How To Use Facebook Groups For A Paid Mentorship
During the last 6 years my company, A Real Change International, has run several paid mentorship groups on Facebook. It has been easy to use, offers 100% deliverability to our members and it's free! There are a few things you must have in place to make it work well for everyone. Just because it's super easy to use doesn't mean it will be easy to manage.
After having more than 30,000 people go through our groups in the last few years, we've come up with our best practices and policies for successful group management. If you're running a paid group, this can help you to keep everyone on track, prevent you from getting into a situation of 24/7 moderation and prove to be very successful for you and your clients.
I do not encourage or like to use free groups for one very specific reason: They are often unmoderated, end up very difficult to manage and are a time robber. Rarely do people invest into a paid group after being in a free group, provided by a company. If you run a business, just say NO to free groups unless it has a very short term, easy to run focus, like we did with my #BEMORE book. For mentorships and paid classes, here are some tips that will help.
Best Policies & Practices For Paid Membership Groups On Facebook
1. Create group moderators. Make sure that your paid group has more than one admin. For us, our group moderators are our instructors and 2 other staff members. If you are running a very small business you will want to get a VA to assist you. Group moderators will help make sure the group stays secure, on track and profitable for everyone.
2. Run your group like a college class and create a group schedule. For several years we didn't do this. Our videos were posted once per week and we had a group live call but we didn't have a schedule of days for posting questions and such. Now we do. If you let the group be an 'open forum' it can quickly become a mess. Once someone is running in a direction that isn't aligned with the group's focus, it can become a nightmare trying to reel people back into the conversation. Everyone wants to talk and chat and the focus goes amuck very easily. Run your group like a college lecture hall: Focused, managed and in a strategic way. For the last 6 months we've run our groups like this, with a set day for question posts, a set day for live calls, and a set day when training videos will be posted. Here's how this plays out:
A. Q & A Day: One or two days per month in our groups, we have a question and answer day. The students will post their questions in a stream of comments under one moderated post. We give hours for Q & A, which is typically our office hours of 9 am- 430 pm CST. Then within 48 hours the instructors will post a video or an audio recording with the answers. Many times the questions are the same from different people, so you can answer several at one time. Our customers love this, as it becomes a training recording they can listen to over and over again. They also LOVE that it is focused.
B. Keep the group moderated: When we didn't have the group moderated, questions were random and all over the place. Not only did our staff and instructors feel totally overwhelmed after awhile, but our students felt distracted. Having a set day for questions and another for lessons helped everyone to learn effectively. Moderating posts prevents conversation overload and can help to keep things in order.
3. No junk policy: We have a strict 'no spam policy' in our groups. The members in our groups have paid to be with us, so it is our responsibility to make sure no one is spamming or DMing other members with their 'business opportunity'. Guard your groups- these are YOUR customers.
4. Keep healthy boundaries: Have hours in your group where people can get help for their problems. Don't allow DMs from members to the instructors. 24/7 is for an ATM, not a paid group. No personal phone calls, personal emails or other activities that pull things out of the group. Healthy boundaries = a happy group for everyone.
Serving your clients in a group on Facebook is a great way to handle your memberships. There are no headaches with forums, no programming necessary and everyone is happy. These simple policies and procedures make everyone even happier!
With love,
Sandi Krakowski
