Ep 17 - Why I’m closing my FB group with over 6000 members

 

Have you ever questioned whether a Facebook group is the right strategy for your business?

Or maybe you’re holding onto a Facebook group – or something else in your business – that no longer aligns with your goals?

If any of that resonates (or you’re just curious about why on earth I would do such a thing!) keep reading…

 

When I first started my Facebook group back in 2019, it was a thriving community. 

It grew rapidly, and in those early years, it became a place where I could connect with my audience, build trust, and generate leads for my business. (Yay!)

I ran free weekly live sessions on everything from baby-led weaning cook-alongs to breakfast ideas for busy mornings and positive food parenting for picky eaters. 

The group was an amazing place to nurture my audience, provide value, and ultimately introduce them to my paid programs and services.

 

But things changed.

After four years, I made the decision to close the group completely. 

On the surface, it might have seemed like an outrageous decision to walk away from what many would see as a potential goldmine of engaged followers. 

But the reality was, it no longer served my business the way it once did.

 

If you’ve ever questioned whether running a Facebook group is truly for you, or whether it’s time to make a bold move in your business…

This post will help you make sense of your next steps.

 

Here’s why I got fearless and closed my Facebook group – and what I learned along the way….

 

1. Engagement Dropped—And It Wasn’t Just the Algorithm

A few years ago, my Facebook group was buzzing with activity. 

People posted daily, engaged with my content, and actively joined in conversations. 

But over time, engagement dwindled.

Last year, I was only seeing one or two new posts a week from group members – a huge drop compared to the early days. 

Even my own posts weren’t being seen, despite having over 6,000 members.

 

In fact, even when I posted the shocker that I was closing the group, after four hours, it had only reached just 73 people.

At first, I blamed the Facebook algorithm. 

It’s no secret that Facebook prioritises paid ads over organic reach. But the truth was…

 

I hadn’t been putting as much energy into the group as I did at the start.

 

I spread myself too thinly. 

 

Like many business owners, I tried to be everywhere – Facebook, Instagram, email, YouTube. 

Maybe that sounds familiar? Or maybe you already feel like you’d rather not!

 

With so many different platforms competing for attention, I wasn’t consistently showing up in the group like before.

So instead of just blaming the algorithm, I asked myself: 

• Was I actively engaging in my own group?

• Was I still nurturing this community the way I did in the beginning?

 

And guess what? The answer was no! 

That was my big indicator that it was time to move on.

 

I invite you to consider these thoughts…

Are you actively engaging in all of your online spaces?

If not, what needs to change?

 

2. It No Longer Reflected My Brand

The group was originally called The Children’s Nutritionist Community.

When I first started it, my business was broad. I covered everything from baby weaning to toddler nutrition to general family health.

 

But over the years, my brand evolved.

I began specialising in fussy eating. That became my niche. 

And yet, I was still receiving daily member requests from parents looking for weaning support. 

 

Many of them weren’t my ideal clients anymore.

 

On top of that, a low-engagement Facebook group isn’t a great shop window for your brand, right?!

If someone found me through social media and joined the Facebook group, only to find tumbleweed and crickets…

What impression would that give them about my business?

Not the best one!

 

If I wasn’t running regular live sessions, engaging with members, or keeping the group active…

Then it was no longer giving a glowing reflection of myself or my services. 

 

So what do I do now, to collect and nurture potential clients?

Don’t worry – I’m not skiving around!

Instead:

• I focus on Instagram, where my DMs are always open
• I send near-daily emails packed with value
• And I continue to build a huge blog filled with free, helpful content

 

I invite you to consider these thoughts…

Are you loving everything you do on social media or online? 

If not, how could you focus your efforts in ways that feel more joyful or more aligned?

 

3. I Needed to Simplify My Business

Have you ever used a ‘word of the year’ to motivate or guide you?

At the start of 2024, I chose "simplify" as my word.

Curious to know what provoked me to choose it?

 

I realised I was trying to do too much.

 

I was running two limited companies, I had nine income streams, and I was managing a team of seven people.

It was exhausting.

 

So at the end of last year, I got fierce and decided to:

✔ Stop offering 1:1 consultations (ie trading hours for money) and replace them with a more scalable income stream

✔ Streamline my team, letting go of roles that weren’t essential

✔ Focus my marketing efforts on fewer platforms but do them really well

 

Suddenly, I could see that the Facebook group was a drain on resources. 

I was paying a community manager to moderate it, but it wasn’t generating the engagement, leads, or sales to justify her salary!

 

So these were my two clear choices:

• I could invest time and energy into reviving the group (but that would take me away from more profitable areas of my business)
• Or, I could let it go and double down on what was actually working!

 

It was a no-brainer. 

Can you guess? I chose the second option!

 

I invite you to consider these thoughts…

If you’ve chosen a word for the year (or made plans or goals generally) is your business still aligning?

If not, what needs to change?

 

4. I Didn’t Enjoy Running It Anymore!

THIS was the final realisation…

I don’t even enjoy social media that much!

(Do you feel this too? It’s a common one!)

Outside of business, I don’t have personal accounts. 

And while I had a social media team that created and scheduled my content, I didn’t love spending hours on the platforms myself.

 

In fact, I found Facebook particularly overwhelming. 

I was in over 400 groups, but I rarely visited them. 

And if I felt like that, my audience probably did too.

 

That’s why I moved all of my paid communities off Facebook and into Kajabi Communities.

Kajabi is a private platform – online but away from social media – that has a community element which runs nicely alongside my courses and memberships.

(So I don’t need to open Facebook to connect with my students or members!)

Here’s my affiliate link if you want to have a spy…

 

Though when it came to closing the Facebook community, I did have a little niggle…

So I did a test run!

For a few months, I took the exact same content (created by my content creation team) and posted it on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram – and hands down, Instagram won.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s different for everyone – so find your platform and go all in on nailing it!

But, for me…

 

On Instagram, I get:

• More engagement
• More DMs and conversations
• And more sales (woo hoo!)

 

It was clear where my audience was spending their time, so I decided to go all in on Instagram.

 

I invite you to consider these thoughts…

How do you feel about the social media platforms you use? 

Do you know where you get the best engagement, have the most chats, and potentially make the most sales? Is it worth going all in on that platform?

 

Final Thoughts: Why Letting Go Was the Right Decision

I’m not going to lie. Making the decision to close my Facebook group wasn’t easy. 

I had over 6,000 members, and part of me worried about walking away from what felt like potential.

 

But the reality was: 

• The engagement had dropped

• It no longer aligned with my brand

• It wasn’t the best use of my time

• I wasn’t enjoying it!

 

So I made the choice to let it go and focus on what truly moves my business forward.

If you’re stretching yourself too thinly in your business, ask yourself: 

• What am I holding onto out of fear, rather than because it serves me?

• Where am I spreading myself too thinly?

• What could I let go of to focus on the things that truly make an impact?

 

Sometimes, growth means letting things go.

It can be a tough decision, often worth talking over with your mentor, but I encourage you to prune some bushes!

 

Next steps:

If you are a registered health professional and want to fast track your business growth, then I’d love to invite you to learn more about how I can help you do exactly that. Click here to find out about my business coaching.

 

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This guide really is your master plan to business success! Grab your free copy, right here…https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

 

Connect with me here:

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

 

Episode transcription:

Thank you for joining me today for this Unscripted, behind the scenes episode of the Beyond the Clinic podcast. And I wanted to do this bit of spur of the moment, off the cuff podcast because I've made a bit of a decision in my business today. And while it's fresh in my mind, I wanted to share it with you.

So I'm going to be talking to you today about why I'm going to be closing my Facebook group that's got over 6, 000 members. So my Facebook group is called the Children's Nutritionist Community and I opened it back in 2019 and at the time I probably had that business going in the form it's in now for about two years so I wasn't really seeing that many private patients, I saw a few but I've certainly started to dive into the online space and I really wanted to have this close community and As a safe space, a place where parents could connect with each other, where they could start to build that know and trust factor with me.

And obviously the intention behind it was to nurture an audience of people who would potentially go on and become my customers and my clients. So when I opened the group, I was really excited because I opened it in 2019 and within hours I had people joining it. Somehow they had just stumbled across the group and they'd found it and they'd joined it and it was really exciting.

And actually, the, Growth of the group was really quite rapid in probably the first three years or so. I would get new members come in all of the time and what I started to do was when I would publish a blog post, for example, I would mention the Facebook group and people would come that way. When I might publish a new lead magnet on the thank you page, there might be a, Hey, why don't you come and join my Facebook group?

When I was using Instagram, I would also mention the Facebook group. So I had lots of different ways to attract people to come into the group. And so it did grow rapidly. It grew quite quickly up to probably about 4, 000 members in the first couple of years. As it stands today, I've got just under 6, 000 members in the group.

And over the last couple of years, that growth has slown down. And when I was looking at my stats, it's down to about 500 new members that I've had in the last year or so. By no stretch of the imagination is this small. It's a decent sized community. There's lots and lots of people in there. So you might be thinking Sarah, isn't this madness that you're thinking about closing this group?

And I'm going to dive into why I've taken that decision in a minute. So the Facebook group, when it first started, it was lovely. It was somewhere where I'd show up about once a week. I'd have a regular slot and I'd deliver a live session. It was where I grew my confidence doing live video because at the start I really wasn't very happy doing live, particularly in like public spaces.

But in the group it felt like a nice private community. It made me feel secure and there was only the people there who really knew me and wanted to be there. So I would deliver these live sessions every week and I would alternate between some form of teaching and maybe a Q& A session. And it was also a really great place for me to pitch my offers.

So when I was practicing selling, when I didn't really have many skills and knowledge about selling and I was practicing pitching my offers to people, it was a lovely place where I could do that as well. So Back in the day, I'd have sessions on things like baby led weaning cook alongs. I might just do a talk on breakfast ideas for when you're in a rush.

I would explain what I'd been learning when I'd been doing all my research around positive food parenting and diving into picky eating. Yes, it does seem like a little bit of a crazy decision to wave goodbye to this potential gold mine, but the engagement in that group has significantly dwindled, especially over the last year or so.

So since about January or so, we are only getting maybe one or two posts from our group members in a week, which is not very much at all. I've been paying a community manager to moderate the group and support the members. And I've been doing this for the last three or four years or so and to be honest, this last six months, it's just not been worth her salary.

She was on holiday a few weeks ago and I took over and I was. Really shocked at how the engagement had reduced so much in that group, just in the last few months. So the other thing I found was that whenever I posted something in the group, the reach of that post was actually minuscule. It was tiny, was hardly going to anybody.

So for example, when I post my announcement today to say to everyone that the group is going to be closing. And I last looked at it, it had only reached 73 people out of the 6, 000 odd that are in that group, and I posted that about four hours ago. So this, even the stuff that I want to tell people just isn't getting into people's news feeds at all.

So I could sit here and I could blame the Facebook algorithm saying, when we first started in Facebook groups did work, but now they don't because the algorithms changed and nobody really knows exactly how it works. But actually, if truth be told, I haven't put in anywhere near as much effort into the group as I used to at the beginning.

Those lives that I used to do every single week, I haven't done a single live in the last 18 months or so. And I think, like many of us in business, I've probably spread myself a bit too thin. If I think about it and I have a look at my own Facebook profile and how many groups I'm actually in, I'm in about 400 of them.

And to be honest, I hardly go into any of them. And I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people in my Facebook group who have done exactly the same thing as well. I've actually been thinking about closing this Facebook group for a while, but I've been scared. I've been really frightened to do it in case there's all of this untapped potential sitting there, and I'm just going to wave goodbye to it.

But, I've come to a decision, and Here are my reasons why I've decided to do that and why today is the day. The first thing is, it's not really a very good shop window for the children's nutritionist as a brand. I still get member requests every single day, but My brand has really evolved over the years.

My main focus is now helping parents with their children's fussy eating, but it didn't used to be. I used to do quite a lot of stuff around weaning babies and actually many of my new members are parents of babies who are looking for guidance and advice around weaning. Somebody requested to join my group today who said that they were joining because they had a child with multiple food allergies.

I'm not an allergy specialist and I wouldn't be able to help that person. And so I just feel as if people who may be coming into this community, they're not going to get the support that they really need. And certainly not the support that I feel confident enough and qualified enough these days to actually give them.

But in addition to that. It doesn't really look great, does it, when new people find me and they come into the group and the engagement's really poor. It's a reflection of my business and it's not the image that I want my business to portray. So I'm no longer showing up to do those weekly lives, as I mentioned, and I'm I don't think that looks really great for my potential customers as well because it doesn't show how I support people.

So instead, what I've done is I've gone all in on Instagram and my DMs are never closed. So I'm more than happy to help people there. It's not that I've withdrawn all of that support. I've just moved it to a different place. And the other thing, of course, is I send out emails to my list, almost every single day, giving away free tips, giving away advice.

I've got a huge blog on my website with loads and loads of valuable information and recipes. So there is a lot of value out there. I just think Facebook group is possibly not the right place for me to be sharing that at the moment. It feels like it's a bit of a mismatch compared to all the other public facing aspects of my business.

So in a nutshell, I just don't think it's painting me or my business in a very good light. So the other reason why I've come to this decision is I want to simplify things in my business in order to speed up. So at the beginning of this year, my overarching word for the year was simplify. And the reason for that is I began the year with nine different income streams.

I had a team of seven members of staff, and I had two separate limited companies, and I also started the year with a feeling of utter exhaustion. I am someone who works a lot, and I am someone who is very hardworking and really disciplined. And I will get on and do something if it's something that I want to do.

But I also am aware that, burnout is a real thing. So I said that was my word at the beginning of the year. But I'd worked right up until Christmas Eve. I'd taken Christmas day off and I'd taken boxing day off. And then I was straight back into work after that. So at the beginning of 2024, I knew that I just needed to simplify things in order to optimize the business's growth.

I was just so busy and the busyness wasn't necessarily leading to more income. Anything that didn't feel like it had an obvious return on investment was on the list for removal. So a couple of months before the end of last year, I'd already decided that we were going to stop offering one to one consultations in the business.

I was going to let go of a couple of team members and I was going to replace that service with a more passive income stream. You know me, I'm all about passive income and working smarter and not harder. I'd also changed my support team and things were starting to feel a bit less heavy. That sense of freedom was starting to come back because I wasn't constantly managing staff.

I wasn't constantly editing and checking people's work. I wasn't constantly supervising, but there was still this niggling ball and chain around my neck called a dying Facebook group that in order to revive it, I knew it was going to need a lot of my time and a lot of my energy and a lot of my attention.

And so it did sit on the back burner for a while six months, it is the middle of June, nearly the end of June. So it sat there for a long while until I had the confidence to decide today that I was going to close it. It wasn't something that I wanted to give my time, my energy and attention to. I know that I can use my face, I can use my voice, I can use my unique skill set on other aspects of my business.

And that I can help people in a better way and actually I can also use that energy and helping people in a way that leads to more income generating activity in my business, rather than trying to just revive essentially what is a dying Facebook group. So the third reason is I actually don't really like social media very much.

I know, shock horror, because I talk about using social media all the time in business, but outside of business, I hardly use social media. In fact, I don't even have personal accounts and fortunately I'm in a position where I have a social media team who create content, who schedule my content so that I don't have to spend hours and hours on the platform.

I actually find it really triggering. It leads me to feelings of inadequacy. It leads me to feelings of comparisonitis. Being on social knocks my confidence. It affects my mood and so I just avoid it. It's just better for my mental health to avoid it. So because of this, I'd moved all of my paid communities in the Children's Nutritionist over to a private platform.

I use Kajabi to host my community, my, my courses and my memberships, and it has a community element and that runs alongside the courses and the memberships really beautifully. And so what that's meant is that I haven't needed to open the Facebook app if I didn't want to because it's all of the stuff that I do around supporting my clients is over in my Kajabi community.

But because I had a niggle and I was a bit frightened to close this community, I decided this year I was going to run a bit of a test. And because I am fortunate enough to have a social media team who produced most of my content, I took that same content and I put it on YouTube. Facebook, and I had it on Instagram anyway, and just looked at what the results were on both of those, and hands down, Instagram won the game.

The same content, the same posts, got more engagement, they had a greater reach. There was more DM conversations happening in my DM inbox. And actually I had more sales, which is what it's all about when we're running a business. So Instagram absolutely won for me in comparison to Facebook. So don't get me wrong.

I think Facebook groups can be a fantastic place for you to nurture a community, to generate leads for your business. But my Best advice for you is just to pick one social media platform and stick with it. Go all in on and learn everything you can about optimizing that platform. And that platform may very well be a Facebook group for you, but don't do that as well as Instagram.

Or TikTok or threads or X, et cetera, et cetera, until you have a team, of course. And when you have a team, and I talk, I'm talking about a marketing team, not an intern or another clinician who helps you, but when you have a marketing team, they can look after a second platform for you and you can expand that way.

And then secondly, if you do go for a Facebook group, keep it very niche, be crystal clear on who you help and the problem that you solve. Mine was called the Children's Nutritionist Community and that meant I had anyone and everything in there. So I hope this has been a helpful behind the scenes episode for you.

I hope you've been able to take away something from this and I hope you understand why I've taken this decision to Close my Facebook group with those 6, 000 members and why it is the right thing for me to do in my business. And at some point in the future you will also have difficult decisions like this to make in your business as well.

And I hope I've given you the confidence to be able to make those decisions when it's the right thing for you. Bye for now.