In Facebook marketing to reach out to the audiences and to engage with them, the other option other than advertising campaigns is creating a Facebook community. The Facebook community helps the businesses connect with their customers and know their feedbacks, suggestions and understand their needs and requirements. According to the experts, the community is the key to a successful membership site, especially if your members can cancel anytime. In this group, one can share posts, comment and tag friends and even Instagram comments if the account is connected to Facebook, that leads to a great relation between them.
This has lot more advantages if used in the best way. The few of the pros that the Facebook community has is it keeps the members on site, easy to start a discussion and search the previous discussions, better categorization of topics and posts, can focus totally on your brand or product, advanced features like private messaging. This platform totally focuses on your brand specifically, not like normal facebook advertisements in which other brands or products can steal your brand popularity, you can actually put a total spotlight without any distractions.
It is evident that more than 1 billion people around the world use these groups to boost up their engagement with their customers. And the thing to understand is facebook page is far different with facebook group.
So now lets dive into the building procedure of a Facebook community:
- In the facebook, go to the create option and there you will find the group option along with ad, page, event. The same option is available in the drop button too.
- Fill in the fields given in the page like “name of the group”, add people who want to invite by giving their facebook ids or email addresses. You have to at least add one of the people. Here, you can also send the message to your friends regarding your groups.
- The next setting is privacy settings, such as public, closed or secret. The public enables any person to join and be a part of the group. If you need more privacy for your group you can choose closed or secret.
- Once you are complete with the above process, hit “create” button.
- Edit your group name, if you want to change.
- Add the cover photo to your group. The cover photo must be a high-resolution one and that defines your group name particularly.
- Give the group type, the group type you can select from the options given. Few of the options in the group type are Buy and sell, Club, Team, Travel, Support etc.
- Write the description: The description is what that defines your group. You need to take much concentration while writing the description. It must be unique and also share information about what your brand or product is about. Here you can also give the instructions to your group members.
- Give the tags. Tags that help people find the groups according to their interests. The other people can also find your group whenever they search any of the tags from what you have given.
- Then the location, this makes the people find other groups in your area.
- Customize the URL according to your wish to use for your group’s website.
Okay, your group is now created. Then, what next?
Let people know the existence of your group! Go ahead and invite new members to join your group and promote.
- You can add the members later by entering their names or email addresses.
- The main thing you should never forget to do is provide the link(URL) you have created above of your group to get more traffic in all of your present social media platforms.
- Encourage your members to share the contents, like the posts and to give any suggestions. Make them a part of your group for better understanding.
- Post regularly, and respond with every of the member as possible. I know, if your group has thousands of members, it is difficult to engage with each of them, so post something that relates and includes everyone and group chats is a great source to it. You can also use facebook messenger for quick chats regarding any queries or responses to your brands.
- Constantly check your progress, upgrade your strategies if needed. You can check your group progress through the analytics in the group insights. There you get the graph showing how many people are being active, the number of shares, likes and comments your post has.
- As this is a group for your customers in respective with your brand, provide a customer service or support network.
- For the active response from your members or customers, organize few events with any deals and offers with a time-limit.
Not only the above ideas, be creative, think creatively and come up with more ideas to make your created group a network to be in touch with your customers. Here, you can also make this platform to share your experiences and the achievements of your customers. The Facebook groups have also been and will be a great source to provide support from your customers to encourage your brand to grow more.
