Patreon or Facebook Group for your creative business?

Community-led Small Businesses

At the heart of small creative businesses is always the communities they serve and grow, which is why creating a special place for them to get more valuable content as well as interact with each other is such a good marketing strategy.

Building an audience of loyal followers is critical to most small business’s success, and what better way to do it than allowing them to learn more about you and your offerings in a dedicated space on the internet.

But where to begin? Whilst there are many more community platforms that allow you to monetise your content out there, today I’m focussing on two of the most common ones - Patreon and Facebook Groups.

Patreon

Patreon says it is a ‘membership platform that makes it easy for creators to get paid’. You might be a writer, musician, artist, podcaster, photographer etc etc. The platform allows ‘patrons’ to pay their favourite creators for more of their content.

Pros

• Community based, patrons are often more engaged and committed than Facebook Group members

• You can offer different tiers from free to premium content – no need for lots of different groups

• Merchandise – you can create merchandise directly within Patreon and they handle all the shipping and production

• Predictable income – you know how many subscribers = how many £ per month

• ‘Pay what you can’ options

• Integrates with Vimeo

• Integrates with WordPress allowing you to serve website content exclusively to your Patrons based on what tier they pay for

• Use Zapier to integrate Patreon with Mailchimp newsletters

• Early Access tools for your Patrons before everyone else

• Many more tools and integrations with your other channels are possible

• Integrates with Google Sheets and Analytics

• Easy to use and set up

Cons

• Not as universally known or understood as Facebook

• Although free to set up, Patreon will take it’s cut of your earnings on the platform

• Subscription fatigue – it takes effort to consistently engage on a platform that you don’t open up for any other reason

• Maintaining consistency – if your paid tier says you deliver X number of videos per month then you must deliver that every month

• Depending on a third party for income (I recommend you use it as part of your income strategy, not the sole stream to protect you from some of the risk)

• Not as many users as Facebook

• Integrations with your useful, commonly used other apps may incur further costs

• Harder for your content to be discovered

• Unlikely to be the only channel you will need to make a good income

Facebook GROUP

There can be few people on earth who haven’t heard of or use Facebook these days. In 2021 Facebook Groups are more challenging to run and personally I find them best for members who have already paid fro one of my products or services (eg for buyers of my book) to give them added incentive for purchasing from me, knowing that they will get more high quality content and community there.

PROS

• Easy to set up

• Easy to grow quickly

• Familiar and intuitive making it easier to run

• Free

• Vast numbers of users so easy to target your demographic

• Most people who own a Facebook account login at least daily, if not multiple times daily, so your content is readily available to them

• Easy to change up your posting schedule without penalties, or take a holiday

• Can directly sell physical goods through links to Facebook Marketplace

• Run and schedule live or online events

Cons

• No in-built merchandising fulfilment

• No consistently predictable income – it will rely on you selling your offerings with links not directly within Facebook

• Algorithm changes – you will have to adapt to Facebook’s changes on how much of your content your group members see

• Few integrations, more manual work required to link your users through to your other content or products

• Less engaged generally than Patrons (especially than paid tier Patrons)

Other things to consider

It doesn’t necessarily have to be an either/or situation - you can run both together, and offer a Facebook Group membership as one of the perks of being one of your Patrons. Zapier connects Patreon and Facebook too so you can get the best of both worlds!

If you’d like help with devising strategies for growing either platform for your creative business do get it in touch and book your free coaching discovery call below.