#114 - Is Circle a better Facebook alternative for your online community?

So for them to go and log into Facebook even with the intention of going to your group to interact, they're then getting bombarded with all this other stuff going on and it's very hard for them to concentrate and to stay long enough to actually do anything meaningful in that group.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello everybody and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. I'm your host Kate from HelloFunnels Co and this is episode 114 and we are doing a tech try out today. We are going to be nerding out on a not so new tool, but one that we've just tested in our business, giving you the highs, the lows and helping you decide whether or not it's something you should add or you should switch to inside your business. Let's dive right on in to the juicy stuff, guys. And today our tech tryout is a platform called Circle. Now some of you may have already used it. If you have hit us up DM us @hellofunnels co, let us know. We'd love to hear what you thought of it. But Circle is really a community platform. It's a platform that's meant to be all around having conversations and, and doing it in a more, I think elevated and to be honest, better looking way than a plain old Facebook group or a Slack channel or something like that. It is a premium program. It is not cheap. I think it was around about $97 a month for the plan that you kind of need to have to do the things that you need to do. It does. It looks really, really nice. But before we dive into our set that there's definitely some pros and cons here, we want to make sure we're really trans. We are not an affiliate for Circle. We have no connection to them in whatever way. We're just here to provide information, help you to make a decision for you. Why would people use something like Circle? Like what's the appeal? What's sort of like the hole that it's filling? It seems to really be that. And there's a couple like there's also mighty networks which we want to do a whole separate episode on but just a few of these platforms which coming up they're not brand new, they've been around for a while, which is good because I hate brand new platforms. They're normally super buggy. So they've been around long enough to iron out a lot of bugs and to hopefully be pretty stable and relia. But the problem they are solving is providing a place to have that interaction, that community that's not Facebook groups used to be the go to if you're having an online program, if you're running a free challenge and you wanted to be able to provide a community platform where people could come in, ask questions, interact with each other, connect with each other, have conversations, that kind of thing. The problem these days is there's a few. First of all, there's some people out there who just don't want to be on Facebook anymore for a variety of reasons and more so in certain niches. Right. If you're in a niche where you know there's a lot of people who are like, well I would love to do this, I'd love to take part in your paid workshop in your free challenge in you to join your group program. But I don't want to be on Facebook so I'm not going to be able to get all the benefits. I'm not gonna. So it's kind of fixing that there. The other thing is that even when you are using Facebook groups and people happy to use them, there's becoming more and more issues. First of all, and this is one and one of the reasons we moved actually to our community to slack for our programs was we're finding it's just. It's actually a bit of a nightmare to be moderating or to be acting as a moderator in these communities because comments get lost. Particularly if you have a busy and active community. There's no like one place where you could go and say here's all of the comments, here's all the new posts and be able to make sure that you were responding to every single one. And I think it's a terrible service if people are with. Obviously some are always going to slip through the cracks every now and then. But if it was very frequent and very common that people knew that their questions weren't going to get actually answered, they're going to stop asking them. We don't want to have that bad customer experience. It was also from as far as running things like a free challenge or some other list building thing or short term event, just the organizing of people being able to find that these are the posts for today and stuff like that, like the way you just actually organized the information wasn't great. Like, yes, there's guides and things like that. Not everyone knows to look for them there or how they work. And if people are using their phones or if they're using the desktop, it's all different experience. And it just, again, it just wasn't ideal. And then the third thing was one of the benefits that used to be with Facebook was that everyone used to be on Facebook and that groups were really highly prioritized in the algorithm. So these posts were going to get seen, which meant that more people would take part, more people would engage and it was actually a good thing. Now it's almost the opposite. The group posts have been way, way, way deprioritized, if that's a word they get. The algorithm is no longer favoring them, it's favoring real like videos. Funnily enough, people just aren't seeing stuff. And also they get bombarded with all these other things. For them to go and log into Facebook, even with the intention of going to your group to interact or to watch the video or whatever it is that's happening there, they're then getting bombarded with all this other stuff going on and it's very hard for them to concentrate and to stay long enough to actually do anything meaningful in that group. Lots of reasons why Facebook groups, I mean, they're still great and for a lot of people they work well, but there's lots of reasons why people will be looking for other options. And that's where something like circle and things have really stepped in. We thought we would try. So we just ran our six figure school, which is like our paid six day, sort of intensive and it has a lot of interaction. We have live stream videos, all that stuff and we thought, well, we'll try it for one time running it in circle instead of as a Facebook group for all, pretty much all the reasons I've just listed. So what are the pros, what are the cons? How did it kind of all play out? Well, first of all, it does look great. And I am, I need my tech to be pretty. I know that it's not that important. It really doesn't do anything for conversions, but for me, if it's aesthetically pleasing, I am happy. And that's why we use the tech that we use. It does look great. It's. You have a lot of nice branding options. It can just be nice and clean and simple tick. However, con, it was very fiddly to set up. Whereas if you're going to go and Create a Facebook group. Like you could have that sort of up and running in less than 20 minutes. Circle was not the case. And one thing that we found was while it was great that it did have all these different options and like, who can see this part of it? Who can't? And things like that, like, which is really cool to. If you were wanting to get more granular, the fact was you had to manually set all these different options for like everything you did. It was like clicking through and going, tick this, untick this, tick this, go to the next page. Tick, tick, tick for everything. Like anytime you're creating a new space or creating like there was just the defaults. You couldn't set a good set of defaults and go, okay, I just want this to be it. And every time I create something, these are it. You have to be manually doing all the things and if you missed one, it could really stuff you up. That was kind of annoying. It did, yeah. Like it took hours to set up versus minutes. Again, not great if you were setting it up and going to use it forever. Like if it was going to be, like I said, where you ran your program community, that would be okay. But I think for something like doing a free challenge or whatever, then you're gonna have to keep setting it up every time. Less ideal. The third con or sorry, second con. But third point was there's no way to schedule anything, which kind of seems crazy if you're wanting to have each day. Like, here's a reminder for our live call which is going at this time. You have to manually be scheduling it or get a third party tech which cost about the same. This is not a low price platform. As I said. It's around about $97 I think we're paying. And then you have to go and get another $97 program to be able to schedule into it. And we're going through their community like they've got quite a good help and support community. And it was like someone figured out how to sort of hack this. Really, really. Again, complex setup with Airtable and Zapier and they're like, look, we can schedule things now. And it's sort of like the tech team at Circle went, oh cool, someone's fixed that problem. We don't have to fix it, just go do that. But it was a stupidly complex way of doing it. And to just be able to format your post, you had to be actually writing the HTML code for line breaks and embedding the videos. And just know if you've got you Guys, you've been around long enough. Let people schedule their posts. That was my work. It was almost enough for us to go, all right, let's give up. But we were already kind of too far down the line of setting everything up. But we really just wanted to test it, so. Okay, well, we'll just. Guess we'll be manual this time. Not really what we're about here at hello Funnels. But yeah, that one's a big no from me. Point number four, and this is a pro, is that, yes, it was much clearer and easier to organize the information. So they had options for you to have. They call them spaces, I think like a space that was like, this is the schedule and you could click into it and you could see like a calendar of when live calls were and people could RSVP to those live calls and then it would automatically send them reminders for those calls. Like all of that stuff I loved and was definitely like, yes, you can do that in Facebook as well, but it's just not as clear. And those reminders are just in Facebook versus where these were sent via email. That's kind of a bit different too. Another con, I'm afraid, is that it is terrible for monitoring comments. So my previous gripe around Facebook about how easy it is for comments to get lost, particularly if they're made on older posts, it applies to Circle. Like, there is no one place where you go as a team, as an admin, as a moderator, and go, where are all the recent comments? Let's make sure they've all been responded to. That's one thing that Slack does really well and why we use Slack for our, our actual, like paid community. The other thing, and this was again something we really wanted to check, was that yes, I think definitely the overall engagement was a lot lower in Circle versus in Facebook. So even with Facebook deprioritizing things in groups, yes, people are there more often. Like Circle, it's an extra app, it's a place somewhere else that people have to log into. And I think unless they had a lot of skin in the game, for example, if this was part of a, a higher level program, then yes, of course I would give them more reason to log in. But if you're doing a free challenge or a low ticket offer workshop like we were doing, the skin isn't there. And so I think definitely the engagement wasn't there as well. That's kind of like, I think the main pros and cons around Circles, if you're looking for something, as in for your paid Programs that is a bit easy to organize. You're going to set up once and not have to redo every time. Oh I forgot to forget to mention they have live streaming into Circle and it's almost like a webinar. It looks really great. Like it's way nicer than zoom. Again, told you aesthetics are important to me. That was really cool. And again it could be a great thing for doing like your your video calls for your coaching programs. You can bring people up onto the stage, highlight them all that kind of stuff. And I said it can be it then saves it and can be republished straight into the platform so you don't having to you're downloading things and uploading things. That was actually another pro. I should have given it its own point. But yeah their live streaming options are really yeah are awesome. I think as I said if for us for doing free challenges, low ticket paid workshops, things that are short time period that where engagement is really crucial but it's like low skin in the game for the consumer. I probably wouldn't use Circle again just because it's way too fiddly. It's too time consuming and I said the engagement's just not there. But for those higher ticket things where people yes they don't want the distractions of Facebook. They want to be able to come somewhere separate. They're going to come because they've invested and you only have to set it up once. Then yeah, Circle is awesome. That's my personal, that's my my choice. I'd love it if you are a Circle user and you like going hey, you just missed a freaking setting girl. Like it's here. Then you DM us. Let us know. Or let us know if you've tried it, what you thought. If you're thinking about trying it. We love chatting with you in our dm' Just DM us at hellofunnels over on Instagram and otherwise guys, I will see you same bat channel, same bat. Time for some more techy nerdy goodness next week. See you then.

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Sam.