Ep. 11: Moving Our SEO Community Out of Facebook Groups with Sophy Dale

Meg Casebolt 0:01
You’re listening to social slowdown a podcast for entrepreneurs and micro businesses looking for sustainable marketing strategies without being dependent on social media. Social media is a double edged sword. It’s a wonderful way to stay connected. But it also can feel like an addictive obligation. And it’s even more complex for businesses, your audience might be right there, but you’ve got to fight with algorithms to maybe be seen by them. So whether you want to abandon social media altogether, or you just want to take a month off, it’s possible to have a thriving business without being dependent on social media. This podcast is all about finding creative, sustainable ways to engage with your audience without needing to lip sync, send cold DMS, run ads or be available 24/7. Let’s get started.

Hello, Sophy, welcome to the social slowdown podcast, I am so excited to have you here today, in part because speaking with you and having you as a member of my team, for as long as you were, it was part of the inspiration for talking about this, because this is something that’s really near and dear to both of our hearts. So thank you so much for being here.

Sophy Dale 1:10
Thank you, I’m really happy to be here.

Meg Casebolt 1:12
Now, before we leap into a conversation about our decision to move our community off of Facebook groups, I would love to hear a little bit more about you and about what it is that you do and how people can work with you and how you market your business.

Sophy Dale 1:28
So I primarily work as a book coach, but also a little bit as a copywriter, I, as you know, I have switched around between which of those is kind of in the foreground of my business over the years. And I feel it’s all really the same thing. It’s all talking to people about their stories and the message that they want to share with the world and the impact that they want to have on the world. So I primarily work with women entrepreneurs, and usually not not quite exclusively, but usually service providers, various kinds of coaches or consultants or designers, those kinds of people. And, yes, the whole kind of area of how to market your business and feelings, lots of feelings around social media.

Meg Casebolt 2:20
Now really quickly, you work with them on nonfiction, correct?

Sophy Dale 2:22
Usually, yes. Okay, so

Meg Casebolt 2:25
creating books that showcase their expertise, especially if they are a service provider, or coach, they’re able to turn that into book format. Exactly.

Sophy Dale 2:33
And obviously, that has all kinds of implications for how they will go on to market their business and how they can position themselves and what that does for their messaging, and so on, which is part of the reason I see the whole thing as a bit of a continuum. And I’ve often worked with people actually on their messaging and their copywriting and on their book, because it is all essentially part of the same thing. But in my business, the reason that I know you is because I have, for a long, long time wanted to be less on social media. And I saw SEO, as you know, one of the obvious routes out of relying on social media, for finding clients. And a bit over a year ago, I took a whole year off from Instagram and Facebook, I archived those accounts. And I only when I did go into Facebook over that year, because I was in various groups that related to courses. And that was I just could not get out of Facebook for that reason. But Instagram I didn’t go into at all for a year. And so that was very eye opening for understanding how much of an impact being in that world has, once you step outside of it, it’s it’s like you really see the impact. And then stepping back inside has also been revealing in the opposite direction. And so, yes, I feel I can kind of speak from both sides of the equation as a result.

Meg Casebolt 4:06
It’s kind of like when they say like trying to get a fish to describe what water is, but they’re in the water so they can’t understand what it is. It’s like when you’re in these social platforms all the time, you can’t recognize how they impact everything else in your life, because you’re just so deep in them. So tell me about specifically Instagram, since you called that out as you were able to fully walk away from that, how did that what recognitions and realizations that you have by being able to shut that off and get your clients from elsewhere?

Sophy Dale 4:37
So one of the things was to realize that I really could get clients from elsewhere. And partly it was as a result of the kind of measuring I had been doing in the run up. I started to see that it was really rare for me to be able to say I can directly attribute this particular client to what I’ve been doing on social media. Whereas if people were telling me they’d found me bye bye or SEO, for instance. And they were also telling me, they found me via referrals and word of mouth. And so that was the thing that kind of gave me the confidence to walk away from social media, because I knew, I could see that I was not really getting clients that way. So sometimes I think, obviously, it helps to keep you Top of Mind with clients and that kind of thing. So it’s so obviously not totally irrelevant, even when people aren’t citing it as their rationale. But equally, clearly, I was seeing that I had the evidence to be able to walk away. And that’s something that you know, when I’ve talked to other people who’ve said, all I really want to do this, but I’m kind of scared to do it. I’ve always said, you know, why don’t you go away and look at where your clients are really coming from if you’re not sure. So, back to why some customer with you can’t get away from it. And so I think what I first noticed when I stepped away, and what I noticed again, when I stepped back in was that the amount of headspace that was taken up by being aware, hyper aware all the time, of every little moment in other people’s businesses, I really did not appreciate how much bandwidth that was taking up in my mind. And I do not see myself as somebody who particularly suffers from comparison itis or is particularly influenced by what other people are doing, I would say I’m really intrinsically motivated. And you know, I have my ideas of what I’m going to do, and I stick to them. Clearly, this is just some fun. When I stepped away from, you know, having that awareness of what other people were doing, I found it freed up this huge amount of mental space. And I had lots of new ideas about what I wanted for my business. And, and just more kind of mental bandwidth generally.

Meg Casebolt 7:01
When you first said you felt like there was a lot of mental bandwidth being taken up by this, I thought it was going to be your posting and feeling like you needed to figure out what you were saying about your business and following the algorithms and the trend. So hearing you say, like, know the amount of space in your brain you were holding for other people’s businesses to figure out every step that they were going through, that’s a totally different, but equally draining piece of input. And maybe that maybe that’s me as the extrovert saying, like, I’m worried about what I’m putting out into the world. And I can take in other people’s energy and you’re more introverted and sensitive to those inputs coming in from other people. So needing to stay on top of that and keep up with their updates took more capacity from you.

Sophy Dale 7:43
Yeah, possibly, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I think as well is not like I stopped producing content, because I came off of those platforms. So I found that I was blogging more writing my newsletter more consistently. And I did spend quite a lot of time on LinkedIn. So it’s not that I gave up social media is that I switched, which social media platform I was on. And I found that with LinkedIn, I just find LinkedIn quite boring. Businesses in same way, because it’s just not very involving, it’s not engaging to me.

Meg Casebolt 8:18
And was a means to an end, it wasn’t an entertainment channel.

Sophy Dale 8:21
Exactly. And it was super clear to me that I was on LinkedIn in order to do my work, and I never ever got distracted. And so it was very much you know, post, engage with other people’s comments, follow a few people who are saying things that are more interesting to me and comment on their posts. And that’s it over move on. Whereas Instagram is kind of like, everybody knows just an enormous, giant, addictive rabbit hole that you are down, you know, four hours later, you’re like. So yeah, I think very, very different from that point of view. And having re entered, I’ve had to be much more intentional, because I’m aware that that is likely to happen. And much more thinking about what what is it that I can only get via Instagram, that I can’t replicate through social media and through being active in other communities and through working on referrals and building relationships and all of those other forms of marketing that had worked perfectly well for me for the year that I wasn’t on Instagram. And so really trying to remain focused and clear about why am I using Instagram and what is it that I can only do here and then trying to get the hell off the platform. I love that

Meg Casebolt 9:52
question of what can I do here that I can’t do anywhere else, especially in this age of social media schedulers where people are sharing the same information to multiple locations, they’re taking that post. And maybe they’re tweaking the graphics to be the right size or adjusting the message that goes with it. But once they’ve created an idea, often we’re sharing it to multiple platforms. So if you’re like, LinkedIn is boring, and I don’t fall down the rabbit hole the way that I do with Instagram, I’ll just read it on LinkedIn, because I’m probably posting it there too. That can be sort of a way to to maintain your boundaries and not fall down into the rabbit hole.

Sophy Dale 10:26
Yeah, exactly. And what I found is that, for the most part, this isn’t 100% True, but for the most part, my ideal clients do hang out a lot on Instagram. And that’s usually because their ideal clients hang out a lot, and they feel they need to be there. And therefore, the kinds of people that I want to get into direct conversations with are on Instagram, and so DMing those people has really, really worked for building relationships, and has been something that would be much harder to do in a natural way, without using Instagram as a platform. And where is it? I think people be quite startled, if they’ve never heard of you, they know nothing about you, and you email them about something that they are posting about on Instagram, it would just seem bizarre. And by that time, those emails they’re called, and they’re creepy. Exactly. Whereas I think if you comment on somebody’s post, and then you get into a bit of a conversation with them, and then that moves over into the DMS. That doesn’t seem strange, it just seems like that’s how conversations develop. And so I have definitely found that by being intentional in that way, and thinking, you know, who do I really want to connect with? Who’s interesting to me, who do I want to engage with. And using Instagram to do that, that has led directly to getting clients, not from all of those interactions, but from, you know, some of those interactions have led to client engagements. And I think by staying really focused on the fact that that’s what I’m there on Instagram to do is to build those relationships with people who I find interesting. And some of those will develop further, not necessarily actually into client relationships, but sometimes into referrals, or into, you know, can you come and give a workshop for my group or do you know, whatever. But you know, relatively directly from that engagement on Instagram, you can see what the purpose is, and you can see an outcome.

Meg Casebolt 12:31
And I think this ties in really well with some things we talked about in previous episodes for people who are binge listening, or this may be your first one, because, you know, Sophie, I talked with Andrea Jones about the fact that we’re really you know, she’s a social media strategist, she knows social media, like better than anyone I know. And she’s like, this is not a place to be discovered. This is a place to engage in relationship building, and to keep in touch with people in an informal way. And Lacey bog said something very similar in her episode, which is that this is not the first point of contact for most people, it is a way to remain in touch. Yes. And if you’re expecting people to find you on social media, that can be tough. But if you’re using it more as a middle of the funnel, nurturing piece, then you don’t have to feel like you’re creating for it. It’s more about engaging and being in, in dialogue with people on social in the way that you’re describing. So, yeah. And, and you make a really good point, which is, who do I want to connect with on this platform? Yeah, and going and seeking those people out and finding ways to engage with them instead of just like, What am I going to broadcast to this?

Sophy Dale 13:40
And I think, certainly, for me, it’s maybe only three, four, maybe five months since I came back, I can’t really remember exactly how long and I have barely posted. Open mean, literally, barely posted. And almost all the time I have spent on Instagram has been commenting and messaging, not posting myself. Because that’s that’s the thing that I can only do that. And that’s where, as I say, I’ve been able to build relationships with people who I was maybe a little bit in touch with before, but in an incredibly sporadic way, or I had met them once at a conference or something like that. And not had any significant interactions with them. But now in a very kind of like touch way, I’m in regular contact with them. And that then means that the next time somebody asks them, if they know of a book coach, for instance, then I would be top of mind because we’re in conversation about those kinds of topics.

Meg Casebolt 14:48
I think of it, it’s kinda like you’re saying it’s more of a water cooler than a megaphone? Yeah. You know, it’s a place to hang out and connect with people. It’s not about getting yourself discovered there. So When you had that year where you were off of Instagram and trying to be off of Facebook and couldn’t tell me about that struggle of the the ubiquitous Facebook groups.

Sophy Dale 15:11
Yeah, I mean, I think even for that I didn’t, it kind of irritated me because I wanted to be able to say I’m completely off it. But I don’t find Facebook particularly engaging. And so I found it pretty easy to go in, you know, go into the group, do whatever I was there in the group to do and then come straight out again, and not get just kind of sucked into the rabbit hole in the same way. So it was more sort of perfectionist in me that wanted to be able to say, right, I’m completely off both of these platforms was annoyed by it, the reality was, I didn’t particularly get pulled back in, I think it very much depends on, you know, if I had a couple of family members who I was a long way away from who post on Facebook a lot, for instance, that I’m sure it’d be more pulled back in by that kind of dynamic. But for me, for most of the people that I want to be in touch with Facebook isn’t really a big thing for them either. So I think that probably made it easier to step away and simply come in and use it in a really utilitarian way.

Meg Casebolt 16:17
My mom will frequently tell me what’s happening with my neighbors, because the algorithm shows that to her because she’s only using it as a personal connection tool, I see none of it, my mom has to tell me what’s happening with my friends, because Facebook has figured out that I am a business owner. So the only things I see are related to businesses. And that’s fine. Again, when it comes to this kind of water, cooler networking, check in peace. But there is a desire in the way that Sophie just stated, but also things that we’ve heard from people in my community to spend less time on Facebook that like the resentment of I don’t want to get sucked into this. But for me to continue to grow my business for me to engage with this network. For me to learn this new thing, I have to be on this tool that is designed for addiction. And that’s really frustrating. So I’m Sophie and I started collaborating gosh, like a year and a half ago now. I was looking for a community manager for my attract and activate program for my SEO program. And Sophie volunteered. Well that volunteered I think. So you didn’t volunteer. Sophie was already in the program and applied to be the community manager. And it was a perfect fit, because she already knew the program and was already in the community. And Sophie is a brilliant, brilliant mind around how to build community and connects people. And so we started working together on that when the community was still in a Facebook group. And part of your research and your serving the community that was in there was saying like, what are ways that we can support you better? What are ways that we can help you engage with this material. And one of the things that we were hearing from people is exactly what you were feeling, which was I really don’t want to have to log into Facebook to get this information. Right.

Sophy Dale 18:14
Absolutely. That came through really strongly. Yeah. And we, you know,

Meg Casebolt 18:17
we use the Facebook community tools to pull the community to ask them, like, do you want to stay here? Or like the class? Should I stay? Or should I go, because I think a lot of us are in that zone of like people are already here, they’re already hanging out, they already have this behavior ingrained in their day, it’s the app that they open. So it’s the lowest hanging fruit in terms of where you can build and it’s free. But there’s a resentment on the part of potentially, potentially, depending on who you’re working with, and how you’re engaging with them and what their relationship is with social media. There may be some of this, like, I would really like to not be in Facebook anymore. And that’s what we were coming up against, I do find that it tends to be more in b2b communities that people are feeling this way. Again, if you’re b2c, it’s like, people don’t feel the same, like push to be on Facebook all the time. So getting off of Facebook doesn’t feel like as much of a chore. So tell me about kind of that process of engaging with people and figuring out whether whether to stay on Facebook or not.

Sophy Dale 19:22
I think it was, it took a little while to dig a bit deeper and and really try to get a sense from people have. Did they feel kind of momentarily irritated by this? Or do they really feel, you know, a strong desire to come off this platform? And obviously there was a range of views and I think there were a small proportion of people who strongly preferred Facebook and have never felt the same about and it’s true and not not in a resenting the community moving off of Facebook way but just in a venue themselves. They knew that they wouldn’t be very good at checking in on a new platform. And so they were aware of that as a as a problem kind of in advance. But the majority of the people that that not just out of the survey, but the people that we talked to do, because you and I both took the opportunity of any live call that we were on with people to have a bit of a chat about this as well. And people were really strongly voicing a desire to come off of Facebook. And that’s really what gave us the impetus to actually follow through the knowledge though, this wasn’t just that you and I personally both happened to prefer to. But it was actually a swell a groundswell of feeling within the community. So it wasn’t unanimous, but it was definitely the majority view. And then, you know,

Meg Casebolt 20:51
really quickly, I’ve talked about this a lot. And so people now are coming to me and say, I want to get my group off of Facebook groups, what do I do? And my first question is always, do you want to leave? Or do your people want to leave? And I think the first step is identifying where that feeling is coming from and how prevalent it is. Because if you want to get out, but you have 20,000 people who are in there really happy in there, then you might just be stuck. I’m sorry. Yeah.

Sophy Dale 21:17
Yeah. So it’s really looking at is there enough of a consensus there to make it worthwhile to move? Because there is pain in the move? For sure. And we then, you know, once you and I had decided that, yes, it seemed to be enough of a groundswell of opinion to make this worth going into. Then Stage Two was working out well, okay. We know where we don’t want to be where do we actually positively wants to move to? And that was a whole bunch of research.

Meg Casebolt 21:47
And we started again, with the community and said, what tools are you using? What do you like? What do you not like? And I’ve actually seen this, I think Lizzie got her death in her group recently, too, which is like, which tools do you like, and why? And which do you not like and why. And some of the tools were very polarizing, I know, mighty, I think you probably have like a mighty networks, people either love it, and can’t get enough of it and want to be in it all the time. Or they really strongly dislike it and want to go anywhere else. And you have a community and mighty so can you talk a little bit about when you made the decision to move into mighty networks, and what that looked like for you maybe not move into I think you started it there.

Sophy Dale 22:27
I started it there. So, uh, well, actually, I had had a Facebook group that many of the people who went into mighty networks had been in, so it wasn’t okay. But yeah, all intensive purposes, I started it there. I think for me, you and I both know each other because of a community that’s run on mighty networks. That’s how I originally Re. And I always appreciated the fact that although I wasn’t always brilliant at remembering to go into that community, once I was there, and inside it, I appreciated that sense of its own space, I’m not being bombarded with notifications, I don’t care about about other things. And it just feels like it’s a space unto itself. But I think that for those people who don’t like it, that’s precisely what. And it also, you know, it’s it gradually catching up in terms of, you know, you can now go live on video inside mighty networks, but obviously, they years after that’s been, you know, completely native free tool within Facebook groups, for instance. So there have been real time lags in terms of the technology. And that’s probably true for absolutely all the non Facebook platforms who just don’t have Facebook’s money behind them to to be able to constantly be innovating in terms of what’s available within the the platform and within the the tool. So yeah, I think I did definitely find some resistance from some people about joining that community because it was on mighty networks. And I also found that there was there were people who were keen in theory, but then kept forgetting to go actually log in.

Meg Casebolt 24:14
Every time I join a mining network, like, like, the community that you and I met in, I think I posted I posted it last night for the first time in eight months. Like even when I get the notifications on my phone, I don’t always open I mean, even when I see the prompts, I don’t always respond to them. And I think that’s true for any community that I’m in, whether it’s in Facebook, or in my ad or in somewhere else that we can also talk about, but it’s like, being able to not just move people to a new place, but getting them to engage in that new place is is the biggest struggle of being a Community Manager in this digital age. Right? Yeah. So we have 90 as an option. Some people love it. Some people hate it. And I think the way that you set it up can be really important in the experience that people have with it. I think that’s true. any tool, you know, I find that mighty as a community I like but mighty as a course platform I struggle with. So and, and some of that is user experience and the way that it’s designed and some of that is just my brain is different than your brain is different than someone else’s brain. And, and I don’t always follow a linear progression, when I’m trying to learn something, I want to be able to dip in and out of content, which is not the way that mighty sets it up. So, you know, it’s knowing who your audience is, how they behave, what they like, what they don’t like. And so when we were trying to move our community mighty was probably the top option.

Sophy Dale 25:35
I think it was probably the most cited, because it was the one that most people had also at least dipped a toe in, you know,

Meg Casebolt 25:41
there was brand familiarity there. We also talked about moving to slack. But I have found, I mean, I love slack, like so much, I’m in so many communities there. But I found that the more people that are in there, the more channels that are built, it’s like I never know how to hop into a conversation partway through it, I feel like I’m missing out on key elements. So I have amazing communities that I’m in in Slack. And honestly, that we made a different choice. And now some of the community members are going, can we just move into Slack, please? That’s where I hang out.

Sophy Dale 26:14
Yeah, absolutely. And I think I think that there are some platforms that work really well for small groups. So I’ve only ever used slack in very small groups of you know, sort of four or five people. And I feel like I can kind of keep on top of what’s going on there. I feel like it would be less helpful in a larger community of several 100 people. Whereas communities like mighty networks are more set up for that’s the kind of the assumption on which they’re built that there will be, but you know, a significant number of people in that community. And so there’s much more of an opportunity to have much more detailed profiles for people so that you can kind of hop back in and out and work out who people are. And that kind of thing. So. So yeah, it wasn’t me, it was you who found circle, which is the platform that we actually ended up settling on. So do you want to talk a bit about, you know, what it was that made you chair,

Meg Casebolt 27:09
I don’t even remember how I found it, it may have been Google Images, I’m really good at SEO. But we, I came to you and said, I found this platform called circle, what do you think, and he kind of looked at their website, and it felt like it checked all the boxes. And then I went to, you know, an onboarding call with one of their founders. But we, we, you and I both kind of agreed, like, we don’t want to hop around to multiple platforms, when we move we are moving. And that is the place where we are setting down stakes. And like putting up a tent. We’re staying for a while we’re building a foundation here. And so I wanted to make sure that it was really the right choice, especially since it was a you know, this was over a year ago, this it was kind of an unknown. In the space. They were they hadn’t gotten funding yet they were still in beta for a lot of things. But for me, especially with for me, it kind of came down to mighty networks, Slack or circle, you know, there are other options. There’s discord servers, there’s forums, there’s ways you can build membership sites into your website, I wasn’t necessarily as interested in those hack together options. Because if it went down, I didn’t want to be the way to get back up. That was not I didn’t want that to be my responsibility.

Sophy Dale 28:23
You know, my whole organization that deals with stuff. The tool that I use

Meg Casebolt 28:28
for the course platform and a lot of the the trainings that I have as member while but they don’t have a community option yet they’re looking into it. So we decided to move to circle. And the reason we chose circle is because a really clean interface. It’s it feels like notion, if you’re familiar with that software in that it has like a left sidebar where you can see everything and there are emojis and it felt very easy to minimize and maximize the things that you wanted to look at. And then it also had a lot of the functionality that we enjoyed from our Facebook group like threaded comments and being able to give different permissions to different areas and be and it felt much more intuitive to me than some of the other tools that were out there and also had that scalable nature that I didn’t feel from slack. You know, I love slack for a team collaboration tool. But as a ongoing communication, it can get a little bit clunky. So none of these tools are perfect. None of them are are the solution that we recommend, but we wouldn’t be able to give some options of what our research said. I also really liked that I could take the circle spaces as what they’re called and embed them into the course tool. So people could ask their questions in the community without needing to go to a different place that was important to me that there was a with a with a learning community like we have. I wanted people to feel like they didn’t have to be in two different places.

Sophy Dale 30:00
Yes, I think that was one of the really deciding factors actually wasn’t looking back.

Meg Casebolt 30:05
And I even tried at one point to pull all of the trainings into circles. So people didn’t even have to be in two places. But it wasn’t easy for things to be linear, they didn’t have a, you know, the dependency model where you have to watch lesson one to get to lesson two, that that is not built into it, maybe they’ll get there. But it did have a lot of those newer, more digital things like being able to do live video within the platform and being able to connect with people in that way. And now they just rolled out events. So it feels a bit more robust in terms of what we wanted it to do. Yes. But but the process of getting people from the Facebook group to the new circle community was not the easiest.

Sophy Dale 30:50
No, I mean, I, I think it just does take people time doesn’t it to to go from having been doing things in method A, to starting to do them in method B. So I don’t think we’ve ever had any real problems with people who have joined, attract and activate since we moved on to circle because then it’s just that’s, that’s how it all happens. So occasionally, somebody sent, you know, one email saying, I’m a bit confused about how to log in or something like that. But once they’ve got past that initial issue, then they’ve been fine. But I think the way human brains work, once, once you’ve set something as up as this is the pattern, this is how it works. And then you say, oh, no, that’s not the pattern anymore. People are like. So I think there was just that not a conscious resistance to change, but a subconscious. This is harder, I knew what I was doing before, I can’t find things. And actually, it’s much easier to find things in circle, because it’s much more clearly flagged, but you have to get used to the new interface. And I think for as far as I’m aware, pretty much everybody who came in had never used circle before,

Meg Casebolt 32:01
right? We had a we had a much stronger learning curve. Whereas now as people are coming in, they’re going, Oh, I already have experience with this tool. This isn’t my first time to this rodeo, not always, but regularly. And I think you’re right that anytime there’s a pattern interruption in our lives, and in our brains, whether it’s digital tools, or anything else, those pattern interruptions are going to throw us off a little bit. So I once we made the transition over, I think it was probably you know, there was the initial excitement of everyone moving over me like, yeah, we’re on Facebook. But then there was a lag. And so I want to talk about this and acknowledge it not as this is the victory of we got off Facebook, and you should too. But to recognize that this is an ongoing process to get people to have that pattern interruption to engage in a place that they’re not used to engaging, and it’s hard. Yes.

Sophy Dale 33:00
I think what helped us was, we’ve never been a community that completely existed. In this online forum sense. There’s always been a live calls element to it. And so that meant that you and I could both on on our joint and separate live calls. Keep reminding people the existence of circle and the fact that you know, in between the live calls, didn’t have to wait all that time until it was another live call, they could just post a question in circle and take one of us and we would answer within a day. And that would mean that, you know, they would get their hands so much more efficiently. And so I think those kinds of things, you know, constantly referring back to it, within the live calls, sending out a weekly email kind of summing up what was going on in circle, which they will now do automatically, but they weren’t doing at the beginning of our period of being on the platform. So those kinds of things to kind of just keep looping people back in and keep reminding them of its existence. And that it’s not, it’s not a matter of once you’ve opened up the Facebook app for the day, that’s it, you will be automatically reminded about all the communities that you are part of, you have to make a separate decision to do this. So I think I think those were the big things, were just kind of making sure that we looped people back in as often as we possibly could.

Meg Casebolt 34:24
Yeah, and I think also, in addition to the ways that we were trying to out and have been trying to reach out to this group of people in our community. We’re recording this in 2022. I think just in case anyone is listening to this and going community or like, Oh, my community is not active everyone else’s. Want to say why lively action January 2022. I think people are really tired of online communities. So if this is part of your your strategy in terms of marketing and growing your business is to have an online community or You want to, you already have an online community and Facebook and you’re thinking of moving them off or you feel like even the the engagement in your Facebook community has lagged, I do want to say like, that is a trend that we are seeing in the industry, it is not a you problem. It is an industry, society level problem that we as entrepreneurs are trying to fix on an individual level.

Sophy Dale 35:25
And actually, I think that’s something that in reverse was working in our favor, probably at the point at which we were moving on circle, because that was still early enough on in the pandemic, that people were like, Oh, thank god community, rather than Oh, my God, please no more. And so I think that was a dynamic that was actually helpful for us, and that somebody listening now isn’t necessarily going to be able to ride on the back of in quite the same

Meg Casebolt 35:51
way. Right. And I always want to say like things that worked two years ago may or may not work for you. Now, there’s a lot of people out there who grew million person followings on Instagram in 2013, that the tips that they would give you would not work now. So always making sure that you’re looking at the time that people are giving you information in the time slots that they are making these decisions is really important to overall. But I do think that still even more now with this feeling of another another place for me to check another group, I’m not going to engage. I think the the overall idea that we want to impart with this episode is no your intention didn’t know the outcomes you want the people who are in your community to be able to achieve and what benefits there are to the community. I think there are a lot of programs that just say, well, we have a community. It’s like, well, why? Yeah,

Sophy Dale 36:52
I think we found that the people who have engaged most in the community and who have gotten the most out of the community are people who come in with knowing their own intention for being there. And and people who know that by getting that public accountability by building up a small group of people who they know better, who are fellow business owners. And you know, we’ve seen people go on to hire one another, we’ve seen people go on to develop friendships have sort of informal peer masterminds together, people who will check each other’s copy for them, you know, prior to a launch or something like that. It’s those kinds of relationships and friendships that are at least as important as now come to them to being in the community as the easy access to SEO information, which is actually, you know, the explicit selling point. And they don’t mean that they don’t value that because obviously they do, but the people who have gotten the most out of the community are the people who have gone in there and built relationships, like for sure, yeah. And I

Meg Casebolt 37:55
think also the people who have gotten the best outcomes are not necessarily those who are the most engaged in the community. And recognizing that community, if you are using it in a digital learning environment, just because people aren’t engaged doesn’t mean they’re not getting results from you. And just because they are engaged does not mean that they are following them to do doing use community engagement as the metric upon which you are basing your own feelings about your success.

Sophy Dale 38:26
Yes. Because that’s true to some of the most engaged people in the community, have become engaged by the community, and are not necessarily prioritizing SEO, in our case, as the main thing that that they’re focusing their attention on in their business, but they still not really

Meg Casebolt 38:47
recognizing as you’re building a program, whether it’s a course or a group coaching program, or you’re just trying to build a community, understanding what the potential outcomes can be, and how you can help foster those outcomes in the community and in one to one and in the way that you’re building your you know, the adult learning understanding of how people’s brains do absorb things differently now than when we’re in, you know, my kids of first grade. Like, he sits, he does worksheets, and he learns, and that’s not how adult brains work. So recognizing how, what you’re building and how it supports your clients, whether that’s community or more one to one support, or how you want to engage with people and how your ideal client can get value from you.

Sophy Dale 39:29
I think also recognizing that, you know, for instance, most people who are wanting to learn about SEO, or wanting to learn about SEO in order to benefit their business, if they’re getting significant business benefits from being part of the community, so don’t have to be as a direct result of learning and implementing SEO for it to be thing that still gets them to the goal that they actually had as their underlying goal for joining. So

Meg Casebolt 39:56
all of our marketing is just an ecosystem and whether you’re, you know, Using the courses that you’re taking in the programs you’re joining to develop relationships that can turn into referral partners, then maybe maybe these marketing channels that you’re using are paying off in ways you don’t expect coming back to what you were saying about, like, most of my leads come from referrals, but I have to be active in communities in order to let people know that I am doing this thing. And we can always trace our brand awareness back to one particular source.

Sophy Dale 40:27
Yeah, for sure. And even when you’re asking people, those specific questions over instances in my, you would not be surprised to hear in my intake form that I’m asking people where they found, and people always answer, and they’ll answer with whatever is their top of mind, reason for why they found you, it doesn’t mean that that’s actually really the reason they found you, because they’ve forgotten that originally, somebody mentioned you or they heard you on a particular podcast, or whatever. And then they started following you on social media, and then you turned up in a community. And then they did a Google search. And when they saw your name, they recognize your name, because of all those previous things. And so, you know, now they’re saying they found you via SEO, but there was more to it than that. Right? And vice versa.

Meg Casebolt 41:12
Yeah. And I think the same is true. If you’re trying to track people digitally, instead of asking them the same is true where, like you said, I might hear someone on a podcast, go follow them on social, go check out their website, and then finally see a post on a different channel and go fill out their form. I’ve I’ve heard from them, potentially six or seven times by that point, but it looks like a social click. Yeah, you know, that getting that first point of contact and tracking it backwards can be incredibly difficult. Yes.

Sophy Dale 41:43
I’m not necessarily that revealing either. Because really, it’s all it’s the culmination of those six touch points. And it’s not really any one of them. Particularly it is, it’s them in combination, and the social proof that that’s provided. And the thing that you said in the first podcast interview that has finally clicked into place the fifth sign leucine in a different kind of setting. So I think it is, as you say, an ecosystem. And it’s about working out where we can be most at home, provide the most value within those ecosystems, and then showing up in those places.

Meg Casebolt 42:24
Yeah, and recognizing that recognizing that people are going to hear from us a lot. And there’s going to be a moment where they decide to take action and knowing what the moment is that they take action is just as important as ever, maybe even more important than knowing what that initial point of contact is. It’s they heard you on the podcast, they saw you on Facebook, they went to your website, and then one day they went, No, I’m ready to to write my book. And now it’s time to reach out to Sophie. Yeah, absolutely. The moment that they realized they were finally ready. That’s just as important to know is all the other stuff.

Sophy Dale 43:01
And if you just happen to hit them at the moment when they’re ready. So for instance, that I’ve just taken on a client who saw me on Instagram because I follow an author she follows so I was suggested to her by Instagram as a person to follow. She clicked Sora was a book coach was like, There’s a thing called a book coach. That’s the thing I immediately click straight through to the website, booked a discovery call. And that was that, you know, she didn’t need all those other touch points because she just happened to be at the exact psychological moment to make that call. But that’s incredibly rare. You know, most of the time people need lots and lots and lots of touch points. But

Meg Casebolt 43:45
all right, so Sophie, if people are listening to this podcast right now and going oh my gosh, I need a book coach. I need a copywriter. How can they find out more about you?

Sophy Dale 43:54
So the best place to go to to find out kind of all the information is my website, which is Sophie dale.com. Spelt unusually done to my dad who may or may not have been SOP H yd a l e.com.

Meg Casebolt 44:10
And we will include that in the show notes for sure. Yeah,

Sophy Dale 44:13
that’s the single best place to find me. As discussed, I’m probably more active on Instagram than I am elsewhere. So that would be the other place to find me. You can

Meg Casebolt 44:22
find it on LinkedIn but shall be bored with

Sophy Dale 44:26
quite likely to turn off my notifications. Notifications about other people’s work anniversaries is just too much for me.

Meg Casebolt 44:36
Well, thank you so so much for being with me and walking back through our history together. Really appreciate your time today. Sophie, thank you so much.

Sophy Dale 44:44
Thank you.

Meg Casebolt 44:47
Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slowdown.com and sign up for our email list so you never miss an episode. We’d also love if you could write a review To help other small business owners find the show you can head over to social slowdown comm slash review or grab that link in our show notes for easy access. We’ll be back soon with more tips to help you market your business without being beholden to social media. Talk to you then

Please forgive any typos as this transcript was automatically generated by otter.ai.