Growing A Community

Everyone will tell you that your life will change when you have a baby. But for most people, this doesn't include gaining a Facebook community with half a million members. For Camille Jaramis and Phil Chester, that's exactly what happened when their Baby Sleep Training Tips & Help group hit the sweet spot for parents all over the world.

As their group grew and evolved they found that they were providing a real time support for thousands of desperate parents around the world, with a team of professionals providing free advice. Finding a way through the mass of information in the posts and comments presents a problem for navigation and filtering. A problem, that can be solved by the friendly, linear format of a podcast.

We caught up to speak about their experience in building and running the group and their next project: Yawn, the baby sleep training podcast.

Outline

We talked about: How did the Facebook group start? Camille’s strategy for getting more people to join the group. How the growth of the Facebook group exploded and the need for additional moderators to manage the group. How professionals in the group answer the 'what', but are not giving the 'how'. The geography of the group members has changed at each stage of growth. An anonymous post that validated that we’d done the right thing first. How they are going to kickstart the podcast and leverage the audience on Facebook.

LINKS

Yawn - The Baby Sleep Training Podcast Baby Sleep Training, Tips & Help (Facebook)

Transcription

MF 1:03 I was trying to find sort of a clever way into it, but I couldn't. So so the obvious thing is you have a Facebook group with 552.9 thousand people in it. I checked today

PC 1:16 We do. Yeah.

MF 1:17 And it says it was created a year ago.

CJ 1:20 That's right.

Phil 1:21 Yeah. Have we started? We have? Yeah. Oh, my God. Okay. We're cool. Yeah, sorry.

MF 1:31 That seems pretty phenomenal. So can you? Can you tell me like, how did it start?

CJ 1:37 So the reason why we started the Facebook group was, Phil and I both had our kids during lockdown. And in Australia, you get a mother's group, which is a really fantastics concept, which means that you get connected with a bunch of other new parents, usually new moms. Now it's got a parent group, I think, but largely, it's called a mother's group. And you get connected to a bunch of new parents who are in the trenches with you and kind of going through the same experience at the same time as you and it's really helpful way to create a community, I found out that doesn't exist internationally, in a lot of countries. In the UK, you often have to pay for membership to a group like that. And I don't know about the US, but it sounded either incredibly uncommon or not existent at all. And so that was the point of creating an online community because we are so not alone in the experience of being in those trenches.

PC 2:31 Absolutely. And I think, you know, COVID kind of enhanced that for so many people as well. But that feeling of being alone and not feeling like you had that support network. So I think it was just the perfect time, the perfect storm of just what all these new parents were looking for. What would I need, what would other people need?

MF 2:51 That's amazing. So you just kind of identified that need, really and thought, I know, let's let's try and make a sort of open group on on Facebook to see if other people share the same interest

CJ 3:04 100% I just gone through a certification to become an internationally certified baby sleep consultant, not because I want to change careers, but because I wanted to understand what was what I was in store fo