Building a Facebook Group Community for Your Business
Why should you have a Facebook Group as opposed to just having a Facebook page for your business? Shelly Fagin talked about some of the advantages of groups and how to properly manage a Facebook group to build a new community around your brand.
So why start a Facebook Group?
- Groups have more organic reach than business pages.
- Sometimes people are more open to posting in a group than they are on a public page.
- Groups afford more privacy, which can lead to better communication.
- Can help foster a feeling of exclusivity.
Additionally, groups can be a great place to do a Facebook Live.
- Live videos are wached 8x longer
- Users comment 10x more
- People would rather watch live videos
You can do:
- Live Q&A sessions
- Live “Ask Me Anything” events
- How-to videos
- A ‘day in the life’ of your brand
The Three Types of Facebook Groups
There are three levels of groups on Facebook:
- Public – anyone can view and join
- Private – must request access to join (people can find in search but need to be allowed to join)
- Secret – by invitation only (can’t be found using search)
For most businesses, you’ll want to start a private group. If you have a membership site, the Facebook Group can be a place where users of your product or service can go to engage with other users and they will create content within the community and be able to help each other out. The other feature you can use for a private group is to use the three questions to be sure that the people joining the group are actually your clients/customers. Just remember, once that ‘accept’ button is clicked, those answers go away (and the information isn’t archived or saved anywhere) so be sure that you have a procedure in place to capture that information.
How To Choose Your Facebook Group Moderator
Be sure, before your group goes live, that you have rules set up and have chosen a group moderator or moderators. Your moderators will make sure that questions get answered and that the conversation within the group is kept on track and focused on your product/service.
Traits of a good community manager/moderator:
- Kind
- Compassionate
- Knowledgeable about your company, your products/services
- Can provide value to the members
- Will provide encouragement to the members
- Able to provide amazing customer support
- And also someone who can fairly manage member reported content, and content flagged as inappropriate by Facebook.
Benefits of a Facebook Group
So, what can having a group do for you/your business:
- It can allow you to stop SELLING and start HELPING!
- It will allow you to test different types of content and figure out the best times and days to post.
- It can help your customers by educating them about your products and services as a group (rather than having to have a large customer service staff to answer individual emails).
- It allows you to engage with people who already know and like what you do and turn them into your brand’s ambassadors.
And, you can use Facebook’s Group Insights And Grytics (which is a 3rd party analysis tool) to help you gauge what your clients/customers are interested in which can help you create better, more focused content.
