Facebook is a gold mine for marketing and makes your followers advocates of your brand. Other than having a page with a high number of active engagement, another way to build a successful community on Facebook is by having an enthusiastic group of followers.
Facebook has 2 billion active monthly users. 50% of those users are members of various Facebook groups. Building a Facebook group is relevant for B2C companies and people who want to build a community for a cause. FB’s new features and tools for groups can help you reach new audiences and grow your community pretty fast. Let’s begin the journey and understand how to a build community on Facebook.
Benefits of Building a successful community on Facebook Groups
- You can promote your brand effectively at a lower cost.
- More likely to reach a higher percentage of the ideal audience.
- Engage with your audience on a more personal level
- Actionable feedback from members about product and services
- Insights about how to improve your content and engagement
However, creating a Facebook group will not magically attract your target audience. You need to implement the right growth and promotion strategy. For example, Reportz.io started with 0 followers. With the right approach, they were able to grow group member count exponentially.
1. Define a purpose and create a focused group
Create a community and bless it with a unique goal. Purpose of creating a Facebook group to bring together people who share a common interest or goal. Your 1 group has to be created with a focus on one core purpose. You shouldn’t try to cover all sorts of niches. That will make your group miserable.
To build a successful community on Facebook, the foundation should be one goal. Having a common goal will make it easier for you to find the target audience. You will be able to determine what type of interaction and relationship you want to build with group members, or them to have between themselves. To make this possible, find the answer to these questions:
- What is your niche?
- Will you use your group to promote a product or service?
- How do you seek feedback from your customers?
- Based on the feedback, how will you improve your business?
- How do you plan to gain more customers using this community?
Put Me in Touch – Ahmedabad Case Study:
If you live in Ahmedabad, Put Me in Touch is one of the best groups to join on Facebook. This group was created in the year 2013 to help people who live in the same city. People of Ahmedabad City post their queries on the group, and other members try to help each other. At the time of writing 2,37,248, people are a member of this group.
2. Promote your Facebook group to the right audience
A healthy and well-engaged community will last longer. For that, you will need like-minded people interacting with each other and keeping the community active. You will need to find the right audience and make them join your community. You must be wondering how to make your Facebook group accessible? There are several ways:
A. Send a personalized invite to your friends
For the very first step, go old-school and send invites to your friends who share the same interests. Send them a personalized invite, ask them to promote your group to their friends who might be having the same benefits.
Image taken from HellBound Bloggers Group
Whenever you are sending a personalized invite, clearly communicate the purpose of your group so that they are clear about it from the beginning. Making people join who don’t share the same interests, isn’t beneficial for you in the long term.
View of Pradeep Kumar, Creator of HellBound Bloggers Group
When you build a Facebook Group/Community, your focus shouldn’t always be with the members’ count. Yes, more members = more discussions. But are they the right members?
There was a time I made the same mistake. I used to post updates such as “BookWritten needs 50 more members to reach 2000”.
Whenever I post something like this, I just trigger people to join the group even without the intention of reading or having a love for books. They joined the groups to support me or just felt like a duty as a friend.
At one point, all those members formed a significant percentage in the group, and they had no interest in reading books at all.
B. Create a Facebook page and link the group to it
In case if you haven’t created a Facebook page for the group you are managing, create a Facebook page, and connect the group to it. Let’s take the example of “Foodaholics in Ahmedabad” Facebook group. The Facebook page has 5,600+ followers, and more than 40,000 people are members of the group.
There are multiple advantages of connecting page and group together. Let’s have a quick look at some of them:
- You can engage (post, Like, and comment) as “your Page” in the Group.
- You can promote your page, gain followers and make them join your group
- Your community can have a separate space to interact and build relationships.
Check the below GIF to know how to connect Facebook Group to page.
C. Attract New Members With Facebook Ads
You can also attract potential members with Facebook Ads to build a successful community on Facebook. Make your the ad promotes an invitation to join your Facebook group (paid advertising Facebook group).
Run the ad campaign for one week, so it shows up multiple times in the feeds of your target audience. After your target audience learns who you are, you can provide value through your group, Facebook Live video, and content on your site. To set up your unique audience, you need to:
- Input the locations you want to target
- Choose your audience’s interests
D. Ask relevant Influencers to endorse your group
Contact influencers who are relevant to your niche. Ask them to share your Facebook group among their followers. Offer them something in return, of course (your product, service, gifts/goodies, or monetary return). This will help you a lot to build a successful community on Facebook. Check one of the examples below.
E. Announce and reward most contributing members
Each month, reward most active members in your Facebook group. Publish a post in your group and announce the most active and most contributing members. Here is an example:
It will encourage other members to participate, support each other, and become truly part of the community. This can make them potent advocates of your brand in the long term.
F. Engage with your members regularly
Daily interaction is vital to building a successful community on Facebook. When the community is new, you may not see a high number of posts from your members. It will be beneficial to post relevant, helpful conversations consistently.
Find out when most of your group members are online; try to post your best content at that time. Most FB users are online in the morning around 8 AM, and the evening after 7 PM. Build a social media community calendar for your Facebook group. Plan and schedule posts as per the timetable. Let’s see an example:
Grab this template by clicking here
3. Utilize new Facebook group features to increase engagement
Facebook has introduced some great new group features in 2019. Few moderation features have just recently been announced. Here are the top 5 new Facebook group features.
- Facebook Group Badges
- Facebook Group Insights
- Watch Party
- Group Learning Units
A. Facebook Group Badges
In modern society, people want to know that their contribution is making a difference. People love it when someone recognizes and admires their contribution. Facebook Group Badges is a new feature to make group members feel special. It is available to groups with 50+ members.
Once a badge is assigned, stay visible to everyone for a fixed amount of time. When the Group Badges feature is activated, unique badges appear next to someone’s name. The types of banners are admin, conversation starter, visual storyteller, rising star, and moderator. This gives group members a distinct identity.
B. Facebook Group Insights
Group Insights will display several new members and relevant group growth insights. In terms of ideas, you can see engagement details, post-performance, and your top 10 contributors.
Besides, the analytics and insights will also show you the days and times your members are most active. Based on that, you can plan when you should be posting or prepare the next live video.
C. Watch Party
Watch Party lets you share public videos on to a group, and watch it with group members in real-time. It is like watching a TV show (or a pre-recorded video) with your online friend in real-time. Similar to Instagram Live or a live broadcast, members will view and react to the video all at once.
The concept of public viewing and will help members develop a sense of community and build relationships. This feature is relevant for business to discuss industry news or educational content. People can share their perspective, and organizers can answer questions as they come up.
D. Group Learning Units
When you are creating a Facebook Group, choose “Social Learning” as your group type to have access to this feature. Earlier, it was difficult for admins and members to refer to previously shared educational or informative posts.
Image taken from Blogging Cage Group
Now, admins can create multiple units and pin content (videos, text posts, or other resource materials) to a specific Unit. Units let you organize information into units and chapters. Once appropriately organized, it will also show you a table of contents. I expect that online educators will highly benefit from this feature.
View of Kulwant Nagi, Creator of Blogging Cage Group
I believe Facebook group is one of the best community you can build around any products, service or almost anything.
Starting the Facebook group was one of the best things I have done in my blogging career. If you can engage with your audience within Facebook, that can become a goldmine for you.
I realized this 5 years back and started this Facebook group.
From this group alone, I have made more than $100,000 so far because people keep buying products with my affiliate links and I do paid affiliate marketing training as well.
Building a community is essential and relevant for brands
Creating a group is easy. It takes a lot of effort to build a successful community on Facebook. Being a part of Facebook Community Leadership Circles, I feel that building an active community is relevant and critical for brands. It will boost your position in the industry and help you become an authority in your niche. A community will result in loyal fans who will buy from again and talk about your brand without you having to prompt it.
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