Tanya is the founder of Get Noticed with Video, where she teaches course creators, coaches and consultants how to market their businesses successfully through video.

She also works with course creators who are trying to leverage more live stream video but also improve their video-on-demand content.

Tanya said: “My goal is to serve more people to stand out to sell more of their services. In doing so, what I realized is that, especially with live streaming myself weekly for the last couple of years, I started to build this engaged community in the chat”. “They wanted a space to go play. And that’s how I ended up landing on GroupApp eventually after a series of visits to other platforms,” added Tanya.”

Tanya built a community platform on GroupApp after trying several options.

Tanya has used online communities and platforms that have features similar to what GroupApp has to offer. The one thing she likes about GroupApp is the simple way she can organize her content.

Before joining GroupApp, she ran a community on a different platform for about a year. And her community was giving her feedback without making direct complaints. Instead, they constantly asked where they could find different materials. As much as they organized things in the community, some of the questions kept recurring, which signaled to Tanya that it was time to look for a different community solution.

Tanya chose GroupApp because it allowed her to organize and grant access to the resources and content she created within her community based on membership subscription plans, and it was easy for her members to use.

Branding The Community is The First Step

The first thing you notice inside Tanya’s community is that she branded it to fit her personal tone and the tone of her other websites.

Tanya configured a custom domain for her community to align it with her brand.

However, branding is just the first step in building a community.

“I wanted my community on GroupApp to align with my brand, and these are some of the questions I asked myself before building a community:”

• How do I actually want to use the community and the channels within it?
• What’s the purpose of my community?

Set your Community Goals

The number one objective was to have people be a part of Membership Academy, which is called Stream Bosses Academy. That was her priority.

The secondary objective was to allow this to be a space that could take over Facebook groups. She wanted the community to be a place where members were learning, asking questions, and getting help from other like-minded peers who were building their businesses.

Unlike Facebook groups, where hanging out with people is a priority, Tanya wanted to provide more for her members, which is a learning experience

Knowing her two major objectives, she started thinking through what type of content she should host inside of her community and how to best organize her community channels to communicate her goals.

Establishing different group channels

Conversation and engagement are big parts of what makes her live streams, and she wanted that to translate to the community as well.

Tanya needed to create channels that would be effective and that would help people figure out where they needed to go to post questions and other posts and comments.

Stream Like a Boss created a general discussion tab that’s open to anyone who’s in this network. So that includes both the paid and free members.

For Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday deals, many of Tanya’s followers were looking for a space where they could quickly find out where the deal was on a certain product or service.

So, she made a temporary thread named deal alerts where she and others can post useful deals and make the most of the holiday season.

She came up with permanent channels and temporary channels, and she communicated this to the network: “Hey, this is how this will be used, and it’ll come down after some time.”

The other thing about GroupApp that she loves is that you can add an option to join a channel. Every person within the community knew about the deal alerts channel, but they chose whether they wanted to join. Some people simply were not interested in Black Friday deals.

Giving the community members autonomy allows them to tailor their experience in the community. Not every active paying member needs to have access to everything. GroupApp recognizes this and allows you to manipulate channels and play with access to each.

As for Stream Like a Boss, Tanya decided that the only people who would be able to view the Stream Bosses Academy channels would be the people who are in the paid program. So, she made that clear to the members.

Showing vs. hiding different channels

For every channel, Tanya thought about whether to showcase it or hide it from non-paying members.

That was a huge part of her decision-making process as she went through each of these channels. She is still experimenting, but for her Academy channels, she decided to use the power of FOMO—fear of missing out.

So, if someone is a member and they’re just in the free category, they can see these channels. They can see what’s available, but they can’t see the content, and this is something she tested with different accounts—checking as free members to see how it looks for them both visually and also from a content standpoint.

For example, free members cannot access the Stream Bosses channel, but Tanya created brief information about what they can expect to get if they become members, and she placed a Join button below it.

When they click on “Join,” it takes them to a full landing page that Tanya decided to build outside of GroupApp because she wanted a traditional page for this purpose. However, the page links to subscription plans created inside of GroupApp.

Yet again, this is a great example of how you can combine things outside of GroupApp and make the most of your community.

Migrating members from other platforms

Since Tanya has had her community active on another platform for over a year, she was trying to figure out how to transfer her members to the new platform without canceling their subscriptions and potentially losing some of the members.

For existing members who already had active subscription plans, she decided to create a hidden free subscription for them that granted them full access to the new community at $0 and kept them on their old plans.

This way, her members don’t have to worry about transferring to the new payment method, and she made sure none canceled their subscriptions.

For her new members, she used the subscription GroupApp offers and made it visible, so now the new people can see it and sign up for it. According to Tanya, this is the decision every business owner has to make for themselves, but for her and her business, this is what worked best.

Onboarding members to GroupApp

GroupApp offers the option to send emails to your members as you onboard them to the platform. However, this feature is optional because a lot of clients, such as Tanya, are already using email marketing platforms that work for them.

She turned these off, but when people sign up for GroupApp, she adds them to one of the email workflows she created outside the platform. This workflow separates free community members from paid members.

The paying members get a custom onboarding email that gets sent to them with a short welcome video and a bunch of other stuff that tells them exactly what to do inside the community.

And if somebody comes in initially for free but then switches to a paid subscription later, they will stop receiving emails designed for free members and be transferred to the paid member email sequence.

Engage community members

Keeping members of your community active and engaged is one of the most important things to do, and there are different ways to do it.

In Tanya’s community, she is making an effort to slowly but surely move people from her free groups, such as Facebook groups, into her GroupApp community.

Getting started channel

People who join your community for the first time need to find something of value, or else they will feel disconnected.

So she created “Getting Started,” which contains onboarding materials for new members who join her community, and included it in her onboarding email.

The first thing new members see inside this channel is a short video that tells them how to engage in the community, directions for setting up their profile. She also included some other useful tips for her members that make it easier for them to start participating in her community.

Posting Content Regularly

So the first thing she must ensure is that she and her team post on a regular basis. When someone arrives for the first time, they immediately find a bunch of new posts inside the community instead of bumping into a month-old post.

However, you have to pay attention not to overwhelm people, and this is a balancing act.

What she does try to include is a community newsletter. Every Sunday or Monday, she will share a community newsletter, telling them: “Hey, here’s what’s going on this week. Here are a couple of links for you to check out,” and this engages everyone in the network. They know what they can expect in the coming days.

Tanya created a standard Banner that she attaches to the weekly update, and she writes a brief text and makes sure it is valuable. The post is written like an email, but she also sends it to their inbox to make sure people see it one way or another.

Organize Events

One of the ways to engage members of the community is to organize events. Tanya invite special guests to speak on various topics related to her industry or organize a training day where members learn something new.

Outside of traditional lectures, Tanya also organizes challenges, live shows, and other types of events that engage the audience and keep them active.

Sharing fun stuff

Tanya wanted to send the message to her members that she is actively participating in the community that she has built. People inside actually get to communicate with Tanya through comments and posts, and for members to have that connection with her is huge. For them, “It feels like, oh, this is Tanya, like I’m hanging out with her.”

Over the course of the week, not all of Tanya’s posts are carefully planned. She wants people to pay attention to some of the interesting stuff Tanya finds as she works. That can be something on YouTube, an article that she found, or her actual regular office hours and live streams, which give the community a more natural flow.

However, this is where she has to be careful because sharing every day could be overwhelming, and she does a great job of balancing sharing important information with fun posts and videos that people may be interested in, which adds another layer of value to the community and encourages others to share as well.

Share courses with your community

One of the reasons to even start a community is to provide knowledge to your members, and Tanya has a large number of courses that she is currently pulling over from other platforms, especially the ones that will align with her business plans in 2023.

She has some cornerstone courses that target different levels of people based on their knowledge of the topic, from beginners to those who already have businesses.

She’s done another brilliant thing with her community. All her courses are easy to find in GroupApp, but she created a quiz outside of the platform that people can take, get results from, and based on the results, receive an email that will lead them to a specific course that is the best one for them.

They can sign up for the course that is most relevant to them and view all other possible courses offered by Tanya in her community. If they are not a paid member of the community and try to access a course that is paid, they will see an upgrade button on the course. This is a great way to convert leads into paid members of your community.

Keep all the essential resources in the library

Library in GroupApp allows you to store your resources and course materials in different forms.

In Tanya’s case, she created really short video tips that will help people get started with videos to boost their confidence. Currently, there’s a webinar in her community for everyone who wants to check it out or rewatch it, and she is adding some other materials.

She attached a PDF file to that webinar and pinned it as the first post members see when they access that webinar. This also serves as a lead magnet.

Not only does Tanya provide value in the Stream Like a Boss community, but she is also using GroupApp features creatively, showing you different ways to make the most out of our app.

Even free members have access to some high-value content, and they also see what they are missing out on because her library content is visible but not accessible to everyone unless you are on a paid subscription plan.

She also plans to incorporate challenges for which people can sign up even if they are not community members, which is another way she will use both courses and library features.

Depending on the level they are at, people need different kinds of communication, messages, and resources. The segmenting of leads using quizzes allows Tanya to communicate with them depending on their needs and offer them the right learning program.

Extra advice on how to build a community on GroupApp

Although we’ve created a useful guide on how to build a community on GroupApp, we love when our clients share their experiences. And the first thing Tanya mentioned is that you have to work backward.

In other words, you want to think about your overall outcome. What do you want people to get from your community? And what types of people do I expect to participate in there?

Because it can be difficult to transition people from more traditional social platforms into your own. It’s a really good idea to do it, but it is a challenge, and it’s something you have to think through because you have to think through what will engage and attract people to come to your own personal platform versus spending time on Facebook or LinkedIn.

How do I get them here? And how am I going to ensure that I keep them engaged?

Ultimately, you want your followers to become paid members. That’s ultimately the goal. But to do that, you need to provide value to everyone—both the paying members and free members you want to convert.

The Stream Like a Boss Community is a perfect example of what you can do if you build a community on GroupApp. Tanya’s just getting started here, and she’s already created an amazing community that resonates with her members and her brand identity.

Build your community on GroupApp today!

What are you waiting for? Follow in Tanya’s footsteps and create your own community today! If you are still unsure, check out some other success stories.

If you are ready to build your community with GroupApp, we are waiting for you. Start with a free account, and we will help you build your community from the ground up!