Brands today are now exploring different ideas to communicate with the users and try to understand their needs and requirements, so they may redirect their marketing efforts and establish brand identity. A great way to do it is through creating a community that could nurture using Facebook group marketing.
Having a community of these customers provides not only your business easy access to your marketing team (and a group of like-minded people) but also provides a sense of human interaction that gives your brand a personality that the users could relate to.
Facebook communities have long been a standard for how user communities are built and managed. There’s a good reason for this: these communities are very strong because members share common interests. Businesses use these communities to deliver product and service-related support through interaction with the users.
A secondary benefit of these communities is the option to nurture potential prospects and build the brand’s reputation.
Facebook is the largest social media platform with an estimated 2.89 billion active monthly users. An important reason behind this popularity is the availability of tools that brands can use to build communities such as Facebook groups around their businesses and products.
Leveraging using Facebook groups for marketing can help brands today to establish a community of customers and prospects who are keen to know more about their product offerings. These groups are vital for driving engagement and increasing brand awareness and footprint.
But, Why Facebook Groups?
(Source: Become a Social Media Manager- With Rachel Pederson)
Why should you create a Facebook Group for your brand?
Well, the answer is simple: Facebook Group Marketing is now a huge thing, and marketers consider these groups an essential component of the brand promotion strategy. In fact, almost all social media marketing campaigns include these groups as an intermediate stage of driving the traffic to the landing pages.
This inclusion of Facebook groups in the social media marketing funnel has established the reputation of these groups as a powerful community-building opportunity. For many brands, the Facebook group is a simple way of reaching out to an audience that is already interested in your services.
As such, this audience can be used to generate buzz around new feature rollouts and service announcements. By announcing these in the groups and sharing the links to the relevant website landing pages, you can strengthen the connection between this audience and your website, with a consequent increase in website traffic.
Towards a More Personalized Experience
Brands could make sure that they are able to deliver a more personalized experience through Facebook group marketing. For marketers, these groups offer benefits such as a boost in organic reach and direct access to an interested audience.
As such, these groups have become a viable tool for creating and maintaining a community that shares an interest in the brand’s products and services.
These groups can also provide a way to build direct customer relationships, as they create a connection that works on a personal level. The members of the group are more likely to engage with the group admins, who can moderate and influence the direction of the discussions by adding relevant posts and comments.
Through engaging with the members and focusing on resolving their issues, the brand can capitalize on the opportunity to build an active and responsible community around its products and services.
How to Improve Facebook Group Discoverability?
The main challenge in building a community through Facebook groups is the discoverability of the group. Given the fact that there are millions of Facebook groups, how can you make sure the users join your group and not one of the many ünofficla” groups run by other fans and users.
The answer to this requires some work.
For starters, the Facebook Group should have all the details that could improve the discoverability. This ensures that the group pops up in the Facebook search results.
An important decision in this regard is whether you would keep the group private or public?
Both choices have their own benefits, so it’s totally up to you. Keeping the group open will have a potentially huge community, but you will lose some control over the discussions and comments. On the other hand, by keeping the group private, the community might be small, but you will have better control over what happens in the group.
The next important factor is the group’s description. This is where many admins fumble by opting for a generic description that does not do justice to the discussions and ideas discussed in the group. The group’s description is your way of telling the potential Facebook audience why they should join your community and what benefits they would have when they join.
Also, the description is a huge opportunity to use keywords and hashtags that could help improve the discoverability of the group in the search.
Next, check the group’s visibility settings. This is often ignored by the admins who assume that this is set to be visible to all. However, when you mark the group private, there is a chance that this setting will get impacted. You need to check this setting to find out whether your group is visible to Facebook users.
As you can guess, this simple check can greatly impact your group’s discoverability as it could limit the number of people who could see your group in their search results.
The location of the group is another overlooked entry. By entering a location, you are determining a demographic of your group. Facebook’s algorithm uses this value to present your group to the people who have the same location.
This means you have to carefully think before entering a location for your group because the audience that you will receive at the group will be potentially from that location. So if your product or services are location-bound, make sure you have the right location for your group in order to bring in people from that region to your Facebook group.
Finally, there is the option of selecting tags for the group. This is a serious discussion because Facebook only allows two tags for a group. These tags help the Facebook algorithm determine the niche of the group so that it can match it with the people who have expressed their interest in the topic.
By selecting the most appropriate tags, you can ensure that your group is visible to the Facebook users who share an interest in your product or services.
Use Social Champ to Build Your Online Community
Social Champ’s Publish feature lets you schedule your content for your Facebook Group at the ideal posting time automatically.
Building Communities Using Facebook Groups
So you are ready to start with Facebook Group marketing. But, how do you know which strategies would work for you, or how can you get the most out of your efforts in engaging with your audience?
The good news is that it is easy to get started. Here are a few tips on how you can efficiently use Facebook Groups for marketing your brand or services and build a loyal community.
Define Group Rules
Having a set of rules for your group establishes a set of guidelines that everyone must follow to ensure that the group remains spam-free. The group’s rules encourage healthy conversations that help the community and discourage negative sentiments.
Establishing and enforcing group rules not only keeps the group environment safe but also reduces the instances of self-promotion or trouble for other users.
(Source: Champ Community)
Prioritize Consistent Posting
Consistency is the key to appearing at the top of the members’ feed’. However, don’t go overboard with daily posting. Make sure the content aligns with the group’s image and vision. A good tip is to ask questions and bring group members into discussions by tagging them in your comments. Another great idea is to share relevant content created by other Facebook members. For this, remember to ask for their permission first.
Keep an Eye on the Insights
A great thing about Facebook Groups is that it has an analytics tool called Insights that gives you an overview of your group’s growth and the performance of the content. Make a habit of checking the number regularly to keep an eye on how the community is progressing.
This allows you to adjust your Facebook group marketing strategies and discover new ways of growing the group’s membership. An added benefit of this approach is the discovery of the content ideas that work the best for attracting the interest of the members.
(Source: Champ Community)
Optimize Your Content
There is no doubt that great content boosts up the group’s engagement rate. However, discovering the topics that work the best often require research into the preferences of the group members.
In addition to posting content around the product or services, make sure you post enough third-party content to retain the attention of the members. a good hack is to share the videos popular in your industry.
Checking the engagement numbers for posts will help you fine-tune this strategy and you can find out the content that gets the most likes and comments from the group members.
Don’t Shy Away From Experiments
Facebook groups offer a great platform for experimenting with content ideas and formats to enhance your Facebook group marketing efforts. This means you have a lot of leeway in posting different types of content.
As such, you can experiment with going Live, GIFs, polls, and videos. If you have a large enough audience, you can experiment with the recently launched Facebook Rooms with interested members. However, note that this experimentation could take up a lot of time so budget for the requirements beforehand.
Use Guides
Guides are a great way of providing knowledge to the group members. This is a great option for filling in the content lineup of the group. For instance, if your group is all about educating members about a particular topic, you could create guides and upload pieces of content that the members can go through at their ease.
Once they are done, you can either opt for end-of-the-book or interactive quizzes to help them gauge their understanding of the material. Many groups utilize this great feature to educate their members and better understand how the contents of the guide can contribute to their individual growth.
(Source: Social Media Geekout)
Don’t Oversell
Group members don’t like it when you are constantly pushing promotions and offers in their faces. This is true for both group admins and members. Even if you are the group admin, you should refrain from posting ads for products and services.
Excessive advertisement is one of the most quoted reasons of the users leaving a group. It is understandable that advertisements are the lifeblood of public Facebook groups and many group admins view them as an alternate income stream. However, from the members’ perspective, this is spam and an avoidable intrusion in their experience.
You should always try to answer questions about ads and see that every ad has a proper justification. A better approach is to avoid advertisements and instead use the group as a lead generation opportunity. This is a better approach for product or services based groups that have a large audience of interested users.
Be Accessible
When using Facebook groups for marketing and as a community hub, remaining accessible and approachable is the least you can do as a group admin. It is essential that the members feel confident in approaching you for discussions.
Try to listen to what they are saying and then respond to them either in private messages or through public posts. Members feel encouraged when they receive timely responses and get answers to their queries. You can break communication barriers and help bring in the “silent” group members into discussions with this tactic.
Promote Your Group at Other Channels
You should not always assume that all of your members are only on Facebook. A community can exist on multiple social media platforms, and as such, you should be prepared to go to other social platforms to advertise your Facebook group. If done correctly, other platforms can also help boost your member count!
Conclusion
Now that you are well aware of the concept of Facebook group marketing and its benefits, you can use this knowledge to establish a healthy and responsible community of individuals who are keen on acquiring knowledge about a specific niche or your brand.
Remember to help them understand new ideas, provide knowledgeable insights that would nurture them from potential prospects into recurring customers.
