How to Grow your Business Using your OWN Facebook Group – Harness the Incredible Power of a Facebook Group
Facebook groups can be an immensely powerful tool to grow your business. Many top marketers swear by them. You can use them in numerous ways, including finding and posting on other groups, but this post is all about how to grow your business with your OWN Facebook group.
If you have read much about FB at the moment (2015) you will know that your like page doesn’t have much visibility anymore unless you boost posts. So you can post something awesome and next to nobody sees it! What a pain…
If you are a member of a Facebook group however, you get a notification every time someone posts on that page. i.e. if you run a Facebook group all of your posts can get seen! This is huuuuuuuge. Why? because you just can’t get that anywhere else. People check Facebook constantly, on average around 14 times a day – people will look at their notifications from you. Straight away you are improving your top of mind awareness even if they don’t check out what you said. However most people will check out what you are saying if you post interesting stuff and Facebook just makes it so easy to engage.
So Facebook groups are great for building a community for your business to form stronger relationships with your prospective clients.
Here’s three great examples of Facebook groups in action from our own experience. Then we will give you some top tips on how to use them yourself effectively to grow your business.
Fresh Networking – Adding value to your service.
As part of the membership for this networking event you are invited to a private Facebook group where members can post ideas, get support, ask questions, and generally carry on networking. The engagement is crazy high and extremely responsive, which means people get a lot of support instantly. It also means that people know each other before an event and so are more likely to come along because they feel like they know someone else who’s going.
Social Media Marketing World – Support
Social Media Examiner had one sole mission preceding their conference which was to make sure everyone knew someone else before going, which is wonderful, and it worked! They then furthered this by adding a great level of support during the 3 day event also. One of the massive impacts the Facebook Group can have is that communication is so much easier than email for engagement and support. Having the group in place during the event helped create a more personal connection and provided an added level of support.
Natalie Lussier – Sales Funnel
Natalie has a great 30 Day List Building Challenge opt-in and one of the first things she does is gets everyone to join her closed Facebook group and announce their goals. This means that there is an added level of accountability to the challenge which is great, but also means that there is a support network there for everyone to use. This is invaluable to the members and ensures everyone gets tremendous value from the opt-in.
In short, Facebook groups offer a proven way to form lasting, productive connections and communities that generate leads. They’re growing in popularity too, in October 2014, Facebook reported that 700 million people use Facebook groups every month, an increase of 200 million from the previous January.
Side note: You do have to use your own personal profile to set up a group so make sure you are comfortable with that and that you have certain privacy settings on if not.
So, have you considered using Facebook groups to build your business? Here’s some top tips for your Facebook group to make sure it works for you.
Top tips
– Don’t spam – People can turn off notifications from your group, so make sure you don’t post too much and also that you keep the content interesting/entertaining/useful.
– Don’t sell sell sell – put out great content, your blogs, interesting stories and hints and tips. Be as valuable as possible to them, and you will hold great importance to them.
– Find a good balance of how often to post, more than once a day can be really annoying for most people, but don’t leave it for weeks either.
– Set up rules for your group so that members know how to use the group and understand why they are kicked out if they don’t obey the rules.
– Include a pinned post that sticks to the top of your page all the time so that you can direct new members what to do first in the group.
– Be as active as possible and as quick as possible to engage – the notifications should come through on your phone so jump on it whenever someone posts or comments.
– Keep the conversations going as much as possible and encourage others to talk and chip in too. Build relationships and a friendly environment that everyone wants to contribute to.
– Be as helpful as possible and never shoot anyone down otherwise they won’t engage again.
– Use the group for research and ask them what they want, use the in build Facebook survey function if you want too.
– Your profile – You have to use your personal account to set up a group so make sure your account is suited to customers looking at it.
The jaw dropper…
– There’s an option on your group page to message all of your members at once with just a 2-3 clicks of the mouse *Jaw Drops*. This is awesome!! But remember with great power comes great responsibility, use it sparingly and entice people back to a post rather than messaging back because that is a sure fire way to annoy people!
Then here’s the key
Yes members should value you enough from all your content and niceties to go on and check out your website and buy from you but they probably won’t. So you have to be pro-active but non-salesy. Here’s how…
Every so often use it to generate leads… so make sure that you post in the group some opportunities to grow your list or sell them something eventually. i.e. a webinar that up-sells your products, or a free download that up-sells your stuff.
There you have it!
ACTION: Figure out what would be the best use of a Facebook group for your business, and go set one up!
ACTION: Read here if you want to know how to get new members onto your Facebook group.