This is a short conversational transcript (Nick Fisher, Ari, and others) about whether and how to move a Facebook group into a paid community (a hosted "school"). Key points: engagement level of the group determines suitability for transition; using short free trials (14-day) with credit-card capture can aid conversions; measurement and reporting of revenue from large Facebook groups is difficult (example: a 130k free group and another ~45–50k group mentioned); recommendation to assign a team leader and run a committed trial period rather than a half-measure.
Chapters
Wanted to buy because something Ari, you said yesterday about transferring your. Your free from Facebook to school and you got my opinion yesterday on whether that's a good move or not. And there's starting to be some discovery and intent. Friends. I don't know if you're still around, but I'm curious. Have you ever moved or transitioned a group from Facebook to school and what were the pitfalls or some of the things you ran into Facebook?
I was actually going to work on a project. This guy at Clickfunnels, he had like 70k from Facebook but he didn't end up going through with that. But I haven't done that yet. But that is something that's becoming more common.
Yep, yep. So in Ari, I think it's. I think like you can determine the engagement of the group is such a big factor too, because if the group is quote unquote dead and you're infusing all this new engagement, it's just at a macro level, it's kind of mixing in and not engaging, well, then it might be time to transition to school. And like I said, I prefer. I love throwing people into a free group, a free trial that rebuilds at the 14 day because then they can still do credit card upfront, you can still get them come into the free group and you can concentrate on just converting them as opposed to what I see typically happen in Facebook. It just balloons into this big free group and you have no idea if all the leads have been worked or what percent have been worked or like just the reporting is really bad. And then you get questions like we get internally because our free group on Facebook's like 130,000 people. And it's like, well, shouldn't we be pulling more money out of this? And it's like, well, it's kind of hard. You concentrate just on the new members. Are we trying to like re harvest and re engage all the people that have been in here entirely? So that's, that's still my opinion as of now. But obviously it's a big decision and once you commit to it, you kind of have to commit to it. You can't really go half in and half out.
I missed. I missed that part of the. Because I had to hop off yesterday call early. So you mentioned that we should transition and just bite the bullet and move people over to the paid. Like, see who's going to actually come in and go over to the paid school community.
Right. Because I mean, you're not running the free group out of the charity of your own heart, right? Like it's probably ascension motion right to your core product. So if the free group. Are you measuring effectively how much revenue you pull out of the free group? Every. Every.
No. And I can tell you right now, again, it's something like I said, Sean and I, we've just, we haven't paid like we have like I don't know, 45,000 people in there, 50 almost. But like we haven't done anything with it yet really. So I'd say nothing.
Then maybe you shouldn't transition yet. Try because really it's an acquisition source. Unless like in your email sequence they're like VSL opt in and you're downselling essentially or like putting people into the free group from there. But if they're finding it and you have actual demand intent and that's a different acquisition channel, truly, then you should just try to see for commit for a month. Assign a leader on your set team or someone to be like, that's what we did. Joel and our team could talk about just how he breached our free group because for a while we didn't have any coherent strategy and didn't report how much revenue we pulled out of that group every month.
