Turn Down The Hustle: Empowering Online T-Shirt Sellers

17 | Facebook Group Tools: Top Contributor

• Sun Kissed Virtual Assistant • Episode 17

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Unlock the untapped potential of your Facebook group and elevate your t-shirt business to the next level! Today, I reveal how the 'top contributors' feature can be your secret weapon in creating a buzzing community. Recognizing and incentivizing these members not only rewards their loyalty but also fuels your brand's visibility and engagement. I'll walk you through the nitty-gritty of Facebook's insights to track these shining stars, emphasizing the strategic benefits of a desktop login and unpacking that pesky 28-day data delay.

I'll share my personal journey of transforming a top contributor into a cornerstone of my business. It's an eye-opening tale that showcases the power of online engagement, so much so that it even snagged me an unexpected job offer from a multimillion-dollar company. This episode isn't just about cementing relationships; it's about leveraging them for mutual growth and success.

Before you tackle your day, let's wrap up with actionable insights and an open invitation to join the conversation in my Facebook group, "Turn Down the Hustle." Together, we'll continue to explore and refine our strategies for recognizing and rewarding those key players in our communities. It's about creating a vibrant, engaged group that not only supports your entrepreneurial journey but also thrives on the collective success of every member. Don't let another day go by without tapping into the power of your top contributors!

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Amy Wheat:

Ooh, it is early morning here. It is 5.40. Got my coffee here. I'm in a pitch black room Getting this podcast recorded before I have to head off to the nine to five. Some of you guys can relate to that. So hopefully I wake up throughout this episode, because today is a good one and it's actually my most popular blog over the course of the last few years that I've been blogging. We are kicking off a new series for Facebook group tool, so over the next few episodes I'm going to be picking one Facebook group tool to go over with you. Make sure you understand what it is, how it works and how I apply it in my business, and then how I recommend you apply it in your business. So with that we're going to go ahead and get started.

Amy Wheat:

You're listening to Tur Down the Hustle, the podcast dedicated to transforming how you run your creative online t-shirt business by working smarter, not harder, so you can spend more time with your why, people and passions that matter most in your life. So throw on your favorite graphic tee and turn up the heat press, because it's time to turn down the hustle. Here's your host digital marketer. Cold brew lover, t-shirt maker, freckled hype girl and owner of sunkist virtual assistant, amy.

Amy Wheat:

Facebook is an incredible vehicle to connect with your audience and get to know new customers. Facebook groups are extremely powerful, but they do come with a lot of available tools to help you better serve your community and meet your goals. As a small business owner, it is vital that you encourage engagement throughout your community. This can be a form of commenting on your live videos, submitting a post wearing their items that they purchased from you, or having fun with this and that engagement. You name it, because the more your community engages, the more visible your content will be in their feed and Facebook will recognize your content as valuable to keep their followers on the platforms. Not to mention, it builds a sense of community which helps round out your business. Yes, of course, we need people to shop and spend money. They are known as your top spenders. But for those top spenders to see what you have available if you're using social media, that's where the other piece of your business comes in play. This is where your top contributors make it possible for your posts to be seen in your group and they also help create that overall vibe of your community in your group. Before we get too further along, just keep in mind that Facebook is always changing. It's always adding new features, taking away features. Also, they roll out different features to a segment of Facebook users at a given time. So just understand that whenever you're listening to this episode, you might not have this tool available to you, or you might have had a different variation of it, or you had it before and now you don't. It's really just about rolling with the punches. So if you do have the tool available for this episode great, you can apply it. If not, take some of these concepts and practices and get creative on how you can make this work.

Amy Wheat:

So our first Facebook group tool we're going to talk about is top contributors. The first thing we're going to do is identify your top contributors. Positive reinforcement it's what you give to your kids when they do something right and you want them to do it again, maybe like a sticker on a chore chart like hey, that was great, keep it up. Or your dog, whenever you call them and it's freezing outside and they come right in, you're probably going to give them a lot of love, a lot of hugs, a treat, reinforcing that, hey, what you did was correct. Same thing isn't true in your business. If your audience is doing something you approve of or you want them to continue doing more of, then we need to positively reinforce that behavior. Actually, thinking back to dog training or dogs, it would be called marking the behavior, like right, when they do it, you want to mark that with like make sure they know that. That is exactly what I want you to do again. So, marking behavior. We're not going to mark the behavior of our top contributors but that just came to mind as my coffee is kicking in but we do want to positively reinforce our behavior of our top contributors. For somebody that's constantly engaging and promoting your products and being very active, we want to make sure they know that we appreciate that behavior and we want them to continue doing it and if they continue doing it, we will continue to reward them for that behavior. Okay, cool, amy, that sounds great. Now are you saying that for all the comments that are in my group, I need to count up these comments and figure out the top contributor? No, thankfully, facebook does it for us, which we'll get into a little bit more how Facebook calculates the top.

Amy Wheat:

So if you want to find out who your top contributors are on Facebook, you're going to go into your Facebook group. Make sure you're an admin and at the time of this recording you can find it by clicking insights. Once you click insights you'll see like a little membership tab and then you will see your top contributors for the last 28 days. If you're not seeing this or it's displaying a little bit wonky, don't do it for mobile device. Go on a desktop view to follow the steps I just described, but notice, whenever you see those 28 days, that 28 date range it usually lags by a day or two whenever it's calculating your top contributors. Also, if you just created a new Facebook group, for instance for maybe your tea parties, and you're wanting to do a top contributor for your tea party those are week long parties that you use to sell your handmade products you typically need about a minimum of a week and roughly 40 to 50 members for this to actually calculate. So keep that in mind if you're trying to calculate top contributors for a pop-up Facebook group. If you want, you can even download these results by clicking that download button. It allows you to extract data capturing seven or 20 or 60 or days at a custom range, if maybe you want to keep the user results and maybe you want to track it over a period of time, because it's updating at a 28 day period at a time. So you don't have the statistics prior to those 28 days unless you're keeping track of it. Maybe you want to see who was your top contributor for entire year and you're going to keep on extracting that. However, you want to do that.

Amy Wheat:

Now let's transition into calculating top contributors. So, unfortunately, facebook does not publish criteria on exactly how they calculate top contributors, so like they're not saying hey, five points for making a post, one point for a comment and so forth. So all we can do, from not having that data available, is analyze our own data. When you pull your top contributors, do you notice a difference between the metrics between each member? Do you notice that maybe somebody is higher because they have more posts to your Facebook group versus somebody who has a hundred likes but no posts? So with that in mind, you can kind of start to infer what Facebook values and when you think of it, think about what takes more time or effort to do. So a post is weighted heavier because, think about it you actually have to think of what you want to post. You have to gather up your texts, submit a post. Yeah, that's more effort than just placing a comment on a post that already exists. But taking the time to comment took more time or more effort than it did to just like something and keep scrolling. So if you want to think about that making a post, comment and like in that order of, if you look at your metrics, you can see how they're weighted more than the other.

Amy Wheat:

So, as a creative seller, if you want your members to climb the ranks to top contributor, you want to encourage them to submit posts, comment and like. If you want your members to submit more posts, you can encourage them. Once they get the order in the mail, they can have a little card that maybe you include in their order with a QR code that scans to your group and ask them to make a post once they receive their order. Or, even better, if they want to do like an unboxing and record themselves and post it to your Facebook community. They don't need to be on influencer status inside your Facebook community, they all just come as they are, have fun with it. But creating a video and having them get their family involved or their dog, depending on what they ordered it could be a lot of fun for them to create and make memories and then share it to your group. Making a post with their order is not only for them to earn more points as a top contributor, but it helps you because now you are gathering testimonials and reviews and you can share this on your Facebook page or on your website. So now you actually have photos of in real life customers wearing your products and satisfied customers at the same time.

Amy Wheat:

If you want to encourage comments, this really comes down to your call to action on your post. Every post, you should have some sort of call to action. Now, if you were wanting them to comment, you can just say come out and say comment below, tell me what you think. Drop your answer in the comment. Add your guess to the comments below. You have to be very descriptive with what you want them to do. You could post an engagement graphic that says what is your favorite color shirt? Now, that's not saying that they don't understand. Like I just asked you, what is your favorite color shirt, answer the question. But they might think it's a rhetorical question. They may not know that you're directly asking them. Whenever people are on social media, they're joining social media because they're either trying to kill time or they're zoned out or they're like brain dead. They're just looking from some sort of quick entertainment. So you have to be very directive with what you want them to do.

Amy Wheat:

If your members are slow to make comments or submit posts of them wearing your items in a review, maybe take a look back at the content you're posting. Are you only using the engagement graphics from the content calendar and not posting any photos of yourself wearing your items working in the office? Maybe a behind the scenes? Or unpack new materials that have come in? Maybe your SNS active wear shirt order. You can go live, sort them out. Call them out by their names, like oh, margaret, your pink pillow cam, a short sleeve shirt, is in, can't wait to make this. Or, jesse, I just got that kids onesie for you. Are you showing up and leading by example of how you want your members to also respond? So kickstart with that and think about that and show your face in your Facebook group and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised how your group members soon follow suit.

Amy Wheat:

Okay, so we talked about how to find your top contributors, how roughly it's calculated for top contributors. Let's move into announcing your top contributors. Now, when it comes to announcing your top contributors. I like to do this activity monthly because top contributors are calculated on a 28-day basis and it's constantly rotating over those 28-day period snapshots. I prefer to just do it for a month at a time versus trying to figure it out every week or every two weeks with the data and how it's pulled. With that in mind, I recommend announcing your top contributor on the last day of the month. Then on the first day of the month you'll post that the top contributor is open again for the new month and how it works. Whenever it comes to announcing your top contributor, you can pull a top contributor graphic from the engagement set in the content calendars and add a photo of the winner to the graphic.

Amy Wheat:

Have a fun way to announce your winner or winners. I say winners because, depending on the size of your community, you may decide that maybe you don't want to just re-board one. Maybe there's quite a bit of people that contributed to your Facebook group that month and, depending on the size of your group, maybe you want to recognize more people. For announcing top contributors, I've also done it to where, if you have made it to the top 10, you get entered into a drawing. It's just wherever you fell on. That top 10 dictates how many entries you get. So maybe if you were number one, you get 10 entries. If you're number two on the list, you're going to get seven entries, and so forth. I use a website called wheelofnamescom. You can edit and personalize this wheel and then you can add names to that and it's completely free. You enter their names into the drawing. The reason why I like this method? Because even that person that was number 10 on your list now has a chance to win because they were engaging, just not at the rate at what number one was engaging. So they don't have as many chances, but they still do have a chance.

Amy Wheat:

But with the top contributor program it's more than just opening top contributor and closing it at the end of the month. I like to post updates throughout the month. You can do this just by checking the top contributor metrics once again, pull a new screenshot and it's going to update to the last 28 days and show them the current standings. It's really fun to track throughout the month because not only are new people gaining comments and posts and points towards top contributor, but the work that they did prior to that new 28 day snapshot is now falling off. So if you had somebody that was super active, maybe at the beginning of last month, but they have not continued to contribute to your community as the date shifts to the right, that work they did will soon start to fall off. So by posting consistent updates, those contributors stats can really change one week to the next, given the variation.

Amy Wheat:

So I've done different fun things as well. So instead of just pulling the true snapshot, I have our screenshot, I have grabbed it and then I will delete out the right side of the screenshot with all the metrics. So it's just the order of people's faces and names, one through 10, of what order they rank in, but they have no idea how much comments or likes and posts and things like that actually separate number one from number two. They don't know. So it keeps it fun. Or I've done it the inverse way, where I just screenshot the right side, where I only give metrics, but they don't know who is assigned to those metrics. They are just trying to figure out. Like, wait, could that be me? I hit three posts this month, I think. Is that included? Is that me, man? The top contributor has five posts. Man, I really need to up that because I know I have none. You can make it fun like that. Another way you could do it is, whenever you pull that update, instead of posting a screenshot you can just make note of those 10 names and then submit a post to your Facebook group that says these people are in randomized order and change it up and say they are in the top 10, but who knows what order they are in. So at least it gives them encouragement, like, oh, I'm in the top, but they don't know where they fall. There's just so many different ways you can make this fun and interesting and have people check back in and encourage them to keep going.

Amy Wheat:

Moving into rewarding your top contributors, now I've already kind of alluded to it. When you are deciding who are you going to pick or name as your top contributor or top contributors, now you have to figure out how do you want to reward them. Do you want to give only a prize to number one? A prize could be a $20 shopping spree to your website or do you want to recognize one, two and three? The first place is 20, second place is 10, third place is five or you can do what I talked about a randomized drawing, so stagger the entries that they get, depending on their ranking, and then maybe they are all entered to win that $20 gift card for the month or discount shopping code. However you want to do it.

Amy Wheat:

Another option is if you have smile rewards set up for your website. This is a loyalty program where they get points for shopping or points for doing different things. Instead of giving a direct gift card, you could also add points to their smile rewards account. Maybe you want to add as many points that actually does give them enough to generate a gift card, or maybe you want to give them just enough to get half way to a gift card. However you want to do that, but every time you are giving back to your community, it doesn't have to be directly in the form of a gift card or something free. You can just add it to their smile reward points. Now you can give the top contributor like a mystery tea or a tumbler or something like that.

Amy Wheat:

But the reason why I don't like doing physical products is because now you could be out for shipping and you're not going to ask somebody hey, you want something, now just pay shipping. It's like, ah, if that wasn't said at the beginning of your program terms, like whenever you post on the first, like, hey, when I was going to win a free mystery tea or a tea of their choice, you just pay shipping. Now if you're telling them upfront ethically, sure I'm fine with that, they understand that, or maybe they may elect. I don't want the prize, but if you're doing that after the fact, I don't really agree that ethically. So I just like the gift card or points or something like that.

Amy Wheat:

Now, what I have also done in the past for those who made the top 10 in my business I did a top contributor, so the top person was recognized. But I also wanted to make sure the top 10 felt valued and that I appreciated their work because I did for everything they poured into my community. So I actually had a client page where I was uploading all of their logos and I think I even had their name on there, but all of their logos were hyperlinked to their website. So my idea was like, hey, if you're generating people coming to me or keeping them engaged in my community, how can I give back to you? Maybe I can send some traffic back to you from my website. Maybe the people visiting my website aren't necessarily your ideal customer per se, but you don't know who was. Maybe leaning on my page that maybe sells tumblers, but they would love to shop with you because you sell t-shirts you never know right. So that was a different way that I've rewarded my top contributors. Now don't forget, if you're wanting to talk about top contributor in your groups, the engagement graphics already exist in those themed content calendars. You can just pull that and make that post to your group was announcing your top contributor program and then also the winner. If you do have tweaks to make to your program and that graphic doesn't work for you, there are blanks in those kits where you can just update and create your own graphic. As this episode winds down, I just really want to make sure I'm part on you how valuable top contributors are to our community.

Amy Wheat:

When you think of a top contributor, think about just someone in your own life. No matter what you do, they love it. It may be a parent, it may be a sibling, it may be your kid hyping you up. No matter what you do, they're supporting you. If you have something for sale, they're asking where can they check out. Hopefully you have somebody like that in your personal life, but top contributors are who do that for our business. Every time you have a new drop, they're ready to promote it, they're ready to hype it, they're commenting on it, they love it. Now they may never spend a dime with you potentially, and that's really interesting. Sometimes those who spend the most with your business, they're never commenting on anything. They're just straight to business, to your website. I'll catch you when you have something else next time. But top contributors, they are commenting on everything. They're making posts or fun, or they're always right there first in line to support something. But just because they're not spending money doesn't mean they're not adding value to your community. They are creating the atmosphere and it's creating an atmosphere that's more encouraging to others and new members.

Amy Wheat:

Think about I give this analogy a lot. Think about middle school dance, like stereotypical in the movies or maybe you experience it where no one is dancing in the middle of the floor. It's just awkward, like maybe boys are on one side, girls are the other, however, but then somebody gets in the middle and starts dancing. There's that reaction where now it makes other people want to join in and then continue on from there. That behavior and engagement is contagious. If other people are joining in, it's going to encourage others to join in and want to keep up that momentum. Top spenders and top contributors are both vital to your business. But also pay attention to your top contributors, and here's why Because if you are trying to build your affiliate program or brand rep program, those are the ones that I want to invite to come join my program, versus just posting it and then having random people come join that maybe don't know anything about your business or maybe it's pulling teeth to get them to participate, seeking out those who are already exuding the behavior you would love to have on your team. Those are the ones I want to approach.

Amy Wheat:

Finally, I had the most amazing independent contractor working for me for a period of time when things were really busy for me, trying to balance small business and nine to five. She was amazing and the reason why I sought her out was because of what she was doing in my community, how flawless she was, how engaging, how transparent and organic she was. She was consistent and that literally landed me and approaching her for a job. And then during the summer months she's a teacher. She was able to pick up on that extra work. So it really worked both ways for us and then me personally showing up to my community. It allowed me to get recognized by a $5 million company even so much so that I was offered a job to come work for them believe it or not to just keep doing what I was already doing. So not much of a job interview, just saw what I was doing, loved it and approached me and offered me to come join their team just by how I was displaying on social media and how consistent I was.

Amy Wheat:

So keep that in mind for your top contributor program. Are there areas in your business that maybe you need help on or assistance with that? Maybe some people are already showing you those qualities and you'd love to make sure you retain them on your team. I see the sun coming up, so it's about that time to start wrapping up this episode so I can go get dressed for that 9 to 5. If you want to see how top contributor works or join in conversation with others also running this in their business and their Facebook group search, turn down the hustle on Facebook, click and request to join my group. I'll get you in there and then search top contributor and you can see all the posts relevant to this topic and how people are using this tool. If you're using this tool in your own business, I'd also love for you to submit a post to my group so we can hear about it and get the conversation going.

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