119: Facebook Group Yay or Nay?

Should I have a separate social media account for my subscription box? Should I have a private Facebook group for my subscribers? These are both questions I get every single month. In this quick episode, I'm breaking down both of these questions, so put your headphones on and come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. Our last episode on the Launch Your Box podcast was all about public and paid content, and that typically goes hand in hand with a private Facebook group. And there are questions that I get all the time. There's two of them that we're going to talk about today. The first one is, should my subscription box be on separate social media page than the rest of my business? So we're going to talk about question number 1. And question number 2 is, should I create a private Facebook group for my box subscribers? So I get asked these probably at least once a month, all the time, and we're going to break them down today on this episode of the Launch Your Box podcast. Now, when we talk about both of these questions, and I would tell you that the answer to both of these is depends. It depends. It's not a yes or no answer for either of these questions. And that's why I'm doing this podcast episode. So let's start off with question number 1. Should I have a separate social media page solely for my subscription box than the rest of my business? When anyone asks me that question, this is the first thing that I ask them. Is that subscription box for the same ideal customer as your regular business page? And the, if the answer is yes or no, that's gonna determine my answer for you. If your subscription box is for the exact same person that your regular business page is for, then no, you don't want a separate social media page for your subscription box. If your subscription box is for a different ideal customer than your existing business, that is the only time that you would wanna have a separate social media account for that. And I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about why that is. The first thing is that the benefits of really keeping things on the same page is one, this is the biggest one, you're not doing double work. So posting over here, posting over there, video over here, video over there, you're doubling your workload. And right now I would tell you that the biggest stressor for a lot of small businesses is keeping up with the social media rat race. What if you had to do that times 2? I don't want that for anyone. So I don't want you doing double work. The second reason to just leaving it on your main page is that you're not having to go over here and build an audience from scratch on a brand new social media account. Anyone that has done that recently knows how painstakingly slow it is to do that. And so I don't want you to have to go build an audience from scratch for your subscription box only. And if you're building your business from scratch, you don't want to have to do that twice. Like, you want to do it in one area. Okay, the third benefit to keeping it all together is that you're able to sell multiple things to the audience. Okay, so if I have a business already and say that I make t-shirts, which I do, I have my business, I make graphic t-shirts, I sell graphic t-shirts. Now I want to start and I want to have a t-shirt subscription. I'm going to sell that subscription to the same people that buy my one-off graphic t-shirts. I don't want to separate that. What's going to happen is that my subscription box people are following me on that page. And they're probably going to buy one of the t-shirts that I've made that are not in their subscription box. You're also going to have people that buy your one-off products a lot that are going to say, oh, maybe I need this subscription box. So you're going to be able to sell multiple things to the different audiences, whether they're a subscriber or not. You'll be able to sell— if they're not a subscriber, you'll be able to sell them a subscription. If they are a subscriber or interested in your subscription, you're going to put other things in front of them. And that would even include, oh, now I have a tote bag. Now I have a monogrammed whatever that may be. I have a monogrammed tumbler. All the things that I sell, just because someone is a t-shirt subscriber does not mean that I want to go put them separate on social media for my t-shirt subscription only. That t-shirt subscriber probably really loves all the jewelry that I sell. They probably really would love that crossbody bag that I just put on my page. And so if I had my subscriptions separate on a separate page, they would be missing out on the opportunity to see all of that content. Could someone follow both pages? Yes. But why would you do that? Why would you create double work for yourself? Why would you separate the audience when it's the same person, the same person following you? For social media on your subscription is going to be the same person following you on social media for all the other things that you sell. If your ideal customer is the same, keep them on one social media platform. Now let's talk a little bit about having a physical location versus an online location. Okay, so I struggled with this a little bit in the beginning. I had a local brick-and-mortar physical store, and when I started my subscription box, that was the very first thing that I ever sold online. So we had all the products in my store and then we had the subscription box online and that was it. I didn't sell anything else online at the time, and I really struggled with posting stuff about the store because before, only the people that were following me were local to my business. And so I would post about the store all the time and all the items that we had in the store. And once I started to build the subscription box business, I was now getting customers from all over the country because I offered it online. So then they were following my page too, and there became this disconnect. Well, I saw you posted this cute display of all these cardigans you have in your store. Can I buy that online? And so I thought, oh, I need to maybe separate these because my online customers, my subscribers that were not local, couldn't buy the things that I had in my local brick and mortar. And so I struggled with that for a little while and I decided it was going to hold me back if I had to separate these things and if I had to only sell things to people either locally or online, that I was holding both parts of the business back. And so that's when I decided to go all online with my business. I had my local brick and mortar, but everything I had there, I also had online. And I was able to bridge the gap between my subscribers being able to get something and my local people being able to get something. And the, the interesting part is, is that I had over 400 local subscribers. So I wanted to show my subscription locally. I didn't want to put it on a separate page. But I also had all these new people in my world that were following me on social media that now I could sell stuff across the country. And so it was a battle for me to figure this out. But once I went online and once I made my page a hub for not only my subscribers but also for my local customers, that's when my business exploded. When I decided that I wasn't going to hide my subscription on my page anymore, that I was going to actually bring it to the forefront and make it the the main part of my business. I switched from my local brick and mortar being the main part of my business to my subscription box being the main part of the business. And when I made that switch on my social media page, that's when my subscription box exploded. It wasn't an afterthought. It wasn't like, oh, I have this brick and mortar store and oh, by the way, I have a subscription. Now it's I have a subscription. Oh, and by the way, if you're local, come see me here. And if you're not, here's where you shop online. And once I made the subscription the main part of my page, the business exploded, the subscriptions exploded, and that's how I expanded my reach, my sales, and my subscriber numbers. If I would have separated them, I would have been excluding big groups of people on both sides. and I didn't wanna do that. I don't wanna do double work. I didn't wanna build a new audience from scratch, and I wanted to be able to sell everything I had to everybody. And once you have that mindset, you wouldn't wanna have a separate page for your subscription anyway. That is the answer for you. If your subscription is for the same ideal customer as your existing business page, you do not have a separate social media. If your subscription is for something completely different and for a different ideal customer, yes, you want to have a separate page and yes, you will be building an audience from scratch on your new page. Okay, so that is question number 1 about should I have a separate subscription box social media presence than my existing business? So that is how we answer that. Now let's get into the Facebook group question because it's one of the questions that I get so much and I've got questions too. I've got questions that you need to think about before you can answer this because it's the same answer as the page question. The answer is it depends. Okay, should I have a private Facebook group for my subscribers? That's the question I get all the time. My question back to you is, are you delivering content outside of your products from the box? Okay, so are you delivering any additional content outside of what they physically get inside the box? And that would include teaching, that would include tutorials, that would include maybe a book club, that would include like an accountability group. So anything that they get outside outside of the physical products, are you delivering any of that content? Okay, so that's the first question. If the answer is yes, then I'm going to tell you yes, you should have a private Facebook group. Okay, now the second question I'm going to ask you is, do you need a private community for your subscribers to feel comfortable sharing in? Okay, so this would be if you have a topic-focused community. And when I say topic-focused, I'm talking about maybe like a health concern or a health topic. I'm thinking about Susan who has Hanging On to Hope, which is a cancer survivor box. That is a topic-focused community that we would want to create a private Facebook group so that those people could share in a safe place. I also think about topics like marriage or kids or relationships. Those would be a topic-focused community or subscription box. If you have a subscription box, maybe it's around a certain health concern or topic or relationship or something like that, that you need a private community for your subscribers to feel safe and comfortable sharing and engaging in, then that would be the second reason that I would want you to have a private Facebook group for your subscribers. Okay, I don't want you just to create a group to have a group. Like, we're not just like, oh, I have a subscription, I've got to create a Facebook group. No, you don't. I do not have a Facebook group. I do not want a Facebook group. I focus my time public-facing because one, I'm not delivering anything outside of my products for my box, and number two, I don't need a private community for my subscribers to feel comfortable sharing anything. So The answers to both of those questions are no. If you, if your answer to either of those questions is yes, then I'm going to recommend that you do have a private Facebook group. Okay. So let's break down a few of the pros and cons of having a Facebook group so you could really make a decision for your own subscription box. So the pros of having a private Facebook group for your subscribers, number 1, creating a sense of community. Okay, you can do this on a public page and I feel like I do this well publicly, but this creates engagement and creates a bigger experience than just the box. People that are engaged and connected inside of a Facebook group like this have just a better sense of community. They're connected to one another. They also feel more connected to you. So that's one of the pros, creating a sense of community. If that's really important to you for your subscription box, then this would be one of the reasons you would want to have a group. Number 2, it's really great for research and development. Inside a private Facebook group of subscribers, you can really get their buy-in. They can help you with the processes. They can help you with selections. They kind of see a little bit more of the process of selection. You can ask them questions that maybe you wouldn't ask publicly, but it's great for research and development. Number 3, it creates a sense of exclusivity. One of the ways that we sell a subscription is exclusivity, like being a part of something that not everybody else is a part of. And having a group like this helps you create this sense of exclusivity. They feel special knowing that they, they're part of a select group that has private access to you or your content and also to each other. So those are 3 pros to having a Facebook group for your subscribers, creating a sense of community, research and development, and creating a sense of exclusivity. Okay. When we think about the cons of having a private Facebook group, I've already told you that it's super time-consuming. So if you're going to have a private Facebook group for your subscribers, you've gotta have dedicated resources to moderating the group, creating engagement in the group, responding to questions, and addressing any issues that might come up in the group. So either you have the capacity to do this, or you're gonna have to hire someone to manage this. One of the other, the other things is when you're just starting out and maybe you have 20 or 50 or even 100 subscribers, there's not a lot of conversation with 50 people in a Facebook group. And I know that feels like a lot of people to have conversations with, but in my experience, when I started my membership and everybody was in a Facebook group, it was really quiet until I got to the 400-member point. And I was driving all of the engagement, all the conversation, and it felt like pulling teeth to get anybody to talk. And so there was no benefit to having that group because nobody was creating a community until I got enough numbers that they started to talk amongst themselves. They started to create their own community. Before then, I was creating the entire engagement conversation. I was driving all of that. It's very time-consuming. And so what you don't wanna do is to create a group, no one's talking, there's no value. You're selling the group as a benefit of being a subscriber, but there's no value to it because there's no engagement and there's no conversations. So it is time-consuming. So you wanna make sure you have the capacity or you have dedicated resources to moderating and creating engagement inside that group. Number 2 reason not to have a group is potential for negative feedback. This could go a lot of different ways. This could be maybe somebody posts that they don't like your subscription box and then other people get on the bandwagon of, oh yeah, I didn't like it either. And then it creates negative information inside your private Facebook group. It could also create negative environment if somebody says something that is negative towards a group of people, an affiliation, or just in general, because people in that group will associate that person's thoughts with your brand because they are in your group. And so that always makes me feel really icky about anybody saying anything that doesn't align with me. There will be a negative connotation towards you and your brand if something like that happens inside your private Facebook group. So that is something to be fully aware of, that there could be some negative feedback. Okay. And number 3, this is the biggest, maybe it's the second biggest reason because I think time-consuming is the biggest reason not to have a Facebook group. But the second biggest reason would be when we have private Facebook groups, what I see is that the business owner does too many things behind closed doors for that group and not enough front-facing activity. So we'll do a lot of teaching, we'll do a lot of engagement, we'll do a lot of interacting in that Facebook group to our paid members, but that prevents us from doing it front-facing. And so everything that we're doing, we're engaging, we're having fun, we're showing off, we're showing tell, we're showing about the subscription. We don't do it front-facing. We're doing it all for our subscribers behind the scenes. And then people don't see what is happening behind there. And that's another huge reason why I don't have a Facebook group. If I'm doing a box opening, I'm doing in front of everyone. Yes, I want my subscribers to come join and watch and have fun and interact with me. But I'm also doing it to show all the people that don't have a box what our subscribers are getting every single month. When I talk to subscribers, I talk to them on my public page because I want everyone to see how awesome it is to be a subscriber, what our subscriber community is like. If I do every bit of that behind closed doors in my private group, nobody understands what it's like to be a subscriber. And so that is really What I see a lot of times when we have a private group, we are less front-facing. And the only way that we're going to attract new people and more traffic is to do more front-facing activities. So I'm a huge proponent of not having a Facebook group for that exact reason. But it's not a yes or no answer. It's not a yay or nay. It's why do you want or need a private group? I want you to ask yourself these questions. If you're a note-taker, Grab out your notes app on your phone or piece of paper and write these down. If you're sitting here listening thinking, I'm not sure if I want a private Facebook group or not, I want you to ask yourself these 4 questions. And the answers to these questions are going to give you a clear direction on what you should do. The first one is, why do you want or need a private group? Answer that for me. Why? Tell me why. Number 2, do you have the capacity to have a private group or are you willing to hire someone to manage and moderate that group? Number 3, what are the benefits to the subscribers for being in that group? Why should they be in that group? Why should they fill their feed every time they're on Facebook with that group? Why should they participate in that group? What's in it for them? What is the benefit for them? And then what are the benefits to you by having that group? What's in it for you? Why should you do this? So if you can clearly answer those 4 questions, you're going to be able to tell yourself yay or nay on having a Facebook group, if that's right for your subscription box business. If the idea of creating a box is swirling around in your head, I encourage you to head over to launchyourboxwithsarah.com, get on our waitlist, and grab some of our free downloads to help you get started. That's launchyourboxwithsarah.com.