Declining 3,686 Members in 5 Months to Grow Right: My 5-Month Journey Managing a 18,000-Member Online Community

I run several communities online, one of them being for a company I work for. That community has 18,000 members currently (yesterday, Friday, we accepted member 18,000). Of those, the community’s grown a net number of 1,000 members in the past 5 months and 1 day (that community also ends up with an acceptance rate usually between 25%-33%, and I’ve ended up declining 3,686 requests as well in the past 5 months and 1 day).

I decided to take this milestone to come up with 5 key takeaways for running a community this size. Please note, I’m not going over engagement in this takeaway session. This is mainly about the process of accepting and declining requests to join (which I think of as an application process to joining the community).

5 key takeaways:

• Many fake profiles, but not all fake profiles are new accounts
• You’ll always have more to learn
• Filtering the requests is one of the fastest ways to go through large numbers of requests
• You’ll want to add badges to the FB group
• Always check your spam and other sections of the admin tools panel

Takeaway 1: Many fake profiles, but not all fake profiles are new?accounts

You’d be surprised, but more and more profiles that are older seem to be fake. This doesn’t always mean they are, obviously, but only recently I found out why. Older accounts are (illegally) sold in bulk. This is to make them appear more legitimate. A lot of those accounts will start adding groups once they refresh the profile (sometimes they even leave the old URL, for example, which is a tell it’s a fake account). When they want to join your community, it may be because they want to show to others that they are legitimate because they’re in groups.

Another BIG reason people are joining groups like crazy now is to scrape info from the group’s members. This is especially for mass DM’ing. There are now bots that can go into groups and start messaging people in those groups, but most groups don’t tell you who’s in them until you join.

However, as to why I end up declining around 66%-75% of those who request to join? A large part of that is knowing who our audience is (in that case, digital marketing agency owners mostly in the United States). If someone doesn't fit our audience, they aren't always let in. The point is - you need to know who your audience is. It's not about having a BIG audience - it's about having the RIGHT audience.

Takeaway 2: You’ll always have more to?learn

There are some certifications out there. Meta has one, and Digital Marketer has another one (I'm currently going through DigitalMarketer 's Community Management Mastery). Those are the two big ones that I’ve found so far, but Udemy also has a lot of good courses (you can usually find them for around $10 each if you wait for their sales).

Takeaway 3: Filtering the requests is one of the fastest ways to go through large numbers of?requests

In the big group I manage, we get between 15–60 requests to deal with (usually 60 is more after the weekend, so it’s still perhaps 20 per day). The most I’ve had to deal with probably was 100–150 in one day. You can’t easily deal with a number that high at once, unless you start using the filtering options that are available for accepting or declining requests.

Takeaway 4: You’ll want to add badges to the FB?group

Badges make the group gamified. Of course, not everyone will want a badge, but people who regularly participate in your community may want a badge. Having that option helps those who like your community and want it shown that they regularly contribute (also, a great thing to do is to make a post about the top 10 most active members of the community each month?—?something we do in one of the communities I manage).

Takeaway 5: Always check your spam and other sections of the admin tools?panel

Facebook’s spam detectors are good, but at the same time they aren’t perfect. This means, if you have a fairly active community, not all posts will be visible?—?you’ll have to go check the spam filters and see if there are any posts that Facebook considered spam that weren’t spam. I usually like to check this at least once a day.

BONUS: You Won’t Always Get Engagement on?Posts

I think this is one of the most important takeaways. If a post you create in a group doesn’t get any engagement, it’s still ok. You’ll have some posts that do extremely well and then the next post you do gets no engagement. That’s ok. One thing I changed in the community to help more posts get more views overall was to change the default view in the community to the most recent posts. People in the community can still change it for themselves, but the default at least shows the most recent, giving each post more possibility to get more engagement. After that, I noticed an increase in engagement. I can’t say for sure that that did it, but it did seem to help.

EXTRA BONUS: Allow People from Certain Other Communities You Run to Automatically Join

If you run a stricter, more closed community that’s related, you can also allow members of that (or those) community/communities to join your other community automatically if they request to join. It cuts back some on admin work (and you’ll see who was added in your Activity Log).