Sometimes secrecy is the best way to market your business. I’m talking about Facebook groups, also known as a VIP way to get valuable information from and interact with your best customers.
The math is simple. On the one hand, your organic reach on Facebook is decreasing. On the other hand, 1.8 billion people use facebook page vs group every month. These self-imposed communities provide a great way for businesses to get around Facebook’s relentless News Feed algorithm and connect with an audience where they can see and act on branded posts.
Here’s everything you need to know about what a Facebook group can do for your business. Keep reading to find out how to get started and grow it into a thriving and profitable community.
Indicator
Benefits of Creating a Facebook Group for Your Business
Types of Facebook Groups (and Which Ones to Choose)
How to create a Facebook group
Add admin to Facebook group
How to change the name of your Facebook group
Post in Facebook group
How to delete a Facebook group
5 Tips for Successful Facebook Group Marketing
Bonus: Start creating your own Facebook Group Policy with one of our 3 customizable templates. Save time on administrative tasks today by giving your team members clear instructions.
Benefits of Creating a Facebook Group for Your Business
Your Facebook page has its place, but incorporating groups into your Facebook strategy has unique benefits:
Building long-term relationships with customers
Groups are effective because people want to be there. Think about it: is someone going to join a group for a company they don’t really like?
These are your #1 BFFs in these groups and are ready to be your personal support group. Strengthen and deepen these relationships with exclusive access to your business with a Facebook group, special content or benefits. (More on this later.)
Increase Your Organic Reach
Your Facebook page’s organic reach may only be around 5%, but your group’s reach will be much greater.
Facebook prioritizes posts from groups in a user’s News Feed, so you’re more likely to show up, especially when compared to posts on your Page.
Explore Valuable Market Research Data
In addition to organized market research, where else do you get direct access to your target group and get answers to your questions from real customers?
The opportunity to test new strategies and ideas in this small focus group will give you a lot of information. As a bonus, your super fans will appreciate you being “in the know”.
This is a win win. Oh, and did I mention it’s free? This data can be used by everything from brand new startups to mega-enterprises.
Types of Facebook Groups (and Which Ones to Choose)
It is important to think about this in advance. You can only change your group’s privacy in a few situations, so make sure to set it the way you want.
teaspoon; DR? Here’s an overview of public and private Facebook groups, but also note any hidden or visible settings described below.
chart showing an overview of public and private Facebook groups
Source: Facebook
Public
Public groups are visible to everyone in search results. It’s important to note that group content is also public, including what members post and comment on. Any internet user can also view the full list of group members.
And these group posts and comments are even indexed by Google.
Users can join your group without administrator privileges. It’s very similar to ‘we don’t lock our front doors here’.
I would not recommend creating an open group. Since anyone can join us, including spammers, you should be very careful about removing inappropriate or spam content that could negatively impact your brand image. It’s really only a matter of time before this happens, so why expose your brand to it?
If you create a public group, you can later change it to private. This change can only happen once, as you cannot go back from private to public.
Make life easier and choose privacy from the start.
Private
There are two types of closed groups: visible and hidden. Let’s look at both.
Private – visible
In private groups, members can only see messages and comments within the group, as well as a list of members. But all Facebook users can find these groups in Facebook search results.
This will not display any content in your group. The search results will only show the name and description of your group if they match the keywords entered by the user in the search bar
