Play Skool Games, Win Skool Prizes
Transcription
So you might’ve heard of Skool. You might’ve heard that Skool is the new hot thing to use. And you probably have a Facebook group and you’re wondering if you should make the switch in this video, I am going to discuss the pros and cons of each and why I think you should consider using Skool for your next or your current Facebook group.
We’re going to talk about some benefits. Of Skool. We’re going to talk about what Skool is. I’m going to show you inside of one of my Skool communities. We’re going to talk about the benefits of a Facebook group because I think Facebook does have its home. I have a place, drawbacks of Facebook because I think they’re a group or they’re a bunch benefits of Skool drawbacks of Skool and why I think you might want to take the switch Now, let’s go ahead and talk about Skool is an online platform.
I like to call it a combination of Facebook group and an online course community, a paid community like Kajabi or Mighty Networks. As you can see, this is one of my Skool communities currently at 469 people. And what I like about Skool, Is its simplicity. Okay. And I’ll compare this to Facebook in just a moment, but as you can see here, it is a platform where people can ask and answer questions.
You can ask questions by topic. There’s a classroom where you can essentially put your courses. Or what I do sometimes is I put my lead magnets here. There’s also a calendar option. You can see your members and there’s a leaderboard, which is really cool ’cause it allows you to gamify and get people to interact with each other, which can be a challenge in a Facebook community.
So let’s go ahead and talk a little bit about Facebook groups. Now I have a bunch of Facebook groups and the reason why I’m showing you this first is this is what people have to see before they get to a Facebook group, which I think can be a problem. In my opinion, with Facebook and Facebook groups, there’s a lot of noise.
There’s a lot of clutter. If I just scroll through Facebook, I’m going to see three ads. And a matter of four or five swipes or scrolls. And it’s very easy for someone to get distracted if your community is on Facebook. But let’s go ahead and take a look. You have a Facebook group, I assume. And the strengths and weaknesses.
One of the biggest benefits of Facebook, which is both a strength and a weakness is that there’s a billion people there. Literally there’s a billion people that use Facebook. And one of the benefits is Facebook will recommend your community potentially to people that might be interested. As you can see, I’ve got a community that talks about affiliate marketing and it can recommend if someone has expressed interest in affiliate marketing in the past, it can recommend my group.
One of the challenges quite honestly, is with Facebook, you’ve got to play the algorithm game. You’ve got to figure out what. Do it. Facebook wants they don’t want links. And so you’ve got to be careful with the links that you post. Your engagement, quite honestly, can be low on your Facebook group, depending on the type of people that you have.
Another issue you’ve got to deal with is the amount of people that are essentially just trying to scam or harvest members from your group. I have seen countless YouTube videos where people have taught a method. Or a way of making money online by going into the Facebook groups, joining hundreds of Facebook groups within a niche, and then going through the members and simply sending a message to every one of the members, which is, in my opinion, a problem.
But Facebook has and can be a really good platform to find people. You can also run ads to Facebook groups now, depending on the group. So that can be a great way to start building a community. Another benefit, like I said, everybody’s here. You can put your courses inside. You can hold live events inside your community.
People are comfortable and familiar with Facebook. It’s a part of their daily life. And so getting people to join your group can be really simple. But. Keeping people engaged and enrolled can be a challenge. So you can see here, this is my Facebook group. It currently has about 33, 200 members, give or take.
A lot of people use Facebook groups as a way of supporting their paid community or their paid members, but you can do the same thing with with Skool. So pros, everybody’s using it. Everybody’s familiar and comfortable with it. It’s not a new learning curve. You can put files in media, you can go live.
You can integrate it with a lot of other platforms. And people aren’t used to it. Like I said, one of the drawbacks is the large number of people that are essentially just trying to scam and take from the group. Not too many people that give. So that is a brief overview of a Facebook group. Now let’s take a look and talk about the pros and cons of a Skool community.
Because a Skool community has a lot of pros, but it also has a few cons as well. That we’re gonna talk about. So one of the things that I like about the Skool community is it’s simple. It’s clean. When you come to the community, you come to the community tab or the front page where people can interact and engage and discuss.
And it’s very clean. It’s very simple. What I think will happen in the coming, Weeks or months is they might probably start running ads. So this will be less clean But I think it allows people to focus you can go straight here and ask questions and get the help that you’re looking for One thing that I don’t like from Skool just yet maybe it’ll change but anybody can post and so if you are new to the community and you’re a Spammer or scammer you can just roll in here and make a post to try and harvest people It’s short lived because other members of the community will probably flag your account You But that’s one thing that I don’t necessarily like.
Another thing that I both like and dislike is the ability to have your course material here. You can see I’ve got a bunch of different courses that people could interact with and engage with. However, one thing that I do not like is that you cannot put your courses natively into Skool yet. For example, this is a link from Vimeo.
You can use Vimeo, Wistio, or YouTube. So if you have a YouTube channel, it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s just like another step that you have to take when it comes to using Skool, something to be aware of. I’m not a huge fan of it, but It’s a new platform. You understand they probably don’t have the money in the backing to host their own courses just yet because they need a bunch of servers to do that.
So I understand, but this is basically what the inside of a course or classroom looks like. The next thing is calendar. You can actually have a full interactive calendar, which is a benefit, but the drawback is quite honestly, You can’t have live video or you can’t host live video inside of the zoom community or inside of the Skool community.
You’ve got to use a third party like zoom. As you can see here, this is a, this would be a zoom link. If you look at my coffee hour, this is a zoom link, which again, people are comfortable with using zoom, but I don’t like having to interweave three or four Platforms in order to make things work if we are looking for a reason to stay with Facebook You essentially can do all of this within Facebook without a huge issue Let’s talk about something that is really cool inside of Skool that is not yet available on Facebook.
It’s called Gamification now what people can do? is they can earn points to move up the virtual ladder. Okay, and the more points a person earns, the more that they can unlock. And that’s called gamification. So what I could do is I could have different courses, I could have maybe one on one coaching or group coaching.
As people unlock different levels, they could get access to more of me. And basically in order to get points, you have to get likes. So you make a post where people appreciate the post and it’s a very, thought provoking. You get points. And the more points you get, the more you move up. As you can see, I have, I’m on level six in my own community.
I need 1100 points to move up to my level seven, but everyone starts off at zero to unlock. The first level is really simple. But what I really like most about The point feature is before people can start sending direct messages to other members of the group, there’s a setting that you can turn on that makes it so that they have to get to level two.
So before they can start spamming people, if that’s what their end goal is, they have to achieve enough points. So to interact enough within the community in order to. Earn the right to spam. Now it actually turns a lot of people away. I’m sure that there will be bots that are on their way to work, have a workaround, but right now I think one of the best features is it’s very difficult and it’s a new feature to spam.
So let me just show you a few other cool things with in Skool. Community to help you make the best choice. You have a dashboard, every community, you have a choice between toggling between free and paid. You can actually bounce between. And the other cool thing within a Skool community is you can change the price.
So if you want to start off at 9 per month and then increase it every single month, you have the ability to do that. Now let’s say someone comes in under the free community and you change it to a hundred dollars per month. You would not force people to then pay you a hundred dollars per month. You come in at whatever level you paid or got access to.
You can see here. You can get the payouts. Obviously this is a free community. There are no payouts. You can invite people in a variety of ways. You can use Skool as like a landing page. There’s a bunch of different ways that you can use Skool. You can use Skool as a landing page to collect names and emails.
You can use Skool as a way to funnel people to your high ticket offer or to other paid communities. You can see here you have a ability to make it public or private. What I encourage you to do is make your Skool community public so that it can be discovered both in search engines and on the Skool platform.
So one cool thing, and I’ll show you in just a moment, Skool is that your community can actually rank in the Skool ecosystem. And I’ll show you that in just a second. Subscriptions, all 469 people are in my free community or on the free plan. You can add different categories or sections it integrates and this is what’s really cool, what I really like you can ask members questions, so you can ask for their email address you can make sure that they are aware of the rules, this integrates with Zapier or Zapier, so if someone purchases something through your through let’s say GoHighLevel or ClickFunnels, you can actually automatically Add them to the community or invite them to the community.
It also has different webhooks. You can send an automatic DM to new members. So let’s say you have a free community and when someone joins, you can say, Hey, thanks for joining. And then you can offer them something paid, or you can offer to start a communication, a conversation, which would lead to paid. Then you can also.
As I mentioned before, unlock chat at level two. I recommend turning this on if you can, it’ll reduce the amount of people that are spamming. And then they’d recently just added the ability to connect the Facebook pixel. Okay. So those are some of the plugins I would anticipate because of the age of the community, there’s going to be more added.
I assume that people, I assume that eventually an affiliate program will be added. Later on down the road you can track your metrics and then this is the gamification that I mentioned a little bit earlier this makes this gives your community the ability to be discoverable and then you can add in links if you want and then So on so let me just show you really quick One of the coolest things that I like if you click on discover communities And you just type in your niche or a keyword within your niche, like woodworking like this.
You can see that these communities rank in all of Skool. So this 49 per month community ranks at 92. So if someone was interested in woodworking and they were looking for a new group, they could type in their niche and see that they have four options. And I also think that this is the opportunity with Skool.
If we look at Facebook groups and we just typed in woodworking, for example, there are hundreds, if not thousands of woodworking. Facebook groups. However, there’s only four of them here in Skool. In fact, if we look these are the top ranking and so your goal is really To rank in the top 10 or top 20 in your community And the cool thing with Skool right now is that it’s not based on the number of subscribers you have It is solely based on the engagement and interaction of your community.
For example, this one right here, number it’s ranked number seventh and all of Skool and it has 333 members and it’s 49 per month, which means there’s probably a lot of interaction and engagement. If we scroll up here and we look 14, 000 members, probably a lot of interaction and engagement. So what I encourage you to do if you’re planning on starting your own Skool community and you want to rank, encourage interaction and engagement.
That’s a pros and cons of Skool and I think that if you are an online business owner, you’re looking to grow and make more money, I think Skool’s probably a really cool alternative to Facebook groups for a few reasons. One, you can change it from free to paid. You can change it from 10 a month to 20 per month.
I also like the fact that you can use this as like a sales funnel. So you bring in people for free, then you offer them value. I like the ability to focus and concentrate. Like I said, one of the biggest problems with Facebook is that there’s just so much going on there. And that’s one of the reasons why I decided to switch.
I also like the fact that a Skool will allow you to send emails to all of your members. Once every 72 hours, you can also include gifts. But like I said, I think that Skool has both pros and cons. It’s missing a number of features that I would like, for example, the affiliate program thing, the ability to have other members of Skool earn commissions for recommending your affiliate program is something that I think really is needed and I think it’s on its way.
I think it’ll be a while before they get that integrated because there’s probably a lot of things that you got to figure out. But that’s something that I would like to see. See happen. It would be a great way to get more people into Skool. There would be a great way to grow your own community, which I guess could be pro both good and bad.
So in my opinion this is, these are the reasons why I switched. I think that if you are looking to grow a community, I think Skool is a very good alternative for you to consider. If you are looking to build your own Skool, Google community and you need assistance. If you use my affiliate link, I will work with you one on one for one hour to offer you any insight and anything that I’ve learned along the way.
So if you want to get started with Google, go ahead and click the first link in the description and if you get started using my link, I can see who, who uses it and who gets started. We’ll work one on one together and I’ll help you build your community. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video.