How I created a Facebook programming group with 60,000+ members

Cory Althoff: Awesome. Okay, so welcome to my talk How I created a Facebook programming group with 60,000 members. Thank you all so much for being here today. I'm super excited to give this talk. And here's what you're going to learn, how I created a Facebook community with over 60,000 members and how you can create your own thriving community as well. To understand how my programming Facebook group started, I have to first tell you about my journey learning to code. So in college I tried to learn to programme but failed. And when I graduated from college with a major in political science, I struggled to get a job.

So unable to find a job, I decided to try to learn to programme, and I bought all the books and courses that's Think Python on the right. That is the first programming book that I ever bought. It's a great book.

And six months later I got my first interview at a startup called Eat Club. I was super excited. My friend actually got me the interview and unfortunately I absolutely bummed the interview and I had to go back to the drawing board and practised more. But eventually I did end up getting a job as a software engineer at eBay, which was an amazing experience. It was just a fantastic team.

I really enjoyed my time there. And so after working at several companies in Silicon Valley, I decided to write a book about my experience and I called my book The Self-Taught Programmer, the Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally. And I wrote it because I wanted to create a roadmap for people to take the same journey that I did, learning how to code and just provide that roadmap to help people go from a complete beginner to a software engineer.

So to my disbelief, it has now sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and my Udemy course of the same name has 170,000 students. And so four years ago when I published my book, I created the Self-Taught Programmers Facebook group to go along with my book. And it's really a community for programmers or aspiring programmers that don't have a computer science degree, anyone that has fallen basically a non-traditional path to learning how to programme. And so we have really high engagement. You can see over the last 28 days, we've had 3,492 comments, and we have a lot of really cool success stories, which for me is the best part because I love seeing people go from beginners to learning how to programme.

And so you can see here we have Dragon here who got a full-time job without a degree, and we also have a tonne of senior developers and people that are just interested in programming in general.

So it's not just all new programmers. We have a tonne of more senior coders as well. Now, what am I doing now? I actually just wrote a new book called the Self-Talk Computer Scientist, which came out last month, and it's about data structures and algorithms. And I'm working as a developer advocate at Vonage, which is awesome. It's definitely my dream job because it combines everything I like to do, coding, marketing, business, all of that stuff into one and building community among developers. So it's really great.

If you're not familiar with Vonage, we are an award-winning cloud communications provider, and we have a suite of APIs that help you do a bunch of stuff like send SMS messages, make phone calls, set up video conferencing on your website, and a bunch more. So how can you create a thriving community of developers? Well, the first thing you want to do if you want to create your own Facebook group is to find your niche so you don't have to make your group about your company.

So for example, if you were in charge of upwork. com, which is a popular freelance platform you shouldn't make, if I was advising 'em, I would advise them to just make the upwork. com Facebook group. Instead, I would say, you should make a group about freelance programmers because people feel passionate about that topic. For example, if you had a bunch of freelance programmers in that Facebook group, they could talk about how many hours they work per week, what they charge, how they get new clients, stuff like that.

So you have to make sure that people feel passionate about the topic that you select. And when you create a Facebook group at the beginning, you're going to be the only one in it. So you have to make sure that you create really good content. So people want to stick around. So how do you create engaging Facebook content?

Well, you want to use Facebook's built-in features. So for example, you can use polls and posts with colourful backgrounds like this. So Facebook makes it really easy to make a post that looks like this, and I found that it gets really high engagement as opposed to just typing straight into Facebook.

If you have an orange background or some other colourful colour like this, and then really bold text, it's really helpful for engagement. And then you can also create a poll. So here I did a poll, what is your favourite programming language? And that tends to do really well. So other types of content that perform really well on Facebook are memes, coders, love, memes, maybe not a surprise. So definitely sprinkle those in and other types of high performing content questions, starting any kind of conversation, starting a debate. Like I said, anytime programmers love to debate.

So anytime the best programing language comes up, the best web framework, any of that stuff always does really well.

Interesting images and then telling a story, humans are hardwired wired to respond to stories, so try to use as many stories as you can. Content that does not perform well on Facebook is anything that moves the user off the platform. So avoid links on your daily posts. You don't want to be sending people to YouTube or your blog or something like that because Facebook's going to punish you for sending people off platform. So how do you grow your Facebook group? Well, the first thing you want to do is make your group public. This was a big discussion when I created my group. A lot of people that joined felt like they would be more comfortable asking questions if the group was private, but unfortunately, that slows down growth.

Public groups help growth because more people see your group because non-members see all of the posts, and that helps create a nice cycle of growth. You can try doing paid promotion by running ads on Facebook. People are already on the platform, and so that's the best place to run ads. You can also do giveaways. I'm a huge fan of giveaways About every month I give away copies of my book for free copies of my course. I'm constantly giving stuff away for free. And so you can offer a prize to someone who joins your group within the first week. You can also create a course and give that away for free.

So this is what I do with my Udemy course. I often give my Udemy course away for free. And then within the course I tell people if they need help or they have any questions to go to my Facebook group.

And that drives a lot of growth. No matter what your company does, you can probably create a course that just explains your expertise and you can do the same thing. You can send people directly to your Facebook group through that course. You can also submit the course to sites that highlight free courses, and there are a lot of those. If you just type in, for example, Udemy free coupon site, you can find a tonne of courses like that.

You also can use hashtags when you post so that more people see your content. Another thing you can do is speak at a conference. So of course there are programming conferences all over the world, and it's a great chance to meet new people and push people to your Facebook group by sharing your expertise like what I'm doing right now. So hopefully some people will join my Self-talk programme or Facebook group through this, but I definitely encourage people to speak at conferences, to spread awareness about their group.

So how do you create a happy community? Well, you definitely want to find moderators. So posting your community, asking for help, a moderator is someone who's going to help make sure that the group is running smoothly and that no one is violating the rules, et cetera. So make sure to post about moderators if no one wants to help.

It could be a sign that you didn't create a topic that people feel passionate about. So maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board on that. You also want to create post guidelines. So as you get bigger, more and more people are going to post and they'll post about the same thing. So in my group, everyone asks, what's your favourite ID or what's the best place to learn to code? And that's a little bit of a problem because group members that have been there for a long time don't want to hear the same question like 50 times.

So we have guidelines saying, please don't ask these questions. So whatever you feel is appropriate, add that to your guidelines and then ask each member to review those post guidelines when they sign up.

And you also should consider approving each post manually. That's what I do. We get a tonne of posts, and with that comes a lot of spam. So all posts in my group have to be approved by me or a moderator, and that helps make sure that we have high quality content. So how do you promote your product in your group? Well do something called Jab, jab, jab Hook, which I got from Gary v's book. But the basic idea is to give, ask a lot of people on social media, just ask. Ask, buy my book, buy my course, join my newsletter, come to my event.

You don't want to ask as much as you want to give.

So you want to give a tonne of value. And only once you've given a tonne and tonne and tonne of value. Do you ask for anything? So what can you give? You can give advice, you can write helpful articles, you can answer specific questions from your audience. You can make people laugh with memes. Give an ebook away, give a course away.

Give anything away that your audience will find valuable. Only after you've done that do you ask for something. So you also want to make sure that your hooks are similar to your jobs. So don't just say, buy this and here's the link. Use a good image and tell a story. So here's an example of a hook that I did in my Facebook group where I was promoting my books. I told the story of how I wrote my first book and the process of self-publishing my first book, and then going and working with a publisher on my second book and what it was like.

And I used a big image, and that posted really well because it felt like organic just native Facebook content.

You also can collect emails with your Facebook group, so you can actually ask new members questions when they sign up, including what their email address is. And so I collect hundreds of email addresses a month from my group, and then I follow up with a drip sequence. So a drip sequence is a series of emails where you welcome new members to your group, and then you can send them helpful content and direct them towards your product. And that's really an effective way to build your newsletter and sell your product by using your Facebook group. So here at Vonage, we're building community a couple of different ways. We have our Vonage Deral blog@learn. vonage. com, and we also have the Vonage Startup programme.

We have a bunch of other initiatives, but these are the two that I want to highlight today.

And so learn do vonage. com is really great. We don't just blog about Vonage. That's one of the ways that we are adhering to these principles. We create content that helps developers, so anything that we think is helpful to programmers, we will write that content. So again, if you want to check that out, you can go to learn. bondage.

com. And then we have the Bondage Startup Programme, which is our programme dedicated to helping startups succeed. So again, we focus on creating as much value as possible. We're constantly giving to our startups, so they get to use our APIs for free. We have mentorship and a bunch of other really cool stuff. So if you have a startup and you're interested in applying, you can go to developer. bondage. com/startups to check that out.

If you want to learn more about building a community and marketing, here's some books I recommend.

We've got Gary v's. Book, jab, jab Jab, right Hook, which I mentioned earlier. And then we've got Influence, which I think is probably the greatest marketing book ever written, and people powered by Jonno Bacon goes into a lot of the specifics of building a community. So I definitely recommend checking these three books out if you are interested in learning more. One last thing, we are hiring, so here at Bonnet. So we have developer advocates, a bunch of different positions that we're hiring. Android developer advocate, a Java developer advocate.

So I actually on Twitter posted everything. So make sure to connect with me on Twitter at Corey Altoff. I would love to connect with you and let me know if you have any questions about building a Facebook community. I'm happy to help. And again, lemme know if you have any questions. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, and I hope you learned something here today about building your own thriving Facebook group. So thank you so much.