Mighty Networks, the community platform that helps you drive business revenue
You’ve spent months, maybe a year or two to grow your Facebook Group. Whether you provide coaching, tips and tricks on how to lose weight or recommendations that help people get hired faster, you’ve been there for your group’s members day in and day out, giving value while keeping the trolls at a distance. Suddenly you realize managing your Facebook Group has turned into a full-time job. The group is a valuable resource for its members but is generating costs and little to no revenue for your business.
What if there was a better way to grow an engaged community and also drive revenue from it?
I recently came across Mighty Networks when someone in my LinkedIn network mentioned it in a comment as a community-focused platform.
Hm, I haven’t heard of Mighty Networks. What is it? Let’s find out!
Mighty Networks, the community-focused platform that helps you build your business
Create a Community-Powered Brand with Mighty Networks from Mighty Networks on Vimeo.
Mighty Networks enables entrepreneurs, organizations, and companies to create and grow a community-powered business. It is a platform where you can bring your community, online courses, and memberships together in one place.
You can build a landing page for your business, publish articles, share content and create an online course platform for your audience.
What do you get when you choose Mighty Networks?
Mighty Networks offers its users three plans they can choose from: the free plan, the business plan ($81/month) and the community plan ($23/month).
Being a pay-to-get-access community is actually a plus because if it’s free, the commitment isn’t there. When people pay a membership fee, it’s an investment and both parties, the Mighty Host (that’s how businesses on Mighty Networks are named) and its paying members are much more likely to engage, add value and contribute to their communities and the growth of their members.
Here are some of the features you get depending on your chosen plan:
- Personalized activity feeds for members
- Topics, articles and direct messaging
- Choose from public, private, and secret privacy options
- Use your own domain name for your Mighty Network
- Message ALL members (reach 100% of your members whenever you want)
- Polls and questions
- Organize events locally or virtually with text chat, Zoom, Facebook Live, or Crowdcast integrations
- Notify ALL members of any post you make or activity you think is important
- Access detailed analytics on every member, every post, and all activity
These are just a few features, check the complete list.
Also, it’s important to mention that Mighty Networks is 100% ad-free, GDPR compliant, SEO friendly and mobile-first.
source: Mighty Networks Facebook page
What else should you know?
Unlike the experience on Facebook, there are no distractions on Mighty Networks, no cat or baby videos that the algorithm pushes in front of us which makes maintaining focus a big challenge for everyone.
Mighty Networks doesn’t encourage distraction, it encourages focus so it’s better for your business.
Also, you may have noticed in the features mentioned above that with Mighty Networks you can message all members of your community, something you can’t do on Facebook Groups unless you become friends with every one of them.
What else can you achieve on Mighty Networks that you can’t with Facebook Groups? The goal of this article is not to do a comprehensive comparison with Facebook Groups so I invite you to find out by yourself.
Over the past few years, businesses have come to realize that being on Facebook had become a pay-to-play game. The algorithm is set up so that businesses need to pay Facebook to show one post to all their page followers. That is not the case with Mighty Networks.
The company’s 2017 news release says that Mighty Networks employs proprietary algorithms and smart technology built from the ground up for interests.
Businesses that have shifted their online community from other community-focused platforms have seen a higher engagement rate and the interactions much more meaningful, than on other platforms (source).
What differentiates Mighty Network from other community platforms?
Here are the main differentiating factors:
- Members are connected by their location, by the topics they choose and the categories they define
- Content and conversations never get lost
- Everything for an interest is in one place
I would also add that your personal data is not sold to third-parties for revenue generation.
source: Mighty Networks Facebook page
Here’s how you can drive business revenue depending on your chosen pricing plan:
- Charge for access to your membership site or group
- Charge for access to your online courses
- Becoming a Mighty Affiliate
You can set up payments within your Mighty Network and charge a one-time purchase or a subscription purchase. Stripe is the payment processor on Mighty Networks and you can charge a max price of $999.
Conclusion
Mighty Networks could be a good solution for your business if you:
- Are looking to build an online membership
- Have grown disappointed with Facebook (and there are plenty of reasons to)
- Are looking to have a course platform and community all together in one place
- Are trying to facilitate the conversation with your customers or user base
- Are looking to get involved and to learn more about what your community may need
- Are struggling with keeping your users on one platform
- Want to personally email your audience
Join the Conversation
We’d love to hear what you have to say.
Get in touch with us on our LinkedIn Group, Facebook Group or Twitter.
Instagram Shadowbanning and How To Avoid It
According to PetaPixel, Instagram has been accused of “shadowbanning” users and posts starting about a year ago, preventing tagged content from properly appearing in searches for those tags. “After photographers and others complained last year, someone made a tool for checking to see if you’ve been shadowbanned. Now there’s a new and improved one: Triberr’s Instagram Shadowban Test. Triberr, a company that develops a content marketing automation suite, created the tool to provide Instagram users with a more comprehensive look at whether their photos and posts are showing up correctly for other Instagram users,” added Michael Zhang for the publication.
“The shadowban applies to individual posts and may occur for various reasons,” Triberr writes. “For example, overuse of a hashtag or a banned hashtag can trigger this occurrence. Therefore, we provide an analysis of your latest 10 posts so that you can easily identify culprits in your posts.” If a hashtag is found to contain the photo, it shows up as green in the results. If a hashtag was not found associated with the photo, it shows up as red and the post failed the test.
What happens is that the shadowban removes the ability of your posts to be seen by anyone but your current followers. Hashtags become next-to-useless because non-followers will not be able to discover your hidden content, even if they search a specific hashtag.
As the easiest way to avoid getting there is following Instagram’s posting best practices and focus on creating and sharing non-promotional, authentic content, we also have some others ideas that can help you along the way:
Engage authentically with your community
Show that you are a real person and have a real personality. Engage and act creatively. Like and comment on content you truly enjoy and follow only those accounts that you’re interested in following. Doing it naturally and having a certain rhythm or pattern all the time in your actions will not catch spam filters’ attention.
Avoid being reported
Being reported isn’t an automatic Shadowban. Instagram will check out your profile to make sure your account isn’t violating their Terms of Service and determine from their. If you’re found at-fault Instagram may shadowban you or even fully disable your account.
Stay in the normal limits
According to Social Media Examiner, the limit of accounts you can follow is 7,500 accounts. Once you hit that limit, you will have to unfollow someone to be able to follow someone new. Instagram also has fairly strict limits as to the number of people you can follow within a certain time period, although a few factors impact this number. “Newer accounts have lower limits on the number of accounts they can follow hourly or daily. The size of your account (the number of people following you) may also contribute to the limit you can reach. Again, some people may be allowed to exceed these limits, depending on various account factors including engagement on their own account content. But pushing these limits puts you at risk of exceeding allowances and having your account put on restriction for a minimum of 24 hours,” wrote Social Media Examiner.
Moreover, at the same time, there are similar limits to the number of accounts you can unfollow in an hour or day.
Direct message to groups at maximum 15 people
As the new rules say, one can send a direct message to a single user or a group of up to 15 people. Each direct message can contain up to 500 characters. When you reach that cap, no more characters will appear in the text.
Don’t use bots and third party apps to help you manage your account
Using a bot to analyze your engagement or to help you with unfollowing inactive accounts may hold a chance for your account to be shadowbanned.
Use different hashtags on your posts
Make sure you change the hashtags you usually use daily. Don’t just copy paste your hash-tags and post them for every picture!
Here you can find a list of blocked hashtags
How to have the best brand storytelling on Instagram
As storytelling is the latest trend in communication, all the agencies and companies trying to bring the concept to life in their campaigns and social media presence, Instagram is one of the latest powerful social media tools to try and capitalize on this trend.
According to Social Media Week, since Instagram launched a couple of years ago, over 300 million people have used this platform as a visual place to share their lives. With more than 20 billion images shared on the app to date–this app has become a creative space & community for people to share their story in innovative ways using photography and short videos.
It’s no wonder the stories on Instagram are catching up people’s attention and likeness as so many of them spending so much time on their mobile devices. What it does now for its users is allowing them to share their stories to the world in a quick and easy fashion. It has become a simple, yet powerful tool that has allowed people and brands to develop their own voice visually.
How can a brand take advantage of this trend and make himself even more noticeable on Instagram? Just take a pick here at our short pieces of advice:
- Identifying your niche & developing your own unique voice.
The way you position yourself is always the key. The more different, unique, special your brand is, the better. Make sure that your stories are always capturing that essence of the brand and special approach. By giving your audience something they know they can expect from you, it will be easier to grow a stronger and more dedicated community around your work.
- Utilizing your captions to add more depth to your photos.
Captions may become a vital part of your storytelling process, if you know how to put accent on them and use the right hashtags and words. The story behind the story is always important and should be relevant. Putting your own spin on the story, emphasizing on a certain aspect that makes your brand YOURS is helping bring the story where it should. Your story ultimately, makes a huge difference.
- Choosing and using different angles
The same places or the same ideas, presented in your brand’s way, are creating the differentiation that you are looking for. Instead of shooting something from the same angle as everyone else, try looking for new spots to take the same photo. Maybe you want to get closer to the ground for a different angle, pose a person in a different place, or shoot a photo through the branches of a tree to provide a more natural frame. There are always ways to put a new spin on the same place, and try to make sure you try a bunch of different angles.
- Highlight your brand’s versatility
People want the brands to be playful, to interact, engage and entertain them. They get bored really easy and you must make sure you always bring something fresh to the table. Don’t be afraid to try, to mix and match, to always have in handy a special new app or filter that is trendy. Make it count while is still fresh and not used by a lot of other brands present on Instagram. Your followers will be looking for powerful, original, content. Find ways to expand your current niche creatively to develop a strong brand voice.
- Using video and gifs
Always be present. Be fast and up-to-date. A video speaks more than a picture. A gif makes one laugh and entertains. In other words, powerful tools for your story.
- Making sure you have user-generated content
Getting your followers involved is extremely important for a TODAY brand. Get your audience to do some of the heavy lifting for you by creating a user-generated hashtag for your brand tribe. Then you can post the content of your biggest fans directly on your Instagram account.
- Showing your happy employees
There’s a global war for talent today and the best brands are showing off the fresh faces on their team and all the fun they are having at work. Showcasing yourself at work or your company’s employees in action is great for putting a human face on your brand, which makes what you share on Instagram more interesting to your followers.
- Introducing them behind-the-scenes
Each one of us loves to feel special and shown that they are important. Make sure your brand does that for its followers. You can start by taking them inside the stories of your company, showing them some never-seen before images, actions, activities, etc. Take them where nobody has been before!
