Hi Charlie,

• Generally speaking, you can create the groups and their content and then add the users later. Just to be clear, are you using Totara Connect to pull audiences from a Totara Learn site?
• There is not a button option, you are correct in adding the image and then linking.
• There is a tool called elastic search that is installed on the server along with Social. You'll need to check in with your Partner/Server administrator to get that setup.
• Email notifications for forums can be turned on by default in the forum settings. The user can be set to "watch" a forum to get notifications of replies to a post and they can also choose to watch a forum if the default is not set.

Hope those are helpful!