Are you utilizing Facebook Groups for your business or brand?
More than 100 million Facebook users belong to meaningful Facebook group communities and that number is expected to grow as Facebook continues to place a high amount of importance on creating meaningful connections within the platform.
If not, no worries!
There’s still time to jump on this boat and integrate this important piece into your social media marketing strategy.
Let’s break down Facebook Group management from how to get started to actually running a meaningful community so you can level up your brand or service.
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What is a Facebook Group?
A Facebook group is a community page you can create (open or closed) in order to promote the social interaction of consumers or followers who are interested in certain products, challenges, or topics of discussion. It’s a space that allows you to foster brand or product knowledge amongst a group of people where you can moderate and help keep things in line.
Why Should You Use Facebook Groups?
Facebook Groups:
- Add value to your products.
- Create a place for students, consumers, and brand followers to interact and ask questions.
- Make it easy to share new information quickly.
- Reduce returns on products by increase knowledge and a feeling of community.
- Generate additional revenue by exposing others to potential brand ambassadors within the group.
Facebook Groups are a great way to engage your audience, build brand advocacy, and foster a great community — if they’re done right. On the other hand, if your Facebook group isn’t engaging enough, or is promoting irrelevant messages, people will forget they’re a part of them, become annoyed with your brand, and eventually, part ways with you.
How to Create Facebook Groups for Your Business
Here are 5 ways to make sure your Facebook groups are full of life and creating a great experience for your brand.
1. Identify What Type of Facebook Group Page You Want
This is a critical step, it is so easy to get excited about building a community that you want to jump right in, invite your audience, and hope for fireworks…
But, if you take the time to do enough pre-planning before you create a Facebook Group it will pay off in the long run.
So, it’s time for some soul searching, what do you want your consumers to get out of the community?
There are typically 3 basic types of Facebook Groups:
Groups That Create Awareness and Provide Value:
People in this type of community will be new to your brand and simply there to learn more and see what you are all about.
You will want to focus on engaging your new members and introduce them to your brand and core values.
Groups That Excite Your Consumer:
These types of groups are usually created as a type of continuity program, often for people who are already customers.
Here you can share tips, resources, post polls, and truly engage your customer.
This is where the relationships are made and where your customer should really fall in LOVE with your brand.
Groups That Advocate for Your Brand:
This type of group offers exclusivity to your customers who have made purchases and are truly elite advocates for your brand.
They speak highly of your brand and become promoters for you naturally.
It’s important to decide what direction you want to take your group as it will decide how you market the group, add members, and create content for the group itself.
2. Decide How You Will Measure Your Success
You’ve thought about your business goals and how you want to utilize your newest Facebook Group, great!
Now let’s put some of that into practice by deciding how you want to measure the success and overall health of your community.
Luckily, Facebook has introduced Group Metrics that easily allow you to track some basic results from your group.
Here at Brandetize, we like to focus on our Engagement Rate and Active Member Count as that is a pretty accurate snapshot of how truly engaged your community is.
We also like to track our Subscribers and Revenue from our back-end reporting metrics, as some of our groups are geared to drive sales.
Set this up in an easy to update Google Sheet or platform of your choice.
I recommend checking up on your group’s health on a weekly basis and formally updating your metrics and goals each month.
3. Create Your Content
The content you create is dependent on the group you are running and the goals you have set. Do you want to generate more leads?
Do you want your current customers to continue buying?
Or, do you want to create a dedicated tribe of brand advocates?
As you may have guessed it, you can’t realistically get all the results out of one group.
To cultivate a successful community you need to have one general focus in mind whether it’s revenue, discussion, or customer continuity.
We like to create a general outline for the year for each of our groups.
This will help you align with your brand’s launches and campaigns throughout the year. Then, we create our content on a month-month basis.
This is where you will decide (through trial and error) how frequently and at what time you will post.
For some groups posting twice a week is a great place to start, other groups may post daily or weekly.
In general, we like to stay somewhere between 2-3 times a week.
Once you get your group going then you will be able to utilize Group Insights to see what the most popular days and times are for your group members and tailor it to them.
It will also take you a while to decide what types of posts are best for your brand, but in general, you want to stick to posts that will ignite discussion between different members.
A few great ways to do this is through one-liner discussion questions, polls, quotes, and through the use of free resources like blogs and videos.
4. Schedule Your Content, Let’s Do This Thing!
It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for – you’ve done the research, you’ve optimized your Facebook group with community guidelines and consistent branding, you’ve likely set up a launch or an announcement to gain interest, now all you need is to do is get the conversation started.
Last year, Facebook introduced the ability to schedule your posts ahead of time, which proves to be an incredible time saver.
To schedule your content simply go to the discussion tab, insert your content, and then before hitting post, hit the clock icon where you will be taken to the schedule.
Schedule your posts and consider it done!
How to Run a Successful Facebook Group for Your Business
Once you’ve got your group created and up and running, you need to engage, engage, engage!
You might think that getting members in your group and continuing to post frequently is all that is required to create a meaningful community, but don’t forget the most important part – engagement!
Your group members will fall quiet quickly if you don’t do your due diligence by participating in your community as an admin or moderator daily.
It doesn’t take long (dependent on the size of your groups) to check in and follow up.
Here are 6 tips for running and moderating successful groups.
You want to make sure you are:
1. Welcoming New Group Members & Approving Requests
Approve your requests in a timely manner and then welcome your new group members in a separate post on a weekly or monthly basis.
This gives them an opportunity to introduce themselves and meet others in the groups.
2. Responding to, Moderating, and Contributing Posts
In addition to your regularly scheduled content, you want to make sure you are participating and encouraging conversations as well.
This might be helping other members connect, asking questions, or even moderating discussion when necessary.
Learn How to Moderate Appropriately
There are a few key roles that the moderator has to play — these include Customer Support, Resource, Disciplinarian, and Cheerleader.
As the moderator – the group participants will count on you to help answer their questions, show them where to find certain features and information, keep other participants in line when inappropriate comments are made, and cheer them on to keep the positive vibes and encouragement flowing throughout the group.
3. Surprising & Delighting
You want to make sure your community feels appreciated and valued. This is where you can have fun with it!
Dependent on your community and brand voice you can start one-off threads (one of our favorites is to share our #WednesdayWins in our goal-setting group), shout-out top contributing members, host giveaways, or even share exclusive sales and promos.
It is nice to break up the day to day of your typical content with something fun that will catch the group’s attention.
4. Use Brand Ambassadors to Help When it Makes Sense
If done right, your Facebook group should have at least a few exceptional members. These are fans, followers, and consumers who can become evangelists inside and outside the group. If the member seems upstanding, trustworthy, and has regularly demonstrated helpfulness over time, he or she can be trained to help handle some of the engagement and encouragement in place of the moderator.
5. Interact With the Group Regularly
It is important to make sure that the group knows who is in charge. As the creator and/or moderator of the group, you should make sure to add posts announcing new information, answer community questions, share helpful resources such as relevant blog posts, and take part in personal conversations with the members.
Examples of this would include tagging specific group members if they would enjoy the content you’re sharing, addressing members by name, connecting members with each other if you notice they have common interests and backgrounds, and answering all of the questions you see.
6. Plan What You Want to Say and Share
To make sure the group never feels old and stale, it’s important to introduce new information to keep the momentum going. In order to do this effectively, it would help for you to create a content calendar where you plan out what types of content and information you want to share, in what format, and when.
Some tips for the type of content you might want to plan out include blogs, relevant articles, insightful questions that will elicit responses, promotions that members would be interested in, quotes that can inspire or encourage the message you’re already sharing, tips, and more.
Running a successful, engaging Facebook Community is no easy task, but it is absolutely worth it.
In the last six months, Facebook has helped 50% more users join meaningful communities and they don’t plan on stopping there.
Dive in and craft your perfect community for your brand, if you make your group members feel valued, heard, and important they will reward you with their continued business and become natural advocates for your brand.
That’s every marketer’s dream, right?
Right.
What is one of your favorite facebook groups that you’re a part of? Let us know in the comments below. Get more digital marketing knowledge delivered right to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter.