on different tabs when they first land. I'll leave that on. On default. But you can see what we' We've now added the guides. And look, if you've got a Facebook page, you can link that page. So at the top it'll say group by Danny Walsh. Right? So if I was to click that, all my pages would load and I could have my, my Walsh marketing pages. They're like the, the owner of the group. Does that sort of make sense? And apps, for example, right now we're using Stream Yard to do the live streams. If you wanted Stream Yard to go live in your group, you would have to add an app for that. So you could go in there and do that. But in, look, in what, 20 minutes, we've had a little bit of a discussion. You know what we're doing, and we've literally come in here and built our Facebook group. And if you come back up to the top here and press on the name of your group, you will return to your discussion tab, right? And here you can write things in your group, you can have pictures, you can do polls, you can feature things at the top, little announcements, which is cool. And in here it's going to kind of say, Danny updated the description. Danny created the group. You don't need those in there. You could just remove those from the group. So it won't remove the description, it'll just remove that post. And then when people join, they're going to see a bunch of relevant stuff and not like the admin things. Right. Does that kind of make Sense. So look, you've got a lot more features in the group and I want to kind of go into these. And now we've done the URL, the name, the settings. I want to show you something that's so, so important. So what we're going to do is go over on the left hand side and we're going to check out some of these other bits and pieces, right? So over here we've got the group rules. Now every group needs some rules. And when people go through that little welcome sequence that we set up earlier, it's going to say, do you accept the rules? If you don't set rules, people will do what they want. And if people do what they want, it's going to create a mess and you're forever going to be like trying to moderate and administer your group, right? So go in here and create some rules and Facebook gives you some rules to start with. Be kind and courteous. Create. You see where I'm going with this? No hate speech or bullying. Create. These are like the default ones. No promotions or spam, Create. Respect privacy, create. But you might want to elaborate, you might want rules that are specific to what you're doing. For example, do not share content outside of this group and please keep all links and videos private. There are not to be shared. You see where I'm going with that, right? So you can set a bunch of rules. I think you can have 10 and you can reorder these things if you, if you want. You don't need War and Peace because people won't read these things. But once you've got your rules in place there, you're now in a position for people to accept them when they join. And if they don't accept them, you might decide not to let them in the sort of make sense. So you've got your rules in place, you've got your URL in place. You, you know that you've tidied up your group. You, you've set how people can post. You're only allowing profiles. It's, it's private. Next thing, go to admin assist. This thing is amazing and we're going to kind of get into this a little bit more in a second. This will automatically approve deny members or posts or comments. It will also create a welcome post for you. Right? And, and this one's probably the best place to start. So you can go here and you can say, let's welcome our new members. And what it does is it tags them and you can come down here and you can change the photo of this you can have say we're gonna have like amazing, amazing photo once a week on whatever day and it's going to first publish it on, on 28th of May to give us time to get some people in. It's the 24th when we're doing this now and you can include the admins in the comments, right? So people who join your group straight away could be like, hey, welcome to the group. And you could direct them to your guide or you could direct them to watch an introduction video or you could direct them to do something, whatever it is, and also tag, hey, your admin team is Danny or Siobhan or whoever it is, right? So you, the more people you've got in your group, the more folks you might want managing it. And it kind of makes sense to add another member, somebody in your family or a friend or somebody in the business and make them an administrator, make them a moderator. Remember, they can't get rid of you, so don't worry about that stuff. If somebody goes wrong and like, ah, they're deleting stuff, they can't get rid of you. You just have to sort that out. And be careful you add. Right? You can also, I think you can set this so that it fires after a certain number of membership requests, but for now that will do. And you can obviously go up here and you can type a bit more of a message, right? So please remember to read the rules, intro, juice yourself and have an awesome time. You can go as far as adding links in this as well. You can also get the replays spell on live replays to what to all previous episodes and the resources. On D Live, smiley face emojis, all of that sort of stuff. Any questions, please ask and whatever you want to put right. And you can add that to admin assistant. That means that every time you get a bunch of members once a week it's just going to tag these folks. So that's a great thing to do. And you can also do custom posts. This is pretty cool. And if you go in here, look, you can make your own or you could be like, hey, time for Friday favorites. Share this week's favorite or monthly rule reminder or heads up your reminder to whatever today is. New week, new start, some motivational stuff, share your win for the week, whatever you want to do. You can set those up in there for now. I've shown you that I'm not going to do it, but you kind of get the idea right? Most important things with admin assist, this is going to keep out spam, and it's going to keep out undesirable things. And what you want to be doing is going to this one that says decline incoming post. Press this and it kind of does it for you. Facebook's really clever, right? So you don't want posts from fake accounts. So if the author does not have a profile picture and the author has had their Facebook account for less than one month, it will decline any post. You can undo these. So if, like, you know, you. You create a new account or somebody just joins and they've never been on Facebook and they start posting and they're like, oh, man, this is not working. You can go and undo those. But that's a really good one to. To kind of have. You also want to look at spam. Now, you can add keywords. You can add swear words. You can add words that are offensive or you don't want in there. You can also add the name of your competitors, right? Does that sort of make sense? So if you go in here and press edit, post or certain keywords, you can add and post as commonly reported words on Facebook. That's a good one to add, right? So. So if somebody kind of comes in there and starts swearing or doing a bunch of crazy stuff and it's been reported before on Facebook, it'll just deny the post. You can review that and you can restore it if. If needs be. So now we've built up our little sort of barrier to stop people coming in. And you can also block links to specific sites. Now what we're going to do is remove that one post has fewer than 10 characters. Well, what are they writing? It just be like a. A link or something. Person doesn't have a profile picture. We've already got that. So we can remove that. So certain keywords. If. If we want to add those post as. As fewer than 10 characters, you add that to your administrat, right? And you start to build up this little list of defenses. So it's going to decline incoming pulse. If they've got less than 10 characters, if they've got certain keywords which you need to define. And remember, we've put that block list on from Facebook, add their account for less than one month or they don't have specific a profile picture, we're going to add one more. And if you kind of come down here, you can create your own and you can go inside here and there's a big bunch of stuff. I'm just going to put link in post. So if it's got a link, I don't want it in my group because what are they linking to? That's not in my group, right? So that's going to decline the posts. And what we're going to do also is you can remove a published post if, if it's got conflict, if it's contentious, if it's been reported or if it's got harmful content, right? And you're going to look at those, you're going to check those out and decide if they're right for you. And you can use keywords and all the rest of it. But comments, very, very important to do the same, right? So in comments, if they've no profile picture, right? So if they've managed to get in the group for some reason and they don't have a profile picture, we don't want them to comment. And also if they've got a link in the comment, we don't want that. So there's any link. And another good one to have in your comments is you can look at the length. So if somebody's going to keep coming in and writing big, massive, long, like essays, you might want to limit that. And then what you can do when it rejects this, for example, give feedback. So all of these actions, you can click this and you can send them a message and be like, hey, you're trying to write 3,000 words in the comments, just restrict it to, to 50 or 100, right? So you've got a lot of flexibility of what you do and the way you do it inside of your Facebook group, right? So if it's Got less than 10 characters comment in the link and, or the author doesn't have a profile picture, it's going to get rid of it. We're going to welcome new members and we're going to decline incoming posts if they meet those criterias. Really, really powerful stuff. We've created the membership questions, we've got where admin assist in place. You're pretty much ready to get to get going with, with your group, right? So people are going to come, they're going to join, they're going to get tagged in, they're going to go through the welcome sequence. It's going to encourage them to make a post. You've created a group and we're like half an hour into this show, right? You can schedule posts, you've got an activity log which will show you exactly who's done what and when they've done it, every single thing. So if you do have moderators and you're like, oh man, this guy Keeps going in and deleting things. You can find out who's done what, when, why. You can add notes as well to any actions that you've taken. You know that you can also put post approval on, which means that when people write the post in the box, they press submit. It doesn't just go in the group, it comes to you. And then you would find those impending posts and you can decide whether to approve them, reject them. That's better. When your group gets bigger, you can schedule your own post. You've got your activity log, you've done your group rules. If somebody reports something and they're like, oh, I don't like this, and they report it, that will appear here in this section. And you can kind of go in there and be like, I don't like that either, and delete it, or what's he really talking about? Keep it in the group. Right? Moderation alerts. Again, this is something that's pretty cool. You can edit this. So if somebody mentions your name or a certain keyword like download or a competitor or how do I. Or help. Help is quite a good one to have, right? And you can go in there and you can set these alerts up so you get a notification when somebody says, I really need help, how do I get support? Because people doing that, they might be unhappy with something in your business, right? So if we put support and help, somebody mentions these and you get an alert. Now if you write too many words, you end up with 3,000 alerts and nobody checks them and it's just a big mess. You need to make sure that you keep this really refined. If somebody uses the word spam, you can put swear words in there. You put anything that you really don't want or you need to be notified about, or the names of competitors, right? So if you put competitors names in, especially if you're running a software business like we've got the click funnels group, if somebody mentions some other software that's kind of competing with clickfunnels, that kind of lets the moderators know. And then people can go and check and be like, ah, these guys are trying to poach members and take them to another software. See where I'm going with that? So put some simple words in there. Support, help your name, spam, probably a good place to start. You can put those up in that, in there and there. And they will help you anytime people write those words in your group. Right? So there you go, keywords. You can also do it based on engagement, so it'll alert you, if, if a post goes crazy. So you've got a lot of features inside your group, group quality, this is where Facebook will intervene. So if people come in here and they start, I don't know, posting adult material or racism or something crazy, right? Facebook knows that. And it doesn't matter that it's in a group, it detects it. And what it will do is it say, hey, somebody in your group's posted something that goes against our terms and conditions. These guys are posting this hate speech or whatever it is, and they may, if that continues and you're not managing it, they may decide to shut your group down. So be mindful of that. I've never had issues in any of my groups, whether the software or fishing or whatever, right. If you're running something that's kind of on the, on the border of, you know, conversational integrity or you're gonna get, you know, you're going to be having difficult conversations. Like I said, maybe it's a recovery group or something to do with drugs and alcohol or, or whatever it is, you may get violations, but admins might violate these by approving stuff, then the group could be put under restrictions, right? So bear that in mind. Read this stuff and make sure you follow the rules of Facebook. Then as you move down settings we've already been in, features we've been in, you've got a big bunch of stuff down here where you can actually see how the group is growing. Obviously there's no one in here how the engagement's growing. You can see your admins and moderators and what they've actually done and the activity that they've taken. So over a month, we've declined this many posts, we've removed this many posts, we've added this many people, whatever it is, that's all there in a summary for you, your membership. It'll show you again who the top contributors are, countries where they're from, cities where they're from, a big bunch of marketing research, right? Market research that you can use. And of course, you can see how many people have actually gone through your guide and completed the little guide sections that you've created earlier. There's a bunch of help, there's a community hub, but we've pretty much been through all of the sections that you've got in your group. And the next thing, logical thing to do is press invite, invite some friends, or go and get the link and you can share it and you can pin it to your Facebook and you can sort comments and if you want to leave it or pause it or get out of there and cancel it. You can do that there as well. Right? So very, very powerful. Now click on the name at the top and go back to your group. Right? So you've done a bunch of stuff. You can see your guides are up here. You can start adding content to your guides and you can configure these. Guide one, welcome. Guide two, get the resources, do the downloads. Guide three, whatever it is, you know you've given it a name. So it's like facebook.comgroups forward slash Danny Walsh. In this case, you've got URLs. You can't see them on the screen at the top in your browser that you can copy and paste. So you could take the link for the guide and use that in your welcome post. It's kind of useful, right? So what you, what, you're at a point now where you need to dress this up, make it look nice, start adding members and start building your community. You can go live in there, you can put videos in there, you can put, if you want, documents in there, you can do polls in there, keep your competitors out, use the admin assist and the keywords and stuff to. To make sure people are not in there. And you can now quickly start to build your group and your audience and your community. One thing that's kind of cool is we've got the ability to use AI these days and we can use something like Mid Journey to create an awesome header for our community, right? So depending on what it is that you want, you can go into AI, you can go into Mid Journey, and you can ask for a header image, right? And what I thought would be kind of cool is if we did that right now. So I will flip over to Discord into Mid Journey. We've covered this in other episodes, but just for fun, a Facebook group header. Boom, boom. I better share this, Right, So let me just share this over. This is in my random images in Discord, right? And all of these are AI generated images. @ the bottom, you can see that I'm actually putting a prompt in here. And this prompt is imagine a Facebook group header for a online marketing community which kind of fits the. Fits the bill, right? What you'll notice at the end is I'm doing something a bit weird. I've put two dashes or minus signs and then ar, that stands for aspect ratio, and next to that space, and then 16:6, right? If you did 16:9, that's the. The aspect ratio of a HD screen. If you do 16:6, that kind of fits a Facebook group header, which is a little trick for you, right? So do your 16:6 aspect ratio in Mid Journey. If you don't know how to do this stuff, we're going to cover it more going forward. But this is just for fun. What we then get is in a few seconds time, by the power of AI, some examples of headers that we can then take back and upload to the top of our group to make it stand out. So whether you do this in Photoshop or you use one of your pictures or you just take a picture of outside or whatever it is that you do, you need a header so it kind of stands out. And in here, AI is doing something cool for me, right? We go back over to the group, I'll show you some other stuff. But how cool, in less than 40 minutes, you built your community. What I want to do is kind of go through some important points that we had in that document, talk you through each of these things so that you're not going to run into problems, and you can kind of learn from a bunch of my mistakes, right? So Mid Journey is doing its stuff. It's at 78. I'm not even touching this thing and it's doing the design work for me. Number four looks kind of cool. Number two looks kind of cool as well. And you, you know, you've got the power at your fingertips, right? So it's done. This stuff, let's look. This one's kind of cool. It's in that Facebook style, that one with the hot air balloons. Mid Journey doesn't do words, so it'll just do images. But you could Photoshop or Canva or, or whatever to change the words on there. So you can put your, your logo, your heading, whatever you want. But if you wanted, for example, number two, what you do is you go and press the little two. It's going to upscale number two. And the 16, 6 ratio means that it's a perfect fit for the top of your Facebook community. Which, which, which is pretty cool, right? So we're going to save that image. We can then go on over to our group and in the corner we can edit, we can upload a photo and you can put your new header in there, right? How, how cool is that? Pretty cool, right? So if you wanted to do that, you can, and you can change your headers, you could change your profile picture, you could change all of that stuff that's going on in there. And your community is now your place to invite your members and you can invite friends, you can Invite email. You can share the group, you can add your cover photo, which we've just covered, your description you've done. And then the first thing to do is just do a post. Welcome, everyone. I can't wait to see this community grow. And you can use the little Facebook smiley faces and all the rest of that stuff. It'll take these off your list for you. And in 40 minutes, you've created a community and you're one step ahead of your competitors. Right, so what I want to do is go back to the little guide now because we are sort of like, ah, you know what it's like. I could talk for ages. I give you a lot of value, but want to kind of tick these off, right? So we made a decision to make a Facebook group and it's the right decision. You've seen how easy it is, right? There's nothing to stop you. And once you've got your group and you've got some members, you'll very quickly start to see how easy it is to manage and administer. And I'm going to go through some of that stuff with you right now. So you know how to set your group up from scratch in, in 10 minutes, well, 30 minutes. But if you actually get used to this, you can do it in 10 minutes, right? So the name, the URL, the settings, the questions, the rules, the guides, other features, this one's important. You don't need, and this might offend some people, but you don't need to spend money on a community manager. You don't need to go and spend money on somebody to come and tell you how to grow your group or make money from your group or do anything crazy with your group. There are people out there that when they see that you've created a new group, they will start inboxing you going, hey, I'm a certified top 10% in the world community business manager. I'm affiliated with Facebook, which they're probably not. And I want to sell you this course on how to make this amazing group. Don't do it. You don't need to do it. Build your amazing group and then leverage the power of your group. Don't pay somebody, especially if you're only just starting, because the community love you. They don't give a crap about this guy. And you don't want to be hiring consultants to teach you what I've just shown you, because that's all free from Facebook. You don't want to be hiring managers to come and help you grow this group unless you are making lots and lots of money in your business. And you think, hey, this group's got thousands of people in there. I wonder how far we can take it. If you get to that point, it'll drop me a message and I'll save you a big bunch of money and I'll show you how you can move with things. There's people out there charging tens and of thousands of dollars just to come and sit with you for a day and show you some stuff on a whiteboard. You don't need it. Right? You know that the Admin Assist is super useful. At one point in our phishing community we had a think like 20 moderators and all of these guys had their own views and they had their own skills and they were up at different times of the day and they were up at night. They were going through everybody's comments and they started. Some of these guys, you know, some of them, they're amazing. But some of these guys started taking this power very, very seriously. And you'd wake up in the morning and you kind of check the admin log and you'd see that somebody's been in there at like one o' clock in the morning and, and like removed a big bunch of your members and because they didn't like them or they didn't like what they were saying, or they wanted to be the person with power in the conversation, they wanted the limelight Moderators. When you get bigger, train your moderators on what you want and what you expect and have 3, 4, 5 moderators in click funnels. For example, there's 300,000 people and there's like 5 moderators who are active at any one time. And all they really do is is approve the posts, make sure there's no spam in the comments, help people. As that's got bigger, we've added the ambassadors and these guys are the folks who are really helpful. They've been brought out of the community and they're not asked to moderate. Right. Be very careful the power that you give people, especially early on when you've only got a few members, because Admin Assist will do the bulk of that work for you. It will add people, remove people, it'll ban comments, it'll do whatever you want it to do. Set those rules up. Don't put people in a position where they feel that this is like their full time job. And every day they're in there thinking, oh, I've got to take action. The less action you take, the better the community. But make sure those rules and those actions are clearly defined to keep the spam out of your group. Now, this next one is a big one and this is something these community manager folks will try and sell you. Right? How do you ensure that you only get the right people in your group? Fishbowl funnel. What we discussed in episodes one through 15, that is going to attract certain type of people. If they like fishing, they probably don't like golf. Does that make sense? Don't add competitors. If you feel that your competition is joining the group and you think, oh, that's that guy who runs that shop down the road or that's the guy who's got that rival company, don't let them in. Because remember, you've configured your group to be private and people have got to answer the questions. They've got to, oh, did we show you the questions? Did we show you the questions in the group? Let me just go back to the group and, and make sure you, you, you've got that in place. I want to share that, share that. Go back into your group settings. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And make sure that you have some questions set and where have they moved those questions to? Group settings. There is a thing where it allows you to ask questions of those folks joining the group and I don't know what Facebook has done done with that, where that has gone. And we are obviously live, but there is a thing about, you know, give us your email. What do you want to achieve in this group? And you need to have those set up when people join. And it's probably looking me in the face and I want to make sure that we've got that. Sometimes for some weird reason, Facebook behaves in mysterious ways. You might be able to find that on your mobile device, but you do want to have the three questions set for when people join the group and you should be able to do that from one of these sections. And it's a little bit weird why that I didn't see that earlier. We will come back to that. But you want to ask some questions to make sure you only get the right people in your group. And unless that is some thing that they've now removed or it's just stirring me in the face and I can't see it. It's definitely something that you do need to look at. So maybe it's under the rules. Create rule. We've done that. Posts membership questions. I would just say check this out. On your mobile device, our membership questions is looking me in the face under admin tools. It's like, like appeared Add some questions, right? You want people to agree to the rules and you want. What are you hoping to get from this group? Question mark. This gives you some market research, right? So we're going to do that. We're going to add another question. Tell us more about yourself, another written answer. You can have multiple choice. You know, if you've got a software, you could be like, are you a software user? What is your favorite color? Whatever, Whatever you want, right? So make sure you've set some questions up. I'm sorry we missed that earlier, but you've got these questions on this thing to agree to the rules when, when they join the group. We found it eventually. Don't forget that stuff, right? So I'm going to flip back to my document, make sure you've got those questions in place so you can get some real good information. If people don't answer that and they don't agree to the rules, don't let them in. You might want to say, what is your email address? But remember, data protection, especially in Europe and the uk, you don't want to fall foul of having like a spreadsheet full of people's details, right? Make sure that you use that wisely. But remember, you are allowing people to post, you are allowing people to enter, and it's your space and your rules. And if they don't like it, they can go. Does that make sense? So you can set the tone, you can deliver the lives, you can be the only one who posts. You could run it however you want, but it kind of makes sense to be interactive, to have fun in there, to do regular stuff, to schedule stuff, to have polish posts that people are going to be able to relate to. Maybe you say, hey, show your homework once a week. It could be Danny's homework club. So I teach you some stuff, you go away and do it. You come in this group and you share what you've done. And then I can critique, critique it, right? It might be Danny's drawing club. Show us your drawings, guys. Hey, what have you drawn this week? Are you using the pastels? Are you using the. The pencils? Whatever it is, it could be a gaming group. I'm getting super excited, right? It could be a fishing group or an acting group or a amateur dramatics. Or it could be about motocross. It could be about anything you ever want in the world, as long as it's legal and ethical. Even if it's not ethical per se, but it's. You're having positive discussion. Facebook would allow it. Check the terms and Conditions. It might be a recovery group, it might be something related to your local community. Whatever it is, Facebook groups are the place to be. And whether you've got a software or a service or a hobby or, or whatever, it could just be the group for the customers and community of the local shop. It gives you an instant way to communicate with people and talk to people. And there's something in there that's really, really powerful, is a little bit annoying. But when you've got loads and loads of members, if you're clear on how you're going to do this, you can go at everyone and you can mention everyone in a post once a day. So you're like, at everyone, Important announcement at everyone. I'm going live at 6 o' clock at everyone. You know, whatever it is, download this thing, access this, offer, watch this. What did you think of this? So not only can you talk to people and do posts for people and, and give people really good content and go live and do videos and put reels or polls or whatever it is, you can kind of tag everyone and be like, hey, everyone, what do you think of this? It kind of makes sense. So you've got a lot of power in your Facebook group. You know, you can use AI or stock images or whatever, your own pictures to do your header. You know how to put a description, you know how to put your links in there, how to do your rules, your questions, how to do your guide. You want to set up your guide, you go to guide, you start a guide. This could be guide number one. Welcome. Do this first and we'll just copy that and then we save. And then any posts that are relevant to that, you can add them to that guide or you can have quizzes and more. This is a super powerful tool that Facebook's actually giving you for free, where you can run courses, deliver content, go live and your competition can't see. And you can add your link that we created earlier. Facebook, not forward slash groups, forward slash Danny Walsh to your end of your funnels, to your thank you pages, to your email footer, to your emails, whatever you want to do. But remember, it's your space and it's your rules. Pretty cool, right? Now, if you want to get the right people to join your group, there's lots of ways that I've just mentioned. You can have this on the thank you page of every relevant funnel. You can organically share this on your own profile. You can invite your friends from your list, you can go into other people's groups, add friends that are Relevant and then in a few days send them an invite from your group to join your group. Kind of cool, right? You can share it, you can email it, you can print it out, you can do a QR code. There's loads of ideas. We'll cover more of those as we move. Fishball Funnel is a fantastic way to do it. All roads lead to Rome. So if, and look, there's a lot of debate about this with these like community manager folks. All roads lead to Rome, right? So some people say, hey, you need to get your leads into the group before you make an offer. Some people say, hey, you need to make an offer before you add people to a group. If people accidentally find your group and join, you're not going to reject them, right? If they then go into your group and they see stuff that you're doing and then sign up to things and it loops them back to the group, that's not a bad thing. If people go through all of your funnels and process or read your email or you invite them and then join your group, that's not a bad thing. One way or another, the joining your community, that is the goal, right? So whether you invite them or they find it by accident or their friend invites them, that is the goal. A little word on people inviting others. One thing that you might be tempted to do is go in your group and say, hey everybody, invite your friends. What will happen is those people will get a notification saying, Danny's invited you to join this group. They can then refuse that and reject it. So you may see a bunch of people in your member requests and you might approve them, but that person might then get this notification and reject it because they don't know what it's about. It's better if you build the group. Does that sort of make sense? You don't want other people just like inviting folks willy nilly and they don't know what it's about. And if they don't know what it's about, they don't join. And you want to build this community based on you, not on somebody else's word. And you don't want people coming to you saying, oh, Danny, I invited 300 people to your group. What you going to do for me? Ah, that wasn't the deal. Be very careful what you ask for. Remember, all roads lead to Rome. Monitor your growth and engagement. Make sure that you're continually growing, that you're engaging. See what your most engaging posts are. Can't show you that stuff because there's not a great deal in there right now. But you will soon get used to that once you start seeing things happening. Members can be difficult. And everybody's got opinions and everybody's got views. It's your group, it's your rules. And you have got the luxury of muting people, suspending people so they can't post, removing people so they have to join again, or banning them. And if somebody really comes in there and upsets the apple cart, don't take it to heart, don't get disheartened, don't cry, go in there and ban that sucker because it's your group and your rules. There's many more groups where they can be hurtful or they can spam. Now if somebody's got a genuine criticism about your business, you might want to message them and be like, hey, you know, Billy, I'm really sorry that you felt that way. What can I do to put it right? But I'm going to remove your post because I don't want that in the group. You can also write rules to make sure that people don't do that. You could put, for example, to get Support, go to support.danny.com or whatever it is, right? So people know there's a channel for support. Because what often happens, especially if you're selling a prod, a product or a service, is people think the group is the place to get support. And you might have a Zen desk or a mailing system or something for official support. Specify that in the group, specify that in the welcome post. And you won't get folks at 2 o' clock in the morning going, I don't know how to reset my password or, or whatever, right? So make sure you, you keep expectations very, very clear. This is the group, this is what it's for, this is what it's not for. But if you do have a problem, you can do this. And if you do break the rules, we're going to do that. It's a place for everybody to be safe. You don't share things outside the group. You don't spam, you don't self promote. It's a place to enjoy the content that Danny's doing or the community stuff or whatever it is that we've got, right? Does it kind of make sense? So bear that in mind. And when it comes to actually moderating and going in there and thinking, oh, do I delete this? Do I not delete this? It comes back to how much control you want. Now some people are really controlling and some people just want, you know, this to be whatever they agree with, you've got to give flexibility for discussion to happen so you can see both sides of the argument. You will learn as things move. But if it doesn't ring true or it looks like spam, or it looks like some kind of craziness, or you think somebody's going to get ripped off, or somebody's just doing something that's not like ringing true with you and making sense, you can remove it, you can suspend this person, you can remove them from the group or you can ban them. And there's lots and lots and lots of examples, tools of where spammers have actually got really good at this stuff. And because I manage lots and lots of communities, what I've done is I've actually put together a little document and in here. You'd hate this if your post was actually in here. I've been screenshotting posts from the fishing group, from other groups that I manage and we use this as training for our moderators. Right? Right. So there's so many different ways that people might come and try and leverage your audience. And there's so many ways that people will write like a veiled post. They'll come in there and go, hey, I've got this thing going on and it's amazing. Who wants to know more? And everybody goes, me, me, me. And then they add those people and they take them off to their group. You want to be on the lookout for that kind of stuff. There's a ranting post. There's people who just use chat GPT to answer questions. Questions. There's people who say that they like they're the expert and try and get people to follow them. There's people are looking for jobs, there's people trying to sell stuff. There's people trying to hire people. There's people that just like folks. They're going to get rich by this thing and they post these crazy schemes. There's blatant spam, which is like just coming in there and writing something and say, hey, click this link. There's like people come in and go, hey, I've got this big opportunity. And everybody goes, what? What? What is it? Tell me more. And they go, come to my dm. You don't want people in anybody's direct message. Right. So if you see that stuff going on, get rid of it. They're probably not there to help you. And if you don't know them, don't let them in. Some people try and add value in groups and then try and pitch your members and take them off to their group. Be wary of that stuff. If you see any of this stuff going on, get rid of it. People want to be polarizing so they'll come in there and say, hey, I, I don't like this color or I don't like this food. And they try and provoke a big bunch of reaction. Come in there, it's like, hey, pineapple on pizza is amazing. Correct me if I'm wrong. And half of the group will agree. And half of the group will disagree. It creates a big useless post and that person's building their engagement. Keep it on topic. If you don't like it, get rid of it. If it's not for you, get rid of it. Be very mindful to people trying to scam folks. There's one that's actually going around where somebody comes in and they actually post a picture of like a games console and they're like, I'm giving my son's PS5 to someone who kind of. Who can afford it, who can't afford it. I lost my son only two weeks ago to an unintentional injury and I don't want to keep remembering him because it hurt me so bad seeing the game, it is no more. So I decided to give it out. That's a scam. People who write really heart wrenching like lies to get folks into their inbox and then I don't know what they do because I never inbox these suckers but I just delete them. Be very, very careful. People asking folks to reach out or DM or people posting their products or people just posting rubbish. Right? There's like a document that I put together that's got loads of examples in this. If you want a copy of this, let me know, drop me a message, drop me an email, drop me comment, whatever and I'll send that to you. It's not quite finished. It keeps growing. It could be about that thick. Just be very mindful of what's going on. Be mindful of risk. Try and stay compliant with Facebook's rules. Set your own rules and remember, you are at the mercy of Facebook. And if they do shut your group down, unless you've kept everybody's email address or you've got a list of these people, you'll never get it back. So be very, very, very careful how you run your group, making sure that it's above board, that it's compliant, that it, it's doing what it says on the tin. But look, you've got an opportunity to build an amazing community. And look, with 1 hour, 2 minutes, 30 seconds on this short today, episode 18. I've really got into this stuff. We've looked at a little bit of AI, a lot more to come. But you can build a community with guides and content and questions and rules and filters and you don't even need moderators. All you need to do now is press the big old blue button and invite your first member and you can get to it. And in an hour's from now, an hour's time from now, you could be sat there thinking, oh man, my business has now got a community. And I'm going to show you how you can leverage this and go live and do a big bunch of cool stuff, right? So there's loads of different things I want to do as we move forward, but I'm hoping that that answers a big bunch of questions, right? There's some other stuff that we're going to be doing as we move Friday, Sunday and next week. As you're watching this, if you're just watching on the replay, you won't notice this. We're actually aware fishing again with the group and that's one of the cool things you can do with your community. It's like, hey, let's all go fishing. We're aware and if the signal's rubbish, there's not going to be any lives, right? If the signal's good, I'll do lives. So you might see a little bit of a pause, a little bit of a break. If you're watching the replay, it doesn't matter. But coming up very soon, we've got a couple of cool trainings, right? So I'm working with some amazing guys out of the US with Denise Madden and Jude Zamora. And we've put together a presentation looking at a weird two page system that will turn web browsing prospects into hot leads. And I'm going to deliver that for you very, very soon as part of this program. Right? So look out for that. We've also got our Video Confidence challenge which is coming up as well. This is going to be around July 3rd. I might change it because I've like July 4th, Independence Day in America. I need to be mindful of other, other people's things. What's going on in the uk we, we sometimes skip over this stuff and that's wrong. So I want to make sure that the dates are right. So as soon as I've got the date and as soon as I've finished the lineup of speakers and who's actually doing this and some of these guys are amazing, you're going to be able to book on this. It's a five day challenge. It's going to teach you how to be more confident on video. I've just done one hour and five minutes without script. Just those bullet points and sharing knowledge. Hopefully you found that useful. But that stuff is going on and you're going to get to see that. And we're also going to be doing some other training around AI as well that are actually specific courses, specific training that kind of breaks out from the lives, but the lives are going to be integral part of this. They're going to have their own Facebook groups, communities, would you believe it? And they're going to deliver you a big bunch of stuff, stuff in association with some amazing speakers, some of my colleagues and friends and associates. So there's lots and lots and lots of stuff going on and I need to lie down in a dark room because I've kind of like gonna run out of voice. So hopefully you are now thinking, oh man, I need to go and build my community. You've got the tools, you've got the talent, you've got the skills, you know what to look for. If you want a copy of my like dodgy Facebook posts guidebook, let me know in the comments or let me know in an email or press help on the page. If you want the resources document so you can follow along, it's on Danny Walsh Live. There's all sorts of cool stuff on there, but Facebook is the place to go and create your groups. You can even do that on your cell phone, which is amazing. Go and do it, set up a community and then let me know. In fact, what I'll do is I'll put the link to the new group that we've just created in the document and then if you want to join that, maybe we'll use that as homework group. Who knows? We don't want to waste it, right? We just built it, so I'll tidy that up, I'll make it better, I'll put it in the document. You can join there as well. If I accept you, you're lucky. There might only be a few of us to start. Maybe we do, maybe we don't. If it's in there, do it. If it's not in there, don't. But look, it's Danny Wall, Stanley Walsh Live. Go and get the documents, do the download, follow along, watch the video, rewind it. Speeded up. All this will be available on that link in five minutes time. It's on YouTube and Facebook in other groups as well. You guys are amazing. I can't wait to see you on the next video. If you is Danny from Preston in the uk. Bye. Bye.