Why I Chose A Private Forum Over a Facebook Group

Welcome to episode 312 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.

Today we're pulling back the curtain on a big part of Hit the Mic Backstage actually. I get a lot of questions about running a membership and how I started it and things like that. What I want to talk about today is not so much how I started something but why I'm changing something.

Up until now, the community part of Hit the Mic Backstage, which I guess I should rewind and say this. Hit the Mic Backstage is a private community full of a library of trainings on everything from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to SnapChat to all the major networks. Plus some content marketing stuff like blogging and video. We have guest experts who have joined us to talk about Facebook groups, to talk about getting publicity from major publications and finances and all sorts of things. It's a really cool part of my business that I absolutely love running. It's without a doubt my favorite offering. I have the most fun doing it.

It's a little more than a year old now. The consistent feedback we get from members is that the most valuable piece is the community because in there we do something called Office Hours where I answer questions. We do profile reviews once a month. I share news as it happens. We talked about last week with the Facebook changes. All that stuff went out to the private community and Hit the Mic Backstage first. Up and until the last couple of weeks, the private community was completely on Facebook. There was the membership area that is on the website with all the trainings but the community part where you connected with each other and with me, that all happened on Facebook and a private group.

Recently though, as in the last couple of weeks, I changed that. It is now a private forum on Hit the Mic's Backstage site, instead of being on Facebook. I had a lot of questions from members about it and it's something I thought about for a really long time and struggled with, but I wanted to pull back the curtain and share why with you today. That's what we're going to do.

When it comes to building a community for your membership. You want that to be a place where, not only to get engaged and connect with each other but also where they're getting value. For me it's one of the easiest ways for me to provide value because I can simply kind of share what's going on. Hey this is happening. Facebook made this change or SnapChat evolved this way or here comes Instagram stories. These kind of things or quick updates like you know about the fact that Facebook ads might be running you a little more right now. They're not broken. You're not doing anything wrong. It's just what happens this time of year.

I really, really like that. I really like being able to provide that value. Again, it's consistently one of the top value pieces for members when they talk about why they stay and why they tell people to join. It's really important to me that I'm able to consistently provide that high quality, high level experience. That gets really hard to do when you talk about building it someplace you don't control.

Facebook and all of its wonder is a very busy place. There's a lot going on and there's a lot of pulls and draws on your attention in that space. I don't know what they are going to do with Facebook groups in the future. I'm not saying that something's coming or anything like that. I don't know. Believe it or not, Mark Zuckerberg does not call me up and ask appro