A short interview-style transcript where Ruth describes rapid community growth after shifting from in-person events to online content and a free virtual conference. Key outcomes include a large increase in social followers, unexpectedly high conference registrations, and strong YouTube viewership, signaling new forms of audience engagement.
Questions this video answers
18,000 followers.
About 1,000 followers per month (estimated).
In April (the same time they had planned an in-person New York conference).
12,000 people registered.
About 1,000 to 1,500 attendees.
The growth, essentially. What does growth mean? Do you send? Your community has grown. Where were you before? Where are you now? Where you're heading to in terms of how big is your community?
Ruth, we've got 18,000 followers on Twitter. That's growing at a rate of about a thousand a month, I think, because we suddenly have a lot more interesting content that we put out and I don't know exactly the size of our community at the moment. We ran a free conference in April, about the time we were meant to be running our New York in person conference. And we couldn't run it, it was postponed. And we very quickly turned around a free kind of online conference with a lot of the speakers who had been coming and 12,000 people registered for that, which just absolutely blew our mind. You know, we're used to running conferences for 1000 people, 1500 people, and 12,000 people registered for it. So we've seen growth this year that we just couldn't have contemplated before as we were kind of slowly adding people who recommended other people. Our list in the past would be made up of basically people who've attended our events before. And suddenly our community is growing because people want to access our content. This is quite a new concept for us. It's very exciting.
It's very exciting. As a marketeer and as a business strategist within the online communities space, I was amazed when I've seen that, okay, so a physical event, a thousand attendees, 1500 attendees, and suddenly you get 12,000 people joining. That to me is community love. When community shows, when they can show up and showing up at your event, showing up at your surveys, showing up when you do call for papers, showing up. And I just really wanted to highlight this because this is amazing. So showing up to your YouTube channel that the top 10 most viewed YouTube sessions and events have a combined audience of 5 million views.
