How We Built and Maintain Our 55,000+ Dental Community
More and more people are starting to build communities, and with Skoolโs Membership Challenge coming up, I wanted to share some things that we've done to build and maintain the "Disneyland for Dentists" as @Sam Ovens has called it in some of his podcast appearances (linked in the comments below). We run a large Facebook group (we started it before Skool was a thing) in the dental space and currently have 55,000+ US-based dentists in the community. Engagement in the group is constantly around 90% (meaning that ~50k of the 55k members have engaged in the past 60 days). The community was grown 100% organically. Not a single dollar was spent on promotion. Here are the things that we did (and continue to do) to grow the group organically: 1. The most important thing is the quality of the content being shared in the group. This is by far the most important thing. I'd estimate that 70%+ of our group members were invited by someone already in the group. The quality of the content is the main reason someone invites someone else to join that group. There are no shortcuts here other than being consistent with great content. We posted daily for several years and now mix in new content and recycle our old posts as we've been at it for 5+ years. A ton of incredible content gets buried in the past posts so it's beneficial for new members to start recycling it after about 6 months of posting. 2. We contacted "all-stars" in the group and asked if they'd post regularly. If they agreed, we assigned them a day of the week. We have had dozens of incredible group members posting once per week on their scheduled day for years. These people come and go, but we always have an excellent rotation of group members consistently posting in the group. This helps to have great content from other people rather than from admins. This also encourages other group members to post and engage as it's more of a community sharing ideas rather than top-down from the leaders.