How Facebook Groups Can Be Used To Market Your Business
Facebook Groups are highly powerful marketing tools that can allow you to build an extremely engaged and loyal audience.
The reasons to create a Facebook Group for your business are many, but one of the most compelling is that this is a project that can run itself.
Facebook Groups are use by one billion people and allow for a far more engaged and personal form of communication between brands and their customers. Despite these facts, a lot of companies simply aren’t using them. The reasons for this is that they don’t feel they have the time or resources to dedicate to yet another marketing endeavor on Facebook. They are already running a Facebook Page and an advertising campaign.
But what if the group could run itself? What if you could set it up, walk away and then come back months later to find it had grown huge?
This is completely possible owing to the community nature the group. A Facebook Group allows people to discuss their favorite topics, share stories and tips, and generally ‘talk amongst themselves’. While it can be useful to facilitate conversation in person, you aren’t strictly needed at all!
Let Your Facebook Group Work By Itself
First of all, you choose a topic for your Facebook Group that is very niche. By doing this, you target a more select segment fo the population, who are therefore likely to have more in common and therefore have more to discuss with one another.
At he same time, you need to make sure that there are clear and concise rules that help to set the tone for interactions and help people behave toward one another in a courteous fashion. There is an option in the settings to set this up.
By keeping your group private at least to begin with and inviting people manually/requiring approval for new members, you can thereby ensure that at least the fist batch of members will have the right attitude. This will again hopefully set a tone for the rest of the members and the conversation going forward.
Another thing to consider is making some of your own members into moderators. That means they will be tasked with approving posts and members, and clamping down on any breaches of your terms. By using moderators, you not only offload some of your own work, but you also create extremely loyal followers in those moderators who will be pleased to have been chosen, and likely to feel even more committed to your brand as a result.
Groups, unlike Pages are typically quieter and less public. If you have your privacy set to private, then other visitors won’t even be able to see the content of a group until they join.
Promote Your Content In Another Facebook Groups
When you think about marketing via a Facebook Group, you probably think about creating your own Facebook Group and then using this in order to promote a product or service that you’ve created.
While this is an effective and viable option for promoting your business however, it is only one of several marketing strategies involving the use of Facebook Groups. In face, one of the best ways to use a Facebook Group is by using groups made by other brands and users.
But there is a way to go about this if you want to be successful. Read on to make sure you get it right.
Choosing The Right Group
This is what we call the ‘go to market’ strategy. If means finding somewhere that your target demographics is likely to spend time, and then marketing to that specific group. For example, if you sell martial arts supplies, then you might look for Facebook Groups about martial arts, UFC, karate, or even Jackie Chan movies.
The key is to make sure that the Group members match your ideal target demographic as closely as is possible. Ideally, the subject of the group should almost precisely match the industry you are in.
At the same time though, as we can see in this example, there is also some benefits to occasionally trying related and tangential topics. Someone who doesn’t do martial arts but does love Jackie Chan, might consider buying a book on kung fu for example. By looking for tangentially related subject matters, you can often open up you products to entirely new potential customers. This is also a great way to increase your readership if you run a blog or website.
Contributing
While missing the mark with your niche is common mistake, it is actually the less serious mistake that gets made. More serious is when you post your content to a group and the moderators remove your post and remove you from the group! This happens a lot because you might look as though you are simply spamming the group and using it for self-promotion.
The solution then is not to start using the group for self-promotion right away, but to first use it as it was intended. Answer questions, post interesting blog posts, and generally try to make a name for yourself. This is the secret ingredient that so many marketers are missing.
Why Your Facebook Group Isn’t Thriving
Let’s face it: a lot of businesses simply miss the point when it comes to internet marketing and especially when it comes to social media marketing.
If you have a Facebook Group but it hasn’t made any progress seeing any activity, then there is a strong chance you might fall into that category.
Have A Point
Too many companies believe that the best way to promote themselves is to set up a bland and boring brand and then to post about how great they are. Think I’m joking or exaggerating? Just take a look at the number of companies that have blue and white logos that are mainly text, with vague names like ‘VexSoft’ and that don’t make it clear exactly what they do.
There is simply no inventive and no emotional pull for people to sign up to a Facebook Group belonging to such a business. People join groups because they believe in a brand and because they want to support it and/or learn more about the topic. If your brand is just ‘generic business’, then who is going to want to hear more from you? Don’t be so safe: know who you are talking to, and dare to show some personality.
Provide Value
These same companies often have Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, and Facebook Groups where they just post bland statements about their own company:
| “VexSoft makes the top financial monitoring solutions in the industry!” |
| “Have you tried our new accounting features?” |
Things like this provide zero value to the user, they don’t encourage conversation, and they simply lack any real value. Would you stay in a group that did this? Or would you leave right away?
Be Consistent
Finally, another one of the most common mistakes made by businesses is to fail to be consistent. They will create a Facebook Group, and then simply not post into it for months on end. This means that when someone enters the group for the first time, they will think it is abandoned, or they will believe that the company simply isn’t interesting enough to be worth following. That doesn’t exactly incentivize then to sign up themselves!
As such then, you should make sure that you are not only posting interesting things, but also posting often enough that your group appears to be a bub of activity.
Facebook Groups Settings You Need To Consider
Now you need to think about how you are going to go about taking your group and making it a hit. Starting from the beginning and setting up your Group, you first need to think about the settings.
Head over to the settings panel in your Facebook Group and here are some of the important options.
Linked Pages
The linked pages option lets you link your group to a Facebook Page. This is a useful tool as it will allow you to promote your group via your Page – the Group will appear at the top of the Page. That in turn means that your Facebook Page followers can instantly jump into your Group.
Linked pages also share administrators.
Web Address
This is the URL for your Facebook Group. This is what people will see in their browser when they visit your group, and of course it also creates the option for direct traffic to visit your group simply by typing in the address. Choose something that reflects the Group name and brand, but consider that your web address is fixed once you pass 5,000 members.
Location
If you set a location for your Group, then it will appear more prominently in local searches and might even be recommended to other users, depending on your setting. Choose a location then if your businesses is a local type of business – such as a high street store, or perhaps a pub or restaurant.
Membership Approval And Pre-Approvals
This defines whether anyone can join your group, or whether you need to approve them first. Which you decide to go with depend on the intent of your Group. Are you planning on using this as a way to build a large following? Or do you want to keep it exclusive and make your Group into a way to attract more engaged viewers?
If you want to approve certain members and save yourself time, then you can use ‘pre-approvals’ and that way set certain groups to be accepted into the Group by default.
Wrapping Up
Imagine if you set up a Facebook Group for your affiliate marketing business there members can discuss the products you are marketing?
This must really be an huge marketing and sale tool, because your Group members can discuss what you offer, they can ask each other questions about the product you are marketing.
Featured Image Attribute: Business vector created by freepik – www.freepik.com