THE 7 KEYS TO SUCCESS

1. Under Promise, Over Deliver

Promising your fans the world and constantly letting them down is a quick way to ruin your relationship with them.

Instead of over promising, start small and exceed their expectations. And instead of promising a specific amount of something, keep it vague.

Your fans will help shape your community by telling you what they want more of – so give yourself time to try out different things and give your fans time to see what they like.

For example, if you think you’ll live stream twice a month exclusively for your Paid Members, that’s great! But instead of saying “2 Live Streams a month” as a perk for that tier, you can simply say “Exclusive Live Streams”. This way, if you want to live stream 5 days in a row, you can! But also, if you need to take a couple weeks off for personal time, you can!

You always want your fans feeling like they are getting their money’s worth!

2. Consistency

It doesn’t require a lot of time to be consistent. In just an hour or two each month, you can easily create enough content for the whole month. And thanks to our Schedule posts feature, you can create and schedule content for the whole month in one day!

Taking an hour or two each month to make sure you can be consistent with content is crucial because it (a) allows you to always keep your fans happy and (b) allows you to focus on making music/art like you should!

Even though the goal is for your Grouped community to be fun, if you can treat it like a business one or two days a month, then it can quickly turn into one of your main revenue streams!

We highly recommend setting one day a month aside so you can make sure your top fans are happy and then get back to doing what you do best – creating art! And if some months you login every day, GREAT! But if some months you need to disconnect, the fans are still feeling appreciated because you took one day to give them content for a month!

Take a look at an examples of content you can make to schedule out for the month here.

3. Reward Your Fans / Give Back

Giving back to your community makes them feel like you really appreciate them, and for paid members it makes it feel like they are getting more than their money’s worth!

You can give back with your time – whether that is a livestream, responding to comments with selfie videos, engaging with the fans in the discussion tab, or more!

You can also give back by doing giveaways. We have some artists giving away $1,000 every week in financial support, we have some giving away merch, and we have some giving away free 30/60/90/Year subscriptions to their paid tier (giving a fan a free paid subscription is no money out of your pocket and a chance to turn them into a paid member in the future).

The point is, the more you give back to your fans, the more they feel valued and become die hard fans for life. The more successful you get, the more you can give back. In the beginning, start with your time and show them that you care. As you make more money, give more back! It’s that simple.

4. Always Give Them First Access

It takes no extra time and takes no money out of your pocket to give your Grouped first access to merch, tickets, or anything else you are going to sell.

If you are going to give them first access to a song, video, or something else that is going to come out – you can choose whether to only give it to paid members (and if you want free members to see a snippet of it), give it to everyone, or give it to no one. Up to you!

This works great because when you promote something on social media that is going to be coming out, you can also mention that they can get it now in your community. For example: “I am releasing the new merch line on Friday, but you can get early access NOW by joining my community. And Pro Members of the community even get a discount code!”

Now you have an opportunity to grow your community, increase your recurring revenue, AND promote your upcoming release at the same time – all in an authentic way with zero extra work!

5. Raw/Unfiltered Content Is Perfect

While it may seem unnatural or counter-intuitive, the best content is the rawest content.

Unedited selfie videos recorded on your camera, unmixed demos with mumbles in it, and all of that type of content isn’t right for any other platform – but this content is what your top fans in your Grouped want to see!

This raw content takes the least time to make but typically gets the best engagement. You don’t have to spend any time editing or worrying about algorithms, you can just be yourself.

We see a lot of artists use their home feed as a personal blog where they randomly write about hobbies, books/movies they like, or whatever they are passionate about at the time. The fans who join your Grouped want to know the real you, not just the public surface level version.

So the content that you make on a daily basis – whether it be music, videos, or just thoughts – that doesn’t fit social media is PERFECT to be used for your community. Your die hard fans want to see the type of content that they don’t get to see on socials – the REAL you.

6. Engage. Engage. Engage.

It only takes a couple minutes to randomly pop into the Discussion tab and engage with some of the fans or start a new topic, but it goes A LONG way!

You can also randomly respond to a comment on the home feed or in the discussions with a quick selfie video and pin it to the top of the comments. That way, even if you don’t have time to respond to everyone, they see that it really is you responding and you are taking some time to engage!

Don’t worry about having to login every day if you don’t want to, just when you go to make a post, take an extra couple of minutes every now and then and make some fans day by responding to them!

7. Share Snippets On Social Media

If you put some exclusive content in your Grouped, create some FOMO from fans by sharing a snippet of the content on social media with a link for people to watch/listen to the full thing!

You don’t have to create any extra content for social media, just take whatever you are already posting and cut it to 10-30 seconds to remind your social media followers that they are missing out if they aren’t in your Grouped.

This whole community platform is a new model so it may take some fans a couple times of seeing snippets to be comfortable signing up. So don’t feel bad if it doesn’t crush the first time you share it, but you also don’t have to flood your socials with it. You know what your fans like and what will get them to join, so trust yourself.

(BONUS) Want to go above and beyond?

Turn your community on Grouped into its own brand/business by creating a separate Instagram account for it & getting a custom domain to match.

We have a lot of artists that run a separate IG account for their grouped community. This is the easiest way to take your Grouped to the next level and it allows you to not have to keep promoting it on your personal IG account.

You don’t have to create any new content for your new IG account – just share snippets or recaps of content that is posted to keep reminding people it exists. This allows you to use your personal IG to share posts to your IG Story whenever you want.

Here are some ways to help launch your new IG account and help it grow:

1. Make a collaborative IG post with your main account and your community IG account (check out this post by Forrest Frank with his community @HiTreeHouse account for a great example of this).
2. Do a contest that requires people to follow your community IG account and to be a free member in the community (check out this example from Vwillz).
3. Tag the community in your posts when you promote something upcoming (like a new single/album, merch, or tickets)
4. Share the community IG posts on your own IG Stories
5. Have a friend/manager respond to all of the DMs and Comments on the community IG account – they don’t have to act like you, they just have to represent the community on your behalf (such as “Thanks for sending this DM, we appreciate it! I’ll try to make sure (blank) sees the message! And in case you don’t know, they are spending most of their time engaging in the community so that’s your best chance to get a response”

If you wanna see examples of how artists on Grouped are using a community IG account and custom domain to turn their Grouped page into its own brand, check out some of these:

Mike. – @OnlySteves
Nic D – @FRDiFam
Forrest Frank – @HiTreeHouse
Anees – @TheCampCabin