Best Practices for Small, Medium and Large Group Sizes

Trainerize groups can scale from small groups to large groups, up to 1000 people. However, depending on the group size and dynamics, here are some best practices to follow to ensure a good experience for your clients. 

Small Groups

For small groups of 50 members or less, you can assume most people might or will get to know each other soon. It's fine to turn on auto-post and let clients post to the group to motivate each other.

Medium Groups

For medium groups of 50-200 members, you may decide what the best settings are based on your group's frequency of activities and type of group members. 

• Turn on one-way messaging. With larger groups, you probably want to limit the discussion and random comments so clients can really focus on the content your team posts. Consider changing the permissions so only trainers can post to the group. 
• Turn off auto-posts. With smaller groups of less than 30 people, as it is more intimate, having auto-posts as clients complete workouts or hit goals can be very motivating. However, in massive groups, this can be overwhelming as every few minutes, there will be a new activity on the group. It will be better to turn off auto-posts and use other ways to motivate clients like weekly motivational videos or posting weekly summaries or leader boards. You can also split up a group into sub-teams to run contests.
• Ensure to mention @everyone when needed. Be intentional whether you want to send a notification or not. In large groups, with the volume of posts, your posts might get lost easily. When you use @ to mention someone, they get an in-app notification. When you post something new, @everyone is automatically added in the text to trigger a notification. If the post is purely informational and should be discovered inline within all other content, you can leave this out.

Use the above strategies to tailor the experience you need for your group. Here are some common scenarios are recommended settings:

• Announcement only groups. Turn off client posting permissions and turn off auto-posts. 
• Challenge groups. Depending on the challenge, you may or may not want clients to post messages. If your challenge is a nutrition challenge for example, where you want people to post a collection of photos, keep it on. Keep an eye on the frequency of activities being done in your group. If it is overwhelming, turn off auto-posts and consider posting weekly summaries based on the recent activity timeline of the group, and post weekly or bi-weekly motivational videos for this larger group format.
• Team training. If it is a sports team or amongst people that know each other, consider allowing clients to post. If it is a group of online strangers that purchased a digital training product, turn off client posting to limit unwanted solicitations and backscatter.

#TZTIP: Because mistakes sometimes happen, you and your clients can edit and delete messages. 

On the Web, you can edit or delete your message by following these steps:

• Hover over the message you’d like to edit.
• Click the three dots icon.
  • Click Edit > Save to finish.
  • Or click Delete > Delete to finish.

On the Mobile app, you have the following options:

• Tap and hold the message.
  • Click Edit > Click ✓
  • Click Copy text
  • Or click Delete > Delete

Large Groups

Trainerize Groups with more than 200 members will automatically have the auto-post feature disabled to prevent clients from getting overwhelmed by notifications from everyone which may hide the value-added content posted by trainers on your team.

This article was last updated on September 16, 2021 01:50