How to build an online community from scratch on LinkedIn for B2B event businesses

Absolutely fine and respectable. So great, let's get cracking. Regan, I'm really, really excited. So over to you and let us know what you have.

Thank you, Ricardo. So, you know, we use the word communities here, LinkedIn communities. We're not using the word groups. Now what's the difference between a group and a community? You know, I'm not gonna, you know, debate, debate that, but the key word here is community, which the success of this comes down to community management. And I think that is what 99.99% of the 3 million LinkedIn groups don't have. So keyword community, LinkedIn community. So throughout this I could have interchanged the word LinkedIn group and community. But what I always mean is community with community management. Now, tangible outcomes and tangible and value that you get from a well run, well engaged, you know, lots of member type community. There's two key tangible outcomes that you can track back to your community. Let's take event promotion. Event promotion. What you've got is you've got, let's say you've got 2,000 community members. How many of those community members attended your event? Very tangible. You can go back and say, right, you know, from this many members, we had this many attendees. Similarly with B2B and demand generation with social selling, you know, how many of our community members became leads? Very, very, very tangible. So those two are probably the most tangible kind of outcomes that you will get from a well run LinkedIn community. Now the others are also valuable. One of the great things you can do within a community, and I'll go into this in detail later, you've always got a community Manager, but in B2B terms, it's always great to also have a thought leader. So someone in your company who's at that thought leader status, the community manager, can kind of create a podium for that particular individual. So a well run community is great for thought leadership. I've got brand building in there, but one of the things I'll come to later, you don't want to make this community about your brand. In due course, once you've got an established, engaged community, it's fine to kind of up the ante as far as the brand's concerned, but you certainly don't want to come out with a branded community. Content marketing and target market insights, those two kind of go hand in hand. You've got your target Personas in a community. You put out content. Are they engaging with it? No, they're not. Okay. That content isn't really working. There's lots of ways that you can get insight from your community members within the group. You run a poll, which is a new feature that LinkedIn have brought in. You're on a poll. Polls are very easy to engage with. You can test, you can market test your target Personas within a group.

I think Regan, on one element, I think we can see clearly from the people that in the audience they say that about 60, 70% of the audience already has a community. So we'll kind of clearing the elements of, okay, the benefits of it. One of the key fundamental things that I've seen in my history is that many companies like to call their community based on their brand or they like to call their community based on their event. And that is as I understand it from you, like it's one of the first mistakes or do not go areas within community building.

Right, Correct, correct. You know, and you can kind of judge that, you know, if you, if your community name doesn't have it and if it has it, you know, what is your invitation to join ratio? You know, you know, a potential member is going to be much more likely to join a community that is brand neutral. You know, if I'm going to join a branded community, I'm going to be sold to, you know, in due course. Once you get to a critical mass, critical membership, you've got an engaged environment. It's all right to bring in the branding powered by, supported by, but you need to focus on your audience and their motivations, not yourself.

Cool. And I think let's just kind of go into the real meat of it. And I think the fundamental thing, I think the basis of when you opened the conversation right now and said, okay, LinkedIn communities, it might as well be on wherever you want them to have, you know, a well run community is fundamentally based around some successful building blocks. So one is the management of the community. And I know that you're going to share, you're going to go more into detail about it because we were talking about the iceberg model then everyone thinks that running a community is just about posting stuff and responding to commentary. But that's actually very, very small part of the process. So, and then, but definitely we're going to touch on that. So what's, what would you say? You know, you've got this kind of area here, you've got this model where you have like the build the successful community building blocks. Can you talk us through around that? And, and then we can then delve into the specific of management and start kind of going into it. I'm really desperate to Start asking so many questions.

No trolling, please. Look, so we're using, you know, we're saying successful community building blocks. So this doesn't necessarily have to be a LinkedIn community. You know, as you said earlier, it could be an online community, it could be a forum outside any social network, it could be a Facebook group. Dare I say it, there's lots of reasons why, you know, to get kind of tangible ROI on things like social selling and event marketing. LinkedIn is better than Facebook, but I'm sure we discuss that later. But there's four critical building blocks. And, you know, sometimes I want to say one's more important than another, but it's not true. These four need to work together. You get one of them wrong and your potential, your community potential is not going to be fulfilled. But as we said earlier, the first thing is positioning. The theme, the description, the name of your community. It's absolutely imperative to approach this selflessly. It's not about me, it's about the members you know. So if you've done target Persona research, you'll understand what your target Persona's motivations are. So you want to form a description and position the community around your target members. Deep professional interests, their aspirations, their challenges. You want to create a destination where they'll come in and network with their peers and where they'll learn, etc. Etc. So the worst thing you can do is make it about yourself. So initially you think brand neutral. In due course, we can change that slightly and how, you know, you got your positioning right or wrong. Going back to the point earlier, you know, you look at, If I invite 500 people to join my community, how many actually join it? If 25 to 40, 50% if you're lucky, join your community, your positioning is probably working, so you've got it right. If under 10% invite to join ratio, your positioning is off. And over the years, I've been forced by a client, so no names, they've said, look, we want to call it this, this is how we want to position it. And I'm like, this is going to be a disaster. I'm going to be pushing water uphill to get people to join it, because their perception will be, I'm going to join a group or a community. That's not for me, it's for them. So selflessly positioning.

And then I think one of those elements, to put it on the context of some of the people in the audience, that they run events, that they run training programs, that they run membership propositions. And again, this is Something that has to do as well. Like how do. Even how you name your community, you're not going to name your community about your event, you're going to name your community is about the industry. So we're talking about event marketing community or the event marketing place or it's also keyword friendly. Right. We have to use the same basic principles of SEO actually, for argument's sake, right?

Yes, indeed you do. Indeed you do. I mean, you don't, you don't really see people joining groups or communities until you've got a certain number, you know, so, but you're right, you know, people are kind of, you know, are there any groups? And they are searching, they are searching using keywords. So you're right. But you know, that's picked up on the description anyway, so, yeah, and Regan.

Now that you said, what is that magic number? Then so many people here will have communities. So I guess question number one, and I might be interjecting here from something that we might be covering, but we might as well deal with it. What is the right number? When you say hitting certain number, what is the number initially when you're talking about member growth that you want to be looking at as a decent number to start with and at what point in time they would begin doing that?

Yeah, look, so I mean, the magic, magic number when you start seeing organic, organic joiners, which mean you're not actually out there, you know, hustling for like, you know, to recruit new members is 10,000. Once you hit 10,000, you can almost stop being proactively to, you know, to recruit members. They'll come organically. And you can imagine inviting someone to a community with 50 people in it, they're like, well, it's not really a community, that's just like a, you know, big family. So the magic numbers, you know, the first critical mass is around the 1500, 2000 mark. And what you'll see is, you know, again, talking about kind of invite to join ratio. You know, when a commute, when a community gets to 1500, you know, someone sees that number goes, oh, yeah, okay. You know, you know, I want to get in there. Fear of missing out. But when you're inviting someone to join a community and there's like 15 of you much, much harder.

Okay, okay, so that's an interesting thing. So first, first milestone. So if I am understanding this right, Regan, so a decent number of 10,000 member community, then you're going to have to, basically, you don't really have to start worrying too much about proactively Growing it because then that's critical mass so that people find it, people talk about it, etc, etc. So then we look up a lot about proactive community management. As you, as you mentioned it, there's the first milestone. If I am starting an online community from scratch or if I'm getting a group of people getting together. The first milestone, 1500 to 2000 bucks. Okay. Yeah. Is that right? Yes.

Excellent. There's one exception to this and I've worked on a couple of communities over the years where they were just so well positioned. They were just singing to the audience. Amazing. So organic growth came very, very early. You know, six, seven weeks ago we started a virtual event community. You know, 1600 members, you know, six weeks, hardly any growth tactics because it's so well positioned. But yeah, the magic number is 1500-2000.

Okay, that's very interesting. And by the way, to everyone in the audience, I have asked Regan that if it's okay. We wanted to see some real, real examples of communities. And then interestingly, I mean Regan has built many, many communities. They successfully run two or three communities for the events industry professionals alone from the social effect. And they run various very successful online communities for their clients. And then Regan, if you guys are interested in seeing some real life examples, we're going to dissect some of those post webinar if we have enough people kind of keen to understand and see how it's done. After the webinars ended, we're going to have like an after hour session so we could kind of visualize it because it's very, very interesting because let's just go into the element rigging. And I posted something on social Today based on our conversations about the iceberg. Should we talk about the iceberg or there's anything else that we want to kind of COVID on this particular slide.

I mean these are the four building blocks, so they're all critical. So let's keep on with this slide.

Yeah. Because I think this is absolutely fundamental, Rigan, and I love when you've explained this to me because the reality is that most of the professionals out there that are either A thinking about launching communities or B planning on hiring someone to manage their communities, they think that it's all about the tip of the iceberg. Tell us a bit more about this.

Right, so if you, I mean how, how much time do you need to invest in building a successful community? And look, you know, some of the. This is a guide and they kind of fluctuate at different points and different maturity stages of your Community, Roughly, that's around 11 and a half, 12 hours early on the first three months. Maybe it's more, maybe it's more. You wouldn't want it to be less. But we use the iceberg analogy because above the waterline, that's what you see in a community. So, so you come to a LinkedIn group and go, that's crap. You know, we come to a LinkedIn. No, you go to a LinkedIn group and you go, that's crap. You come to a LinkedIn community and go, wow, that's awesome. But it's awesome because of what is going on below the waterline under that particular iceberg. And community growth is probably. Getting members into your community is probably the most time consuming and it's the most heavy lifting. And so what we've always done is we've always set a kind of a target. We want to grow a community nice and steadily, not too fast, not too slow, keep it consistent. We've grown Microsoft communities at 900amonth. The ideal number is around the 200amonth. So there's multiple tactics to grow your community. So look, let's say you start a community, a LinkedIn community. The first thing you want to do as far as the recruitment phase is what's your first level network like? What are your team's network like? I mean, what's your company network like? So the first thing you want to do is you want to invite existing first level connections to join. Really, really simple, you know, in a LinkedIn group it's got a function, invite connections. And literally you click on that button, your first of all connections come up and you can invite, invite, invite. So you spread that out, you know, amongst your team, amongst your company. So you get the first run of people coming in, they kind of know you, they trust you a little bit, they, you know, so you get this base based on your first level connections.

Good. Riggan, just, just to be clear for the audience in place, because we're talking about, yes, we're talking about the community management, which is kind of what is about the surface. But now we're kind of building as well the growth because. Exactly. Okay, I want to set up my community and there's a growth, what people. And I think which kind of forms the basis of the debate that you and I were having offline. And I want to bring that online, which is about, okay, are really LinkedIn groups the place where you want to build a community. And then I think that is kind of one of the first fundamental thing. And obviously the answer from your side is, yes, and then you're going to explain a little bit more. But, and the first point is, because having A group on LinkedIn is going to allow you to do what you've just said. Invite your first line of connection. So if your business, your event or wherever company you work for, when you, the first things that you launch your community, the first stage is invite your first line of connections, let's say, compile all the, all the connections that you as a business have and invite them one to one to join the community. Right, that, that's what I'm understanding.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know, the thing about LinkedIn communities over Facebook is there's a profile, there's a detailed business profile sitting on LinkedIn. You can look at a LinkedIn profile and go, this is the ideal community member. What are you doing? What are you gonna do on Facebook? A Facebook group? You know, you just have a look at their, you know, their cat, their wife, the family, what do they do? You know, having that. I mean, I mean, LinkedIn is the best B2B database in the world, hands down. So you've got that, you've got that database. So identifying the people you want to invite to your community on LinkedIn is easy. So you can identify them. Then it's getting them in, it's getting them in. So the first, as you said, the first technique, you know, is easy. Invite your network after that. You've got to be proactive. You've got to be proactive. And to hit a target like 200amonth, month in, month out, means you really need to kind of focus on multiple tactics. So one of the great things about being a community manager, if I've got a LinkedIn profile saying, Community manager, I'm a neutral, dude, I'm neutral. If I've got a profile saying sales or business development or marketing, someone's going to be going, eh, you know, do I want to connect with someone? So one of, one of the very proactive methods that we'll use, a community manager will go out and connect with potential community members and once I've connected, they will invite them to join. And, you know, so as a community management profile, having community manager profile, your connection success rate is typically, you know, 30 to 50%. If you are a kind of salesman connecting with prospects, your connection rate depends, isn't very high. So a proactive method, community manager goes out there and connects and invites. Now some of the cool functionality that's just come back. So five years ago, LinkedIn had a bit of functionality that if you and I were in the same LinkedIn group, I could invite you, I could communicate with you. So five years ago you had to opt out to receiving messages from fellow group members. So let's say I wanted to grow an HR community. What I would do is I would join all the other HR LinkedIn groups and I could actually go into them and poach members out of their groups to come and join mine. Join mine. It's well positioned community manager, you know, so you could poach out of other groups. Now LinkedIn killed that functionality five years ago because a lot of spammers were using it. Well, you know, I mean, LinkedIn take away a lot of functionality and in groups they have been bringing it back and back and back. A month ago LinkedIn brought back that functionality. So another very proactive method that you would use to grow your community, you join competing communities and you can message members in those groups to join your community. Now one of the other cool things about that is the best members, the members that are going to engage. So jump onto a competing LinkedIn group, look at who's engaging and then message them with, with a very personalized message saying, hey, I see you're engaged in this group. We've got a better one, we've got a community, come and join that. So you're not only recruiting members, you're recruiting engaged members. We've used inmails, paid in mails, kind of aren't too expensive. If you do them well, you put a kind of a benchmark, what's a member worth? But you want to have four or five different tactics, you know, use all four or five of them the whole time and then you will hit the 200 to 300 mark per month.

That's really interesting, Riga. And I think this is kind of the fundamental. And then I know that we're going to have these people in the audience saying, hang on, but why are you going to go, you know, are those kind of good tactics to go on someone else's LinkedIn group and then start kind of poaching people to come and join your group and everything? And I probably, I'm sure that you have an answer. But my answer to that would be, well, at the end of the day, aren't you going to try to poach your competitors clients and using whatever means to get them to your board? So I think it's a very fair tactic. But what would you say to someone and say, hang on, what is it that going to other LinkedIn groups and poaching people, what Would you say to that? Regan? Hello? Hello, give me a quick second.

Hello?

Please, someone in the panel, can you let me know if you're hearing me, please? Okay, so people are hearing me. So great. Thank you guys. Thank you, Regan. So we've lost Regan for a moment, so let's just hope that he's able to log back in. But again, I think what, what Rigam was saying and then I think many, many people are saying, okay, the big key thing, and this is, by the way, I was a reluctant person to steal people going from to the LinkedIn groups creation or using the tools available to them. But the reality, the big fundamental piece that I think I wanted to highlight is the big piece that I want to Highlight is the LinkedIn group. It's just predominantly about the functionality that is available to you as a business to engage with the wider audience within LinkedIn. Okay? Very, very important because I think a lot of people then go launch their community, they'll send emails out to their own databases to their event participants and people like that. And then they will then basically that's all that they will do. But then remember, you have the ability if you join the link and I think what is very clear from Rigan's word is that if you are a member of a LinkedIn group not yours, if you are a member of a LinkedIn group that is not yours, you can go and invite them to come to another event. And I know that then we had a member of the audience that weighed that said, oh, if I get a LinkedIn invitation I wouldn't join it. And then that's something that we can just basically discuss later. But very, very clear, important. The LinkedIn groups functionality for engagement is S H I T but is the functionality that allows you to have on the back end for you to grow it, for you to bring in and to reel these people in. So Regan, we brought you back on board.

I was so mortified about that question. I just like couldn't slam my computer down. No, I didn't.

You're not going to run away from the tough questions, Regan, because I'm going to ask those tough questions which I think is about, okay, the LinkedIn group. Okay? Oh my God. And I was just kind of clarifying until you kind of look back on that. I was just basically saying the key element of the LinkedIn group functionality for your community is that you have actually functionality available to you to do the thing. So basically everything that is underneath what lies underneath the iceberg, which is what many people don't do. And I have clients saying to me, Ricardo, I've got clients saying to me, Ricardo, I've got 25,000 people in the LinkedIn community. What should I do? And I'm like, okay, those guys that are here today, and I know that we've got some of you here, please remember, is about what is at the bottom of the iceberg. So I'm going to repeat that for you guys, is invite your own connections. Yes, through LinkedIn, through your emails and everything. But be proactively. The community manager needs to be proactively connecting with people on LinkedIn, on other groups, you're looking at competing LinkedIn groups, you're looking at sending perhaps some emails to get them to invite to, to join the community or to join the group, et cetera, et cetera. Over to you, Regan. So anything else that we can hear about this.

Look, there's one more kind of tactic which we're using more and more, and I mean with LinkedIn hashtags. So here's a prime example. A lot of people are posting content with hashtags and let's say your community aligns with that particular hashtag. So, you know, virtual events. Virtual events, it's all over the place. You know, we will go into, follow that hashtag if someone posts. There's quite a lot of engagement around a bit of content. We'll go, hey, we don't want to hijack this post, but There's a new LinkedIn community all about virtual events. Why don't you check it out and you know, if you've got posts with a lot of comments on it, following that hashtag, following that technique, you'll pick up 20% of the commenters in the group, in the community. So that's another tactic that should be used often.

And then I think this is very, very interesting and fundamental. I mean, what to me, what I, and I, what I really want the audience to understand is, and I'm sorry to pick so much on it, but I think for the audience here, that I know, I know many of you guys, they're like the tip of the iceberg, if you look at it in comparison from a community manager, they should be spending one and a half hours per week roughly engaging with the community. But if you look at the amount of time that they need to be actively and proactively working, we're talking about two, six, probably about eight hours additional to doing this proactive engagement. And I think that is absolutely fundamental. And I think I get a lot of invitations to participate in some kind of Groups and in some sort of discussions and I think just to tap onto some of the questions, I don't necessarily engage with all of them because I need to know that it is worth my time or it is worth my. Because I mean people say that I am a LinkedIn extrovert and so I get invitations precisely from people that are another group and say hey do you mind coming to my group and, and have a conversation that you want because you know that you're going to bring certain audiences. So you also need to be looking out for all those LinkedIn extroverts of course that are within your community that are important to bring, which I think Regan and I don't know, I'm still. Why 200 and why not? Okay, why not 500? Why not a thousand a week?

Yep, good question. Because you know a great community manager is building relationships with the community members, you know, so when everyone joins it's a personalized message. Hey Ricardo, you know, thanks for joining. I see you do this, see you know this guy. Fantastic. Look, could I, could I get you to introduce yourself? You know, you know, so the community manager is building one on one relationships from the get go, you know, so you know, over 200, you can't do that effectively.

Right.

You know, so if a full time community manager should be managing, can be managing three LinkedIn groups or communities, you know, that's kind of max.

Three communities. A community manager can manage three communities full time.

Full time, yeah. I mean in that iceberg I think we've actually used the term community management team. So normally what we would do is we have a specialist team who's about growing communities. We've got community managers who will be about, you know, content engagement, you know, building one on one relationships so we can split it up.

I see, I see. Okay so, and I think that is kind of element and I've got some questions coming up here and I want to bring some of them already because I think this is kind of important. I think Daniele, you've asked about statistics and then how many group members are actively checking posts and how many members and I think part of the iceberg that you had was, okay, that is fundamentally where you need to tap into the reporting bit. You need to be knowing if you're doing your own posts as the owner of that community or that group, then you need to be managing what posts are getting the most engagement, getting the most views and everything. And you're able to track that on the groups. Correct?

Yes you are. Yes you are. Look, it's manual. Unfortunately it's manual. And again, talking about LinkedIn group functionality being ripped away. I mean, five years ago when everyone goes LinkedIn groups were great, now they're not. LinkedIn started taking away functionality from groups and there was amazing LinkedIn statistics. You could go into a group before you joined it and go, oh, look at the engagement. This many comments, this many posts, these are the members. They took that away. LinkedIn had an API. We get really good statistics from who's engaging, who's not. They took that away. So to look at statistics, what we do is we've got a content calendar and it's normally a one month rolling content calendar that's flexible, we can change it. But what we're doing at the end of the month or whenever it is, you look back and go, hey, this post worked. This one didn't. We bombed on that. No one cares about this. Let's focus on what was working. So you're recording things like how many comments you got, how many likes and stuff you got a particular post. But it's all manual and that's all kind of down under the iceberg, you know. You know, under the reporting component.

Yeah. And I've got some question from Maria that said, what if we don't have a brand ambassador to drive and motivate the community and how difficult is it to start a community without a driver? I think the answer is already kind of been implicit in what we've discussed it. Right. So the answer is impossible. You better not do anything impossible.

But I think, but I think, you know, that's the expectation of 99.99% of LinkedIn group owners.

Correct.

Just put it up, you know, they'll come, you know, we know that doesn't work. Yeah.

And I think, you know, we've got another question from Soli which is what's, what's the use of building a community? It's not for ulterior brand motives. Surely there must be a value in the community for member. But no one does this for nothing. At what point does one start proper brand communications? So I guess from what I understand in Sally is that you build a community, you want to invest time with your community manager. For many of that, that is a salary, very likely a salary from someone that actually understands your audience, commands the topics within your audience. So that means let's say a salary or the equivalent of a full time employee, if they're hiring someone like Riple or, or the social effect, do that. Now, at what point in time can I sell my event at what point in time can I tell them, I've got this amazing product, I've got this amazing demo, I've got, or we're amazing at this product. How does that work?

Okay, I mean, events and demand generation are two different things really. For events, it's about volume. You really want to have quite a lot of members. And look, if you got to a community in three months of 2000, boom, invite them. Individual invitations, promote it in the group, recommend the post. But what we do as far as social selling is concerned from a demand generation perspective is we talk about three months, you want a member to join, and on month four, the community manager has already had three or four interactions with that particular person. The person may or may not have responded or posted because in social media terms we talk about the ratios between engagement and not 1% of your members will be highly engaged, 9% will be semi engaged and 90% will lurk, be lurkers. So 90% of your audience won't engage. So, you know, again, this comes down to, you know, the more members you got, you know, the higher percentages of, you know, active and semi active members. But as far as social selling is concerned, you know, the community manager has had two or three interactions with that particular individual. In month four, we will start doing a lead generation program, you know, on that particular particular individual. And, you know, so we've got a nurturing process and look, one of the killer methods, and this is basically how I establish the social effect. You know, I went to, you know, I went out for lunch somewhere, some guy in London goes to me, I've got an agency, you know, social media, we don't do it, there's no ROI in it. I was like, well, actually, I tell you what, there is ROI in it, you know, and I went to LinkedIn groups. So here's how we did it. And this is the first time we went, oh, this actually works. The community manager has had interactions with a potential prospect. Two or three, month four, the community manager goes, hey, hey, Ricardo, I was talking to Peter about what you do at this particular company. I think it'd be great to connect you two for a conversation. I just, you know, just for, just for a chat. Would that be okay? So in social media terms that's called a bridge. So you got a bridge. So the community manager then bridges the relationship between, you know, prospect and community owner, put them together. And when we first ran that, we had 50% of the members saying more than happy to speak to this particular individual. So the answer is it's a process and typically after three months you'll start that now that's below the iceberg. You know, it's not, it's not on top. No one's seen that. It's below the iceberg. That's where all the magic is. Below.

Yeah. And then I think there's a big fundamental. Let's remember that about 60% of the audience, majority of the audience on this session today are from a B2B organization, from a B2B tech. So they're probably more like into the demand generation type of thing. And you know, from what I. B2B organizations are very good at the demand generation. They're very good at the, you know, inbound selling and you know, all that sort of stuff. Event organizers and companies that promote events and everything are not that great at it. That's kind of why they are finding most of the times very difficult to understand. That's why we might have some questions as to can we just have the community group there and just broadcast and do all that stuff? And I think that's kind of absolutely, fundamentally wrong. So. And I just want to reiterate for me what I used to, what I used to think about is because the most of the companies that I used to have conversations with, they were wanting to have engagement in the community, etc, etc. But I think the element of below the iceberg is the point that they have not necessarily been capitalizing on. And that's kind of why they're having these communities with 2003 or groups with 2000, 3000, 4000, 10,000 people dead, you know, not doing anything. And I think that is kind of a fundamental difference. The, the one to one direct messaging, below the iceberg. Now Regan, one thing that I think is fundamentally important and I want to touch on that, which is you have a community wherever you have them, basically platform agnostic, whether you're using LinkedIn, Facebook groups, your own program, your own website, etc. This is what happens. And this is clear. Many people don't understand this. 1% of your community is going to be highly engaged, 9% are going to be doing some bits, you called it selling or semi active, semi active. And 90% are just literally observing. That's the fundamental element. You look at the people that are engaging, but there's also a lot of individuals that you can tap into to bridge that gap. Now tell us about the tier ones because I think this is critical when you guys are launching your own community in whatever platform. We're talking about three tiers of individuals. That you need to bring in order to do your selling, in order to facilitate that bridge. Talk to us a lot about the three tiers of members.

Yes. So let's, let's say we've got a growth target of 200 members a month. What we do is we break that into three tiers. Tier one would be members who joined from the right target company, right job titles, right seniority. That tier one, they are your ideal prospects, they are decision makers. Tier twos and this is really about B2B or it's about exhibition sales for, for events. Tier 2s would be people from the right company, not the right job title. So they would, so they would be kind of decision influences maybe. But tier ones are perfect. Tier two is right target account. Tier 3s are consultants. Tier threes are people in the industry who really want to be vocal. People who, you know, kind of need to get out there to kind of promote themselves. Even though we'll be on an iron fist. No, no, you can't post that self promotion. So by combining those three tiers, you've got a highly, highly engaged audience which will stimulate the Tier 2s to do more interaction. And the tier ones, who, from a B2B social selling perspective, you were going after.

Right? So the fundamental thing is because everyone said, okay, LinkedIn groups, they are place for spammers, they're a place for broadcasters, they're a place for everyone. And LinkedIn groups are packed and full of them. So. But I think, so what I'm hearing is those are the guys that you can convert from, call it a spammer, an annoying person into an advocate. Right? How do you go about that?

Yes, I mean, the community manager, you know, I go around saying we moderate with an iron fist, but it's not really the case. I mean, obviously if you're proactively community managing, if someone posts something that is self promoting or spammy, if you like, the community manager deletes, it obviously communicates with that individual and go, hey, this is self promotion. Here's the community guidelines. It's a don't do it, please. But instead of just cutting them off at the knees, they then say, hey, look, if you want to get engagement in this particular community, change tact, you know, instead of posting something that's self promoting, you know, post a question, you know, a question which would cover the challenges your product overcome. So what we will try and do, you know, we'll give someone three warnings and if they keep on doing it, boom, they're out and they're blocked and they won't come back. But quite often, look, one out of three, you take some time, community manager communicates with that individual and say, hey, look, self promotion doesn't work in LinkedIn groups, it's a waste of time, just don't do it. But I tell you what, if you post something, a few questions, you know, paraphrase something, we will get engagement for you. So we try and we moderate fairly get rid of the spammers, self promotion, try and turn them into, you know, kind of active members, Try to turn.

Them into active members. The tier 2, which are the guys that are within your target accounts, probably not as senior. And these might be applicable for event organizers, this might be applicable for exhibition selling or sponsorship selling. By the way, LinkedIn groups, those promoters, those broadcasters are all of them most likely coming from companies that are trying to get some selling of some sort of product and service. And those are the ones that I probably get. Turning those into advocates and everything will help bridge sales communications there from the sponsorship point of view or that angle. So the tier 2 are the ones that obviously are going to help influence that, the conversation. Right. And how do you get, so how do you get, how do you engage the 90% that are just literally observing?

Well, you try to a point and then you go, there's no point trying, you know, you know, so I mean social media, social community management is really interesting. You know, it's quite a big thing to come in and actually, you know, if you're slightly introverted, you don't say the wrong thing to come in and actually comment on a particular post. You know, it's quite a big leap. So you know, now LinkedIn have brought back LinkedIn polls. You can do polls in groups from a social media perspective trying to get people engaging. Polls are awesome. They drop it, they've brought it back. And I say it again, there's so much more functionality coming back into groups that they will get back to where they were five years ago, but you keep on trying. The community manager goes, hey Ricardo, you know, introduce yourself. You don't, ah, okay, you try one more time, two more times. Ricardo's not responding. Okay, let's stop harassing Ricardo with kind of, you know, to try and try and get him to him to engage. You know, things like recommending a post which puts a group post into your notifications is quite a passive way to get people back into the community without one on one messaging them. So but you know, eventually just going to resign yourself to the fact that these people don't want to kind of, you know, engage. It's a fact of life.

Okay. And I understand that kind of particular part of. But then that's kind of when you might again use some of these other members or probably even via if you know that that person is a member of your group. I personally, what I have done in the past is that I have used, let's say I have emailed my contacts on my database and saying, look, I am having this discussion on this group or I'm having this discussion even, even on my personal profile. And I say, can you please offer a comment? Can you please. Because you can add value to this discussion that is also very valid. Right? Just to continue that engagement.

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's an incredible way. You know, let's say I've posted something about some technology that's quite complex. You know, we will search the LinkedIn group members and see has anyone got this technology, any experience? Can we go to them and say, hey, you're obviously an expert with this technology. We've got a conversation going here. Your insight would be invaluable. You know, you know, we all like to kind of share our expertise, you know, so, you know, you just need to take your foot off the gas. You know, you want to be very, very smart about how you get someone who hasn't historically engaged to come into, come into a group. And a great way is you look at their LinkedIn profile, you look at the skills, skills they've got, you look at what they're doing, their content that they've been engaging with, you can find a nuance to bring him back.

Okay, that's kind of an interesting part. I've got some questions here and then I'm kind of conscious that we've got about five minutes left and many, many more questions are here to come. Just I wanted to be also clarifying, if you guys want to stay after hours, after the hour, then we're very happy to continue answering the questions. And then if you have any specific ideas and everything, you want to see some examples, some communities that have kind of worked and I think Regan can share some of those ideas. But this is kind of an element, Regan, about what is permissible, what is getting classified as spam and everything. So Tom, as a member of the group has asked about, we're looking at the way that, in the way that we've promoted this event using LinkedIn posts and mentions to alert of the event. Right? There are tactics when you are promoting that, when you tag people that you think you want them to come, do you want them to attend? And so how do you do that? What is the fine balance without flooding your connections with the same message in a row? And I'm saying, does LinkedIn prevent the same post from being sent to connections?

Yeah, look, great question going back five years and this is all about LinkedIn functionality, what you can and can't do. Five years ago you could communicate with anyone who is a fellow group member. They stopped that. And subsequently to that we're like, okay, how can we communicate with people without actually connecting with them? How can we show them that there's a group or a community that we'd like them to join? And we realized that you can connect, you can actually tag people outside of your network. Look, it's a fine line, you know, you can overdo it, you can be overzealous, you know, depend depends on the, on the volume. But I tell you what, now that you can now communicate with a fellow group member, you know, with no limits, that method will slowly die. Death.

Right, right. And I just think many people are curious to learn like the tools that for instance that we used to promote this particular webinar. Right. And I just kind of want to be very, very kind of open as well to say like for instance, we created a. Because there's all the tools within LinkedIn that allow you to get or to resurface a product or an event in a particular way. So and we've emailed our internal database, we've created an event on LinkedIn because that allows you also to invite your personal connections to invite that event when someone accepts and clicks. I am attending this event that helps with internal notifications. When you do your personal post or some influencers kind of do their personal posts, then also that allows them to get disability and if you tag anyone that you're connected or any tag, because I think Riggan, LinkedIn allows you to tag people in a post that probably you're not connected to. Is that correct?

Yeah, it does. It's a little known fact out of the bag.

And then what is the balance? Because sometimes I think that can go right or wrong, right?

Yeah, look, there's a very small minority who won't like it. Often people go, hey, thanks for tagging me. You know, on the flip side you might have that this is not cool. But you know, you're talking a very, very, very low percentage, you know, with, with GDPR coming in. When GDPR came in, LinkedIn changed a few things. Basically, you know, historically before GDPR, if I tagged you you would actually get a message on your email that you've been tagged in a post. So yeah, look, it's a fine line.

Fine. Okay, so there's another question from Helga which is saying, should you build a community under your own profile or should you do it under a company or a LinkedIn group? What will be the benefit of that?

Yeah, okay, so you have to build it under your own profile. Unfortunately, you don't have a, you know, kind of corporate, you know, kind of group community management kind of profile to you. So you have to do it on your own profile. You know, we've got community managers who are either brand neutral, so community manager of this particular community, you know, so there's, there's no actual brand associated to it. Very good. In the early days when you want to be brand neutral to maximize, you know, joiners and get the engagement, or you have community managers who are working for Fujitsu or Panasonic or whatever. Certainly it's about the neutrality. The more neutral you are, the better the engagement. The better the joiners will be, the better. Etc, etc. So hopefully that answers the question.

That's fine. And then there's another, by the way, we have one minute, but we are. Reagan, are you happy to stay a little bit longer?

Right.

Answering these kind of questions that are coming through?

Yeah, sure. Yep. Good.

There's kind of one. For instance, how much content do you need to have to set up on the community page before you start inviting people to join? And what are the visible must haves that must be on the feed for them to see as they join?

Look, okay, probably three posts I would start with, you know, the best starting post is always an intro post. And you know, maybe, you know, if you get into 200 members a month, you know, create a new intro post every month, you know, so in that intro be, you know, come tell us a few things about yourself and what you want to get out of this community. So when you know, so typically you'll get 20% of the community members introducing themselves. But what's gold about that is they're saying, I'm here because I want to learn this, or I am here because I want to do that. So you're getting content ideas. So intro post and then maybe an article with a question maybe isn't this article great? Maybe it's a video, something like that. You're not going to get very much engagement on that. And then one that we always like to start with. What are your top three challenges? So to answer the question, three posts and Then after that, as a community manager, you controlling the ebb and flow, you know, there's no point posting ridiculous amounts of content so you just need to kind of feel, you know, feel what the members are like, you know, you know, so there's, you know, I go for like two posts a week but you know, sometimes if the community is absolutely bustling and there's lots of user generated content, then the community manager doesn't need to post anything. So it's just about you control the ebb and flow.

Right. And I think Regan, what communities have you seen out there that are very successful or that are successfully run? I can basically cut. I am a member of the Event Event Professionals group which is run by EventMB, which is about hundred thousand members. They have various subgroups and I know that they have like probably about six to seven community managers because to manage a community of that size, pretty damp. Have you got any examples of communities that you think are well run or that you can basically share with us what they might be? There's also another question there. If there is a marketplace for like minded industry centric communities.

I tell you what, you could imagine probably the best community on LinkedIn and it's not one of ours is a LinkedIn community, community manager community for people who are just absolutely fascinated about LinkedIn groups. And you know, it is absolutely raucous, absolutely raucous. You know, I mean LinkedIn event.