Now that you have created your Facebook group, it’s time to add members. Adding your friends and family is simply not enough if you mean for your Facebook group to bring in revenue for your business. There is a vast source of potential members among Facebook’s roughly 2.2 billion users. The question now is, how do you get those people to join your Facebook group?
Social media experts advise that one of the best ways to expand your group is to actively provide relevant content on your page. This increases engagement among your existing members. In return, they will spread the word on how fantastic the group is, and you get your members who are truly interested in your page and advocacy.
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More tips from the experts
1. Use relevant tags and keywords. This helps to make your facebook group easier to find when people search for topics that you have tags on.
Social media experts recommend that you make sure that your group settings are optimized. To do this, you need to make sure you add your group topic in the group name. A good Facebook name creates a psychological and emotional response from your audience. For example, if your topic is High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), a bad name for it is: High Intensity Interval Training Group. That name is pure and simple, boring. A good name for that group would be: “Fit & Healthy HIITHealth Buffs” or something to that effect.
Use tags that are relevant to your group or niche. Tags will help people and Facebook understand what the group is about. It is important that people understand what your group is about on the outset, otherwise they won’t really be interested in joining. It also helps to set the parameters of the group topics because admins will be able to easily provide the right information to potential group members. Taking the HIIT group example, good tags would include: health, exercise, weight loss, wellness, fitness, and other relevant keywords.
2. Advertise your facebook group to existing followers.
Link up your group to your Facebook page. There, you can post about your group and tell your existing followers or fans to join the group. You can do an information drive and send out invitations to join your group to your subscribers through their email addresses. Another easy way to invite people is to add a “Join Group”button to your Facebook page. If you have a verified page, you even the option to invite people through email in bulk.
You should also promote or advertise your group in other avenues that you already have like a newsletter, podcast, website and other social media platforms.
Examples of effective facebook group promotion:
- National Public Radio (NPR) has a group named Your Money and Your life, that discusses personal finances. The group has over 42,000 members. Being a broadcast company, NPR mentions the group on air whenever a program discusses personal finance.
- “The Weeds”, a podcast by Vox takes a bit of on air time to plug its group.
- A group run by The Times UK, which is a Brexit-themed group, has grown largely through the outfit’s efforts in promoting the group whenever they have posts on the topic. They add a link to the group in the comments section so it’s easier for potential members to find. William Park, The Times UK’s social producer even said that they also help grow the group by personally telling people about it and encourage them to join. Now that’s not a bad idea at all. Use all of your existing resources so there is no additional cost.
3. Ask you members to invite their friends
If you are personally inviting people to join the group, you might as well tell your members to do the same with their friends. If each of you could bring in just one new member, then you have already doubled your number of members.
Simply telling people to tell their friends about the group and to ask them to join is not a very reliable technique. You can run events, contests or other promotional strategy to entice your members to invite their friends. You can also post a simple infographic showing an update of the group’s growth is a great way to encourage your members to invite more. Make sure you make them feel that the growth was a team effort and it wouldn’t have happened without their support.
It is highly likely that your members have been meaning to tell people about the group but simply forgot or haven’t had the time to do it. Post a subtle reminder every so often to make them remember.
4. Join other groups that have related topics.
As a group admin you need to be knowledgeable about your group’s topic. Enhance your knowledge not just on the topic but on the types of people and interaction required for that demographic. You can do this by joining other groups. You can even reach out to other admins of related groups and ask them to think about linking with your group.
Of course, you can’t just up and say you want them to link their group to yours. Offer them something of value that is useful for them. This may include providing content to their group or creating a knowledge base. You could co-host an event or give live advice.
A Facebook group admin has said that he has been offered partnerships with other admins so that they can promote each other’s groups to their respective members. This type of promotion has been proven to boost membership numbers.
Growing a Facebook group does not require a lot of financial resources. All it takes is creativity and a healthy interpersonal relationship with members and the Facebook community as a whole.
To recap, here things to remember when growing your Facebook group:
- Improve member interaction by posting relevant content. Think going viral.
- Optimize your group with tags. Think of a fun and memorable group name that is easy to find.
- Be visible to the community.
- Make use of existing avenues. Reach out to your followers and other admins.
If you have other techniques and tips that you will help grow a Facebook group’s membership, let us in the comments! Don’t forget to join Digital Boom’s Group on Facebook
