Quick Start Guide to Effective Facebook Group Marketing
This is a guest post – Katie Wyatt is a business coach, trainer & podcaster who works with passionate wellness entrepreneurs who want to live their wellness-focused passion and by doing so make money and help people be well.
She balances her own personal passion for wellness with an unhealthy addiction to coffee and chocolate (we can’t all be perfect, can we?). She loves trendy superfoods, productive self-care and talking ‘shop’ – which usually includes green smoothie recipes, business model porn and podcasts.
She is the founder of PodWell – A Course for New Podcasters and the facilitator of a fun and growing Facebook community for women entrepreneurs in wellness – Wellness Entrepreneurs – Start, Grow and Thrive. (Ladies only, sorry guys!)
Learn from Katie and other leading entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space on The Wellness Entrepreneur podcast. Sign up for her newsletter and get an email list strategy for heart-led entrepreneurs.
Welcome Katie…
So you may have noticed lately that Facebook Groups have become extremely popular, particularly amongst entrepreneurs.
Four months ago I was in maybe four Facebook groups and they were all related to private interests (ie. Connecting your child’s school parents to discuss the fete) or online courses I had purchased – Facebook Groups are the community forum of choice now for connecting participants in an online program.
Fast forward four months and I now facilitate my own Facebook Group of more than 700 engaged tribe members and I’m actively engaged in another twenty or so.
Does it take up a lot of time? Yes.
Do the constant notifications when a new comment or reply is made or you’ve been tagged drive me crazy? Sometimes.
So how can I afford the time and energy to do it? The truth is – I can’t afford not to do it. You see, connecting and marketing my business in Facebook Groups has become a major source of personal satisfaction, connection, brand building and lead generation for my business. And that makes me one happy entrepreneur. Who actually has a business imperative to be present on Facebook!
There are 5 key things you need to know and do in order to start marketing effectively in Facebook Groups.
1. Understand Facebook groups and privacy settings
A Facebook Group is essentially a closed circle of Facebook members. You can join groups under your personal Facebook account, not a business page.
Facebook Groups can be one of three types of privacy settings: Open, Closed or Secret.
Open groups can be viewed and joined by anybody. If you’re in an open group and you post in there, your entire Facebook network can see it.
More often a business-related group will be Closed. This means you can search for the group and find it, you can view who is in it and read the description, but you need permission from the owner or administrator to join. This is the perfect setting for the type of groups many of you may want to join to market yourselves.
A Secret group is only accessible via a direct link or if the owner adds you – it cannot be accidentally found on Facebook. These groups are good for small closed circles such as masterminds.
2. Join groups, then curate your favourites
Facebook loves Groups because if you’re in Groups you’re on Facebook! So they tend to advertise groups to you that your friends are already in, via the right hand ad bar on your desktop. This is a good way to get started with finding some groups. However if your friends are not business owners, then they may not be hanging out in groups where your target market are. And this is the key – hanging with the people you want to work with.
One way to find your target market is to identify somebody who you feel would be hanging out with them already, then enter into the Facebook search bar Groups joined by ….. enter their name
You will quickly find yourself discovering a whole new world of groups so it’s good to regularly curate the groups you like most, where you’re getting the best connections and marketing power, and keep those added to your Favourites list, and cull others. Sometimes you need to join them for a little while and then decide.
3. Read the guidelines and pinned posts
Most well-facilitated groups will have clear Guidelines (found to the right on a desktop or in the Group Info on mobile) which describe exactly who they’re for and what they’re about. You can read that before you even request to join.
The groups that I frequent are usually groups with regular theme days. Theme days are great for a number of reasons, including:
- They keep conversation going and engagement high
- They limit “promotional posts” to a certain day (if they allow them at all – most entrepreneur networking groups do)
- They make it easy for scanning and reading, because you are expected to start a post using the theme day hashtag
The pinned post and cover photo can quickly tell you about the theme days – their hashtag and what it’s about. In business groups you often find a tip day or a promotional day. It varies and part of the fun of participating in groups and curating your own is creating theme days that engage your tribe.
There are groups that are specifically marketplaces, where you can promote 24/7. These are not the groups where I spend my time, and they are not my area of expertise. The model I am discussing is based on building relationships and then generating leads from a pool of ideal clients.
4. Introduce yourself
When you are accepted into a new group, take some time to check out recent posts and then do an introductory post – the guidelines usually invite you to do this and also tell you if you’re allowed to include links in that post.
In my group I ask new members to use the hashtag #Intro and to tell us about them, their business and include a web or Facebook page link. Use this opportunity to explain clearly what you do and who for, this is an “elevator pitch” moment – sell yourself and your personality!
When I introduce myself in a new group I usually include a selfie. As daggy or Gen X as you might think a selfie is, it is an excellent way to allow people to connect with you as a real person.
5. Be generous, provide value and connect
This is the most important piece of your Facebook marketing strategy and will resonate as a core part of any content strategy – blogging, videos, podcasting, social media. Being generous and helpful, providing value without obligation and connecting with people will always create success in marketing.
In Facebook groups you can build a reputation for this (or the opposite!) very quickly.
For example, people who show up in groups only on the promotional theme days, promote their product or service and then leave would probably tell you that Facebook Group marketing doesn’t work. Think of it as a party – would you show up, walk around the party shoving your business card in people’s faces and then leave? Then don’t do it in a Facebook group (or anywhere!).
Those who take the time to contribute on numerous days during the week and look for opportunities to answer other people’s questions or engage in conversations find themselves ‘known’ very quickly (even in a group of many thousand members you can become known very quickly for what you do).
You can definitely be strategic about your helpfulness. If your specialty is social media marketing, look for where someone has asked a question or expressed a challenge about their social media marketing so that you can make a suggestion. If the theme day is “Tip Tuesday”, make sure your tip is about social media marketing.
Do this genuinely and you will soon find yourself tagged in conversations on your topic. When I was in the launch phase for my podcasting course, I made sure I was talking podcasting whenever I could, starting conversations and being helpful consistently around podcasting. Soon whenever a thread got onto the topic of podcasting in a group I was in, I would be tagged.
6. Make an offer
If you have done steps one to five, you’ll be connecting on a daily basis with your target market, building relationships, being helpful and getting really clear on their challenges and immediate needs.
Now is the time to craft an offer just for them. This works particularly well for service-based businesses, because you can offer an opportunity to work with you at an affordable price; a taster. Then you have a paid opportunity to demonstrate your value and upsell into a longer package or product.
Facebook Groups are ripe with opportunity to form meaningful connections and find new clients. Not only have I gained clients but my business has developed a momentum that was missing before. I’ve found my tribe (especially through starting my own Facebook group) and my close business confidants.
They aren’t for everyone. If the thought of hanging out on Facebook talking to people on the other end of a device makes you cringe, this may not be for you. The majority of groups I am in are definitely majority female, but this says more about my target market and the groups I am in than about the presence of men on Facebook.
The most critical piece to the puzzle is not to forget all of the rules of engagement that you know about online business – giving generously foremost, focus on connecting and developing genuine and deep relationships and then, you can watch the money flow.
About Katie
Katie is a business coach, trainer & podcaster who works with passionate wellness entrepreneurs who want to live their wellness-focused passion and by doing so make money and help people be well.
She balances her own personal passion for wellness with an unhealthy addiction to coffee and chocolate (we can’t all be perfect, can we?). She loves trendy superfoods, productive self-care and talking ‘shop’ – which usually includes green smoothie recipes, business model porn and podcasts.
She is the founder of PodWell – A Course for New Podcasters and the facilitator of a fun and growing Facebook community for women entrepreneurs in wellness – Wellness Entrepreneurs – Start, Grow and Thrive. (Ladies only, sorry guys!)
Learn from Katie and other leading entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space on The Wellness Entrepreneur podcast. Sign up for her newsletter and get an email list strategy for heart-led entrepreneurs
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