Guest Marc Mawhinney of Natural Born Coaches joins host Julie Hood to talk about exactly how to run a successful Facebook group…what works, what doesn’t and those secrets you wish you knew before you started.
Guest Marc Mawhinney of Natural Born Coaches joins host Julie Hood to talk about exactly how to run a successful Facebook group…what works, what doesn’t and those secrets you wish you knew before you started.
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Marc’s Group Gold Program -
https://www.CourseCreatorsHQ.com/GroupGold
The Coaching Jungle Facebook group -
https://CourseCreatorsHQ.com/CoachingJungle
Natural Born Coaches Podcast -
https://CourseCreatorsHQ.com/marcs-podcast
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This week, I have a very special treat for you. Mark Mawhinney, who runs one of the most successful Facebook groups for coaches is here to spill the beans on exactly what works and what doesn't. When it comes to using a Facebook group for your course business. He answered all my questions and I can't wait to share them with you. Welcome to the course creators,
HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood. Welcome to episode 20 Mark Mawhinney builds the beans on Facebook groups. Thanks for listening. And I want to jump right in with Mark, but first a couple of things. We mentioned a lot of links in this episode, and rather than you having to try to remember all of them,
just go to coursecreatorshq.com/20 that's coursecreatorshq.com/20, and I'll put them all there for you. And then second, let's talk about Facebook groups and how as a course creator that you could or possibly best could use them first, you can use them for lead generation. So it's a free group where you're connecting with your potential students as a guru,
as the expert, and this is what Mark's group is. And so today he's going to talk to us about how he went from 300 members in 2014, all the way up to nearly 20,000 members today. Then second, you could also use your Facebook group as a community for your paid students. So this approach can also be really excellent to help your students connect with each other and help each other out sort of becoming friends along the way.
But that's not what we're talking about today. I'll save that for a future episode today, we were talking about a group that you're using for potential students. All right, so let's get to it. Here's Mark Mawhinney of natural born coaches. Welcome everybody to the course creators HQ podcast. I am thrilled to have our guest with us today. Mark Mawhinney is from natural born coaches and he has a phenomenal,
fantastic, amazing Facebook group. And he's going to tell us all about his secrets today to making it work. So mark welcome. Thank you so much for being here. I'm glad to be here. Thanks, Julie. So I want to just jump right in and please feel free to kind of weave in your history as you tell us about things and what has,
how you've put your Facebook group together and kind of how you got to it. I know you work with coaches and you have the coaching jungle, which is fantastic. So how did you get started with Facebook groups? What was kind of your intention and how did that, how did that go? Yeah, so my coaching business, I started in early 2014 and that's when I started my podcast as well,
natural born coaches. And for the first year or two of my podcast, I had a Facebook group for guests on my show. So it was called the very original name of natural born coaches past guests. So I had probably 300 members in that group because it was a daily show at the time. And it was a very tight knit group because people had to be on the show to be in there.
But what was happening was I was getting all these requests from other coaches who hadn't been on my show. They must not have noticed the past guests part in the title, the Facebook group. And I had to decline all their requests because they hadn't been on my show and I would use a shoot back a quick message, Hey, thanks for requesting to join.
But it's only for guests on my show and have a nice life. And after that happened enough, I thought, Hmm, you know what? I'm getting so many requests here. People are seeing coaches in there, you know, and that's probably drawing them. And I thought I should have a group that's for all coaches or aspiring coaches, not just so tight knit that it's former guests on my show.
And that's when I decided to launch a coaching jungle. That was September, 2015. And so it's just, we passed our five-year anniversary a while back and I decided to close up the other Facebook group to focus on the coaching jungle. And now as of today, we're just about to 20,000 members. I saw that, congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. So it's grown like crazy and having a lot of fun with it.
So When you started, what was your strategy for getting people to join or did they just ask to join? Was there a specific technique you used. Yeah I paid everyone a hundred bucks. I'm just kidding. Hey, I didn't get my a hundred bucks in the mail. You'll get it soon. It's five years late. Cause I think you've been in the group for awhile.
Well, you know, I'll be honest. I mean, it was a little bit easier for me starting the group because I'd had a following from my podcast and from other stuff I was doing. So I got the first 500 members pretty quick just from getting the word out there. Now something I did and I recommend this for all Facebook group owners,
especially new ones is I just talked about that group constantly. I said it was kind of like the parent of a newborn baby that won't shut up about the baby, you know, going on how great it is. But I think that there's something to it there. And unfortunately, a lot of group owners make the mistake of posting once or just putting up a few posts and then that's it,
you know, me, I'm emailing my list. I'm talking about it every day. I'm like, you have to be in this group if you're interested in becoming a coach or if you are a coach and you want to grow your business, come on over. So I talk to clients now sometimes, and they're a little discouraged because their group's not growing the way that they want.
I'm like, well, when was the last time you talked about it? They're like, well, you know, a couple months ago I posted about it. I'm like, oh yeah, tell me about that. Well, it was Wednesday night at 11 o'clock and you know, I got one like, and nobody joined. I'm like, yeah, you gotta do more than that.
So I got the first 500 or so pretty quickly, but then I continued to talk about it, promote it. And it was all organic, no paid advertising by the way. So it wasn't like I threw gobs of money at it. And I found that we hit a tipping point, probably around a thousand members. Once we got up over a thousand Facebook started suggesting it to more people.
And then it just really grew the, it was like throwing gasoline on the fire. So yeah, that's it in a nutshell, I mean, you got to aggressively promote it, talk about it and don't be shy. Well, And I have to say your engagement is amazing. It shows up, we have the group's feed now and the coaching jungle posts are two-thirds of my feed most of the time. Excellent.
It is all Over the place. So what's your technique there because you're the only one I've seen that has done it that well. I'd like to say there was some master plan or something. I'm friends with mark Zuckerberg. So I asked him to do me, do me a solid and make sure it's on your feeds. But no, I mean,
part of it let's face it it's the size of the group makes a difference. You know, compared to a group that has 120 people, 20,000 members is going to be a lot more activity. But the other thing is I'm active in the group. Obviously, if you're a group owner and you're not active in your Facebook group, then why should anyone else be?
So I'm posting usually three to four times a day, including theme day posts. Now, one of them's a theme day posts. One of them is my daily email, which essentially goes into the Facebook group as well. So two of them are taken care of right there, but I'm usually posting three to four times a day, but I'm also encouraging others to get involved.
So if somebody asks a question in the group, let's say, they're asking questions about publishing. You know, I'm not a book writer published or sorry, not writer. I am writing, not a publisher. I don't help coach people to write a book by no people that do it. So I'll tag those people into it to get their expertise. Or if someone asks a question about webinars or they ask a question about Tik Tok someone asked the other day,
I don't know Tik Tok, I have no desire to get involved in Tik Tok, but there was a discussion going on in there. So I think it's really important that you bring others into the conversations. You tag them in. You, you ask lots of questions and also don't be afraid to sometimes take some chances and post something that can ruffle some feathers.
That's definitely going to help with engagement. And sometimes I get in trouble. I put my foot in my mouth in there and a few people leave, but at the end of the day, it's more engaged in the people who are staying gel with me. And they resonate with everything that we're doing in there. Yeah, it's, it's a really diverse and very helpful group.
When did you start with moderators and having them help you out? Was that early on or I've had a couple iterations of my moderating teams. So in the early days I had four or five volunteer moderators and I was doing a lot as well. I then hired a team from the Philippines to handle and to be honest, nothing against it, but just,
it didn't work out. You know, they're supposed to be checking once an hour that wasn't happening. I'd be waking up in the morning and I'd have to go through the wall, delete spam and do some other stuff. So I changed at the beginning of 2020 to a different system with bought back to volunteers. However, I have a perk for anyone.
Who's a volunteer admin. They get to do a promo post once a month to the group. And that's as a thank you or if some sort of compensation, you know, for taking their time to do it. And I have about 15 admins. We're just in the process now of getting some fresh blood in there cause some of the people just said,
Mark, I don't have the time or the bandwidth. They can't do it. That's cool. I want people who are able to be active and, and on the ball with that. So it's still something I'm not a hundred percent happy with, to be honest. And I don't blame my admin team, but it's hard to find people who treat the group the same way that I treat it.
It's like my baby, right? So I have a 12 year old son. That's my only kid, but this is my other kid in the Facebook group. So my challenge is a, there's some admins that are in there and doing a lot with moderation stuff. But some that aren't as active, we're cycling those out to get new people in. So my suggestion,
if somebody's listening to this is looking to get volunteered. Give them some sort of perk like a promotional perk or something in there. Maybe you give them access to one of your programs. If it's a FET. The other thing they do is make sure that you have admins who are active in the group. Cause you know, they're popping in throughout the day.
Don't choose people who, well, here's the mistake I made my setting up. I want to have people in every single time zone around the world. I'm like, okay, we need someone in Australia, someone that's over in Europe, someone that's here, someone that's there. I think that that's a there's value to that, but I think it's more important to have the right people.
So we still have a mix, but I focus much more now on the actual moderator and how engaged they are and how active they are in the group. That is a great point. Thank you for giving us your secrets there. And I know you have a very strict rule about including any kind of links cause I've gotten zapped A couple of times. So do you Want to tell people how,
how you set that up? Because you do have times when you can share links, but yeah, Yeah, Well, yeah. I know we're a big meanie. Sometimes we're deleting stuff and I know you're not a spammer. If there's so many groups that try to remember the rules, so stuff, there's really good people who give great value in the group that sometimes forget they put something up and we,
we don't boot them cause we know they're not spammers, but you do have to have some rules in the group and, and stick to them because that's not, it becomes the wild west. So I've been involved in Facebook groups before that were once really good. But then the admins took their eye off the ball with moderation and it became the home shopping network.
The whole wall was just sell, sell, sell, and just garbage. And then it makes it unusable. So we have certain theme days that members can promote in. There's promotion Friday. There's a content sharing day on Thursday, Monday, you can share your fama page for your Facebook, but you can't just go in and post on the wall. Now the exception with that first off is me.
Cause it's my group. I put right in there when people join, Hey, follow the rules. Don't sell on the wall. But by the way, I promote my stuff. And if you're not cool that you should leave, don't be afraid to sell in your group. You're putting in a free community. You're a lot of effort, a lot of value you should get benefit from that.
So I tell them that, Hey, I'm going to be promoting on the wall and then my joint venture partners. So when I do a joint venture, they get used to the wall for those days. And I tell my admin team don't delete anything from Julie this week, we're doing a JV or whatever, but besides out, we're very tight on it.
And it's funny because I get some people trying to get around it. They'll put a post up and they'll tag me and they'll say, thanks so much for this group at park morning. I'm really loving it so much. And then they sneak in this, the pitch, the sale. And as much as it's flattering my ego, I'm like, now we can't keep it up.
Cause it's just going to encourage more of those tight posts. It's kind of like the gremlins, you know, if you get them wet or feed them after midnight, they multiply problem on your hands. A bunch of gremlins. You don't want that. Yes. Yes. Oh, well, and I love how you do it cause you're right. It's not full of people pitching constantly because then people won't even come to the group.
So I'd like it. Well andif people are getting very sneaky, I guess you could say in some cases and not saying just my group, I've just noticed without, with other groups too. But most people, 99% of the people in the coaching jungle are great. You get that very small group that joins. And then two seconds later they're posted on the wall right away.
They don't take time to read the rules or they do something like they'll sneak it in. So they'll put a post that has no selling, but they sneak in that, Hey my client, Joe, I just helped them make eight figures in the last week. You know? And they'll, they'll put a very specific number. I say eight figures exaggerating,
but they might be like, oh my client, Joe last week made a $71,422 and 43 cents with my work. And here's what I did a little bit. Well, yeah, that's a fishing post or that's definitely trying to sneak it in there. So it's tough. Sometimes we, we have a Facebook group for myself and the moderators that we can chat and stuff and sometimes they'll post something like,
what do you guys think about this one? And we're kind of on the wall of the fence for like, ah, geez. And often we're like nah delete it. That's a very good disguise pitch, but it's a pitch. Ah, okay. That's another good trick is to have a separate group for all your admin stuff. Yeah. To talk freely.
I think that's important. We use a Facebook group. I mean, cause we're on Facebook. I know some people could use a message thread, which I think is tough to follow. Could you use slack? I just think it makes sense. Have a Facebook group for Facebook groups, you know, for the admin. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And do your moderators help you with your content?
Cause there's a lot of really good questions that come on there and I keep wondering, I'm like all, are all of these coming from the members or are, do you kind of seed some of the questions? Cause they're really good. And they- Questions from members you mean? Yeah the questions that come up in the group. I was, yeah,
no we've never done that. Really? And I am, I create my own content as well. I don't sub out any content creation. Sometimes people hire someone to do some writing for them, write emails, write posts me. I have a, you know, my sense of humor can be a little bit dry kind of punny dad jokes. And then I'll work,
pop culture references into content. And I have a kind of a different style that way. It's a very dry sense of humor here from Atlanta, guests. But if somebody was writing for me, like if I hired someone from the Philippines and to write a bunch of posts or something, everyone would be like, yeah, that's not Mark. Yes,
You do have a really outstanding writing style and everyone who's listening, who's interested in how to do daily emails to your list. They really need to subscribe because you're one of the few people I've come across that can do it well. Oh thank you. Yeah. I just checked the other day. Actually I started doing daily emails, April, 2016 and I'm up to 1700 and some odd days of,
without missing a day. And I'm going to say that, that line that you always hear from these, these cheesy people online, I tell you this, not to impress you, but to impress upon you. So I don't mean to do that, but what I'm saying is the reason I've done 1700 plus straight days without missing a day is because daily emails work.
If they didn't work, I wouldn't be doing 1700 days of it. I would do something else because it is a lot of work. So I encourage people to, if we could do a whole other show on daily emails, but definitely consider them. Yes, I will definitely have you back to talk about that because not only do you do a good job of sending them,
like your content is interesting. I think a lot of people have maybe have trouble coming up with good stuff. So interesting. Well, I do have an infographic if you'd like, if you want to put it on the show notes page that basically shows where I'd come up with my content ideas with it. So it's a few years old, but it's a hundred percent relevant from when I created a few years ago.
Nothing's changed. So I'll get that over to you. You know, I Think I remember seeing that it's really good. It had a lot of ideas on it. Yeah. So I had to become a content creation machine is what it's called. But the advantage of daily emails, like I mentioned earlier is my first post of the day in the Facebook group and other places is my daily email.
Basically I'm going into the group and there's reasons for doing that. But that daily email forms the foundation of my content creation and it helps when it gets spread all over. Ah, you have, that's so smart. Okay. And I have to ask you about this because I have been noticing this trend in the last probably six, seven months that some of the bigger gurus are shutting down their Facebook groups.
And part of the reasoning is that they say they're too hard to manage. And I'm just kind of curious if you've noticed that what you think of it as a student of theirs. I find it incredibly annoying. Maybe that's not Fair. Weird. I noticed that trend a couple years ago and I haven't noticed as much, but there was a, a one or two weeks span probably.
I think it was two years ago, roughly that some really big groups like Kimra Luna shut down her group, Josh and Jill Stanton shut down screw the nine to five. There were a few other big ones that had even more than the jungle. I think we're looking 40,000 people, 50,000 people. I agree with you. I looked at that and,
and no disrespect to, I know Josh and Jill. They're awesome. So I'm sure they have the reasons for it, but I couldn't understand the logic. I thought if you take that time to build up something to 50,000 members, that's a very valuable resource and community. And to just shut it down, seems strange. I don't get it. I don't get the logic with it.
I would look at changing how they're running it so that they don't have to shut it down and can keep it going. But I know that there are a frustrated group owners that aren't monetizing it. And some of them have, you know, maybe it's 5,000 members or something and it's not a small, not small groups, but they're just not making any money from it.
They're finally screw it. Or they get tired of babysitting. You know, there's been days I have thought with my, and like, you know, you, you, people are between 20 years old and 80 years old, you're adults in here. I'm not going to babysit you. You know, like some people report comments or posts in the group cause their feelings were hurt.
And unless it's something really bad, we're probably not going to delete it. You know, we say right in there, if you're easily offended, leave the group. I got crapped on well, years ago I posted something. It was a, a meme about copywriting, which was a play on Winston Churchill's quote about speech writing. And it saidparaphrase and good copywriting is like a woman's skirt.
It should be short enough to generate interest, but long enough to cover the basics or vice versa cut long enough to cover the basic short enough to, you know, for interest or curiosity. Oh my God, you swear. You know, I was Hitler with some of the people in the group. So I posted the another meme, which was a men's boxer
shorts and said, good copy is like men's boxer shorts, meme that I found online. I said, here you go guys. You know, being fair to both genders, here you go. But it was kind of, kind of silly the day of drama with some of the stuff going back and forth. And I just said, look, if you're offended by this,
I could do much worse. So if I was trying, I was not trying to offend. Sometimes I poke the bear a little bit, but I said, just leave. You know? Cause it's not the right fit for you in the group. No hard feelings, just please leave. And I think about 15 people left out of the people in the group.
That's pretty small number at the end of the day, but I have very little patience for the cancel culture. Easily offended people, sorry, social justice warriors. I don't, I don't get along with, you know, basically that's two thirds of people online, basically. Yes. They, they do tend to make our lives interesting and keep things moving along.
So I also want to talk about, I know you have a Facebook group program that you sell. And so tell us about that because obviously I'm sure everyone's hearing this. They're like, wow, he knows what he's doing with this and I need to be doing this too. So tell us about that a little Bit. Yeah. So I created a program called group gold back.
Oh boys, 2017, I believe. And it came from, at that time, the group was large, not as large as it is now, but as getting so many questions and it's tough to fit into a little paragraph in a message like, Hey, how do you grow and monetize a Facebook group? Oh, here's a three-sentence answer. Good luck.
And so I said, I'm going to create a program around it. And group gold shows how to create the group. Cause there's certain things that you can do that will shoot you in the foot before you even get started. So it'll show how to create the group, how to grow the group because you need more people in there. If you have 17 people and 15 of them are your aunts,
uncles, parents, and then two of them are your neighbors. It's going to be tough to monetize it. So which shows how to grow the group, how to get it engaged because that's another important thing. There are so many Facebook groups out there that are on life support or they're just, you don't know if they're dead or alive, there's tumbleweeds blowing through and finally how to monetize a group.
So I will say if you're not monetizing a Facebook group, either fix it to get it monetized or shut it down. Like we talked about because your time's valuable, everything you do in your business, you should be getting an ROI for. So don't just play around with Facebook groups. If it's taken up all this time and you're not monetizing it. So that's the four modules inside group gold.
We're actually in the process of updating it because Facebook's gone through now with the new Facebook, you know, the look and everything else. So I thought it was time to update it. So we're in the process. Now I'm recording new videos and a lot of the principles are still the same, but I want to freshen up a few things and yeah,
that, I guess you have the link for it. If anyone's interested in it Yes, coursecreatorshq.com/groupgold that's /groupgold. And I will also put it inside the show notes obviously for this episode so they can be sharing, get ahold of it. And I know I've had some friends go through it and they really love it. So Thank you.
Yeah. Well, funny story about that. It was originally called Facebook group gold and I got my wrist slapped by Facebook because I used Facebook in the title. So that's where it's now group gold. I see so many people doing that online every day is people are saying Facebook, this Facebook, that or LinkedIn, we'll say LinkedIn, whatever, but technically you're not supposed to do that so bad Mark.
Anyway. So I won't make that mistake again. Good advice Though, because I think a long time ago I bought a domain name with Facebook in it and I, they Were very quick. Yeah. I heard from their legal team within days. Wow. Wow. Okay. Good to know. So is there anyone, if we've got some course creators out there who were thinking about doing this,
is there anyone you would say? Yeah, don't do a Facebook group. Yeah. I mean, if your people aren't on Facebook, obviously Facebook groups, not the best thing to do with it. So I'm always about going where your people are. But in my world, the coaching world, I think Facebook groups are probably applicable for, you know,
80 or 90% of coaches, unless you absolutely hate Facebook. There's some people that hate Facebook. They don't enjoy spending time there. Yeah. Yeah. So it can be a bit of a dumpster fire, especially in 2020, between COVID debates and your darn election. I think you guys had just had, I heard something about that recently a little something, you got race riots,
you guys like killer Hornets, just a whole bunch of stuff. So with Facebook groups, one thing that's important is not get sucked into it. So you're living in your group at 24/7, because then it's going to take away from the rest of your business. So what I do and I'm some days more successful than others, but I try to get in,
do what I have to do and get the heck out. I don't keep my Facebook tab open. Cause that's dangerous. You're going to get pulled in a bunch of different directions and it can be a rabbit hole. So don't get sucked into Facebook. It's not real life. It's kind of like that meme you ever see it's it says something along the lines of,
you know, basically Facebook isn't real life. Cause there's so many people that think they're since they're, Facebook famous that means that they're like a celebrity or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Well I'm, I'm amazed. Even people I talk to outside our online bubble, I'll mention Gary Vaynerchuk, like who, who we assume he's like, oh, everyone knows Gary Vaynerchuk.
Yeah. So what would you say a lot of people are web celebs, but maybe not a Hollywood celebrities. Yeah. So tell everyone where they can get ahold of you. And obviously we want them to listen to your podcast, natural born coaches and you know, where else would you like them to come check you out? Sure. So, I mean,
as we've been talking about today, the coaching jungle I'm in there a fair bit. So that's at coachingjungle.comand for the podcast that's over at naturalborncoaches.com. And as of today I've released almost 700 episodes on pretty much any topic imaginable for coaches. You'll find it on that podcast. So natural born coaches.com. Fantastic. Oh my gosh, mark. This was so good at,
this was like a master course in doing a Facebook group. And so thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for having me. And thanks for being in the group too. I know you're a, an important member, so we appreciate it. Okay. Thanks, and I really do appreciate all the effort you put in. Cause it, it,
you know, I have some of my audience in there, so it's really fun to connect with them. So yeah. Thank you and have a great Christmas, everyone. Happy holidays, all that fun stuff, unless this is coming out after Christmas in that case have a great 2021. There you go. Thank you so much. Have a great day,
mark. Okay. Bye bye. So you can grab all the links. At coursecreatorshq.com/20 including the links to the coaching jungle Mark's group, his group of gold program in case you're interested in finding out more about that and his podcast. So wasn't he just fantastic. And I bet you're probably wondering the next question you should be asking yourself is should I start a Facebook group or not?
So let's talk about it real quick. There are a couple things I really love about Facebook groups. First since Facebook itself is really excited about them right now, they give them a lot of attention. There's notifications for your group members when there's posts that they might like there's notifications when you, as the owner go live. So there's lots of positives. It's a great way to connect with people and build that community.
There's a couple of negatives though. I just want you to keep in mind as you're thinking about them. First one for me at least is it feels like it would take a decent amount of time to manage and run a group really well. So I'm not going to jump into the deep end of the pool on this one until I've got plenty of support to help me manage it.
Also, I sometimes think that certain audiences are, are a better fit for Facebook groups than others. So you want members that who really liked to talk about your topic. I had a client once who she could not get her Facebook group audience to participate at all. And it turned out they didn't really want to share in Facebook groups because she had more of a sensitive topic.
So think about your topic to see like, is this something people are gonna want to chatter about and support each other? Or is this something that's more personal and private? So keep those considerations in mind as you try to decide whether or not you should start a Facebook group. And then I also want to tell you, thank you so much for thank you for subscribing and thank you for reviewing this podcast.
I really appreciate you. And if you found this helpful today, I'd love it. If you could leave us a five-star review, it helps us get in front of more potential course creators. So thanks so much for being there and have a fantastic week. I will catch you next week.