Every business already knows about the benefits of social media marketing. While developing a social media profile can be done within minutes, the challenge begins in carefully managing the brand’s online presence to tap into a significant portion of the market and turn them into paying customers. In order to so, social media often needs to be an interactive two-way conversation. So how can brands best leverage social media to develop relationships that will convert into customers? Facebook Groups.
Think about it: No other large social network (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram) has this type of active community feature that you can easily create for your brand. It should therefore come as no surprise that utilizing Facebook Groups can help your business attract potential audiences and gain loyalty from existing customers. That said, you need to have a sound strategy in effectively managing your Facebook Groups as engagement does not come easy.
Before we proceed to our Facebook Groups for business advice, centering a group of customers around your brand in order to build an interactive community is not an easy feat. It requires a different mindset of collaboration and inclusion that you need to make sure is an integral part of your Facebook Group as it should be your workplace. Before launching your group, you might want to ensure that your community managers and others managing the group have enrolled in diversity and inclusion training that prioritizes the overall well-being of modern customers.
Let’s now move on to our advice. If you want to build an excellent Facebook Group in marketing your business, the following points may help you out:
1. Actively Encourage Discussions
Get your Facebook Group members talking by actively sharing discussions relevant to your brand niche. This strategy not only enhances more activity in your group but also boosts the probability of your posts appearing in your members’ feeds.
For example, if your group is open to the public, as your members leave comments, their acquaintances on Facebook may see their comment activity on their feed and visit your group out of curiosity. At a minimum, they might see a notification if one of their friends posts to a group that they are a member of. Even if you don’t get viral activity, though, you need to actively encourage participation to create a truly self-sustaining engaging community.
Here are ways to start discussions in your Facebook Group:
Ask your Group members
The information you’ll want to receive in asking the users include the kind of content they want to see on your group regularly. By asking questions, you can better understand what your customers need. In addition, the information you gather will help you learn what your existing consumers like and dislike about your product offerings.
Ask the members’ opinions about your new marketing campaign
If you plan to launch a new marketing campaign on other channels, you may seek suggestions from your Facebook Group members. This strategy will make your consumers feel like they’re part of the company as they get the “inside scoop.”
Post-fill-in-the-blank prompts
Providing fill-in-the-blank posts will keep your members guessing. As they come across the prompts, they’ll have to stop for a while to think about a possible answer. This method will help your members tie your engaging prompts with your brand, boosting customer retention.
For instance, you may use a ‘My favorite thing to do when I am not on Facebook is ___.’ prompt.
Ask gratitude-related questions
In a world full of negativity and chaos, a little sprinkle of daily inspirational content from a person’s favorite brand goes a long way. To brighten your Facebook Group audience’s days, you may create gratitude-related prompts. These questions may include:
- What are you grateful for today?;
- Who do you admire most in your life?;
- What made you smile today?; and
- What is your favorite product from the brand?
Offer live question and answer sessions
Another way to promote active interaction within your Facebook Group is by conducting live Question and Answer (Q&As) sessions through Facebook Live broadcasts to your Group. This format allows you to discover a specific topic as you answer your members’ questions.
Q&A participants may have interest in getting essential details about your company such as general information about your brand, steps in purchasing a product from your website, details on how to avail a specific product discount, and the process of manufacturing a certain product.
Identifying a specific topic allows you to take control of the Facebook Group Live session. Without defining a clear Q&A goal, participants may ask questions that the host might not be able to answer directly.
To get the most out of this strategy, conduct research on when your members are most active to ensure that you get more views on your content. This technique will give your members something to look forward to as you stick to a social media post content calendar.
Moreover, actively engaging in discussions in your Facebook Group brings more entertainment to your viewers, adding to your members’ positive experience with your brand.
By actively responding to and asking questions from your audience, you’ll have proper knowledge about what your customers need. Moreover, you can offer help from your brand products and services, which helps in enhancing existing customer loyalty.
Engagement in your Facebook Group is the main asset in marketing your brand. Your Group will be full of empty numbers without actively engaging with your audience. More so, your Facebook Group marketing efforts will be useless if you can’t build strong relationships with your customers.
2. Utilize Interactive Content Formats
Since you’re just beginning to explore the benefits of using a Facebook Group for your business marketing, you can experiment with new interactive content formats to augment your current marketing efforts. This method will help you determine what kind of content engages your audience the most.
Taking advantage of these unique Facebook features will keep your Facebook Group members excited because they’ll have something to look forward to.
Here are different formats to explore with:
Poll
Facebook Group polls allow you to increase traffic to your brand website as you encourage your members to share the polls with their Facebook friends. Because creating polls is said to boost overall engagement, this technique helps you beat the newsfeed algorithm without paid ads.
Survey
Just like polls, surveys can help you boost member engagement within your Facebook Group.
Utilizing surveys will provide you with better information about why your existing market preferences are changing. With survey forms linked to your post, you learn what your market currently needs, helping you develop your products further and enhance customer services.
Quiz
Another excellent way to increase engagement is by sharing quizzes. To make this technique work, you must provide a specific and enticing incentive to make them want to click on the quiz link.
Posting any of the abovementioned content formats is believed to be the quickest way for businesses to gain information about their audience because engagement happens almost instantly.
3. Utilize Visual Content to Engage
Using visual content in marketing is regarded as a great help to business owners looking to engage and connect with their target audience. Visual content is crucial in communicating your branding and advertising messages to your target market. Since Facebook users see multiple images as they visit the platform, social media marketers need to level up their visual content marketing strategy.
Quotation content effectively persuades your target customers for they generally want meaningful and interactive content. Because social media is about being friendly with other users, your audience usually desires posts from professional accounts that are inspirational, hopeful, entertaining, and, most importantly, humorous. Thus, creating graphic images is another way to enhance active Facebook Group engagement.
Here are tips in creating visual content that will surely gain a high amount of Facebook Group engagement:
Leverage user-generated content
The first tip might sound counter-intuitive, but being overly self-promotional with your content might turn people away from your Group. That’s why you should try to leverage the user-generated content of your fans as much as possible.
Fortunately, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and even Facebook provide you many opportunities to find people talking about your brand and asking them permission to post their content in your group. It is a fantastic win-win to source great visual content for your Group while promoting the presence of your Group to those that are already talking about you.
Do some research to get the quotes that fit best to your audience
The use of visual quotes is an excellent tactic to boost engagement on your Facebook Group. But picking random quotes that are irrelevant to your brand may be risky. Consequently, you must ensure that you’re posting the proper selections that best support your brand image.
Frequently use testimonial images
Businesses should utilize Facebook Groups to leave a good impression on the audience. Once potential consumers get across your Group, they might be skeptical of your brand if the company doesn’t promise a positive user experience. So, to build more trust with your audience, try including customer testimonial images as part of your content.
Dedicate a visual post about your most active members
One great way to retain your Facebook Group members is by showing genuine appreciation.
Case in point, you can post shoutouts to your most active member within the week. Moreover, your members will have something to look forward to during the whole week. If they’re actively involved in your Group, they might receive a dedication post next time. Implementing this strategy may boost your members’ motivation to stay active within your daily discussions.
Dedicate a visual image to welcome your new members
You can expect newcomers to flood into the page as you spend more time managing your Facebook Group. Since new members don’t know enough about the Group, you must regularly guide them as they toggle across your page. That said, you can mention the newcomers in a new post by reiterating what they can expect in your Facebook Group.
While video content still enhances overall brand engagement, this strategy rarely sustains the attention of your members. Since most visual content forms only require less than 30 seconds for your audience to read the text, you can easily retain their attention.
Because reading visual content needs only a little commitment, this technique will help your members become more actively engaged. The interaction you gain from using visual content will provide your business with more brand awareness and online visibility when used strategically.
4. Provide Easily Accessible Customer Support
Facebook Groups are said to be unique for their ability to gather people together, a feat that most other social media platforms can’t replicate.
By building a Facebook Group to improve your social media marketing, you create a highly-engaged virtual community around your products and services. That said, if your Facebook Group marketing campaigns are successful, you can quickly turn your loyal customers into brand advocates that’ll lend a hand in expanding your marketing efforts.
This is where customer support directly aids your marketing.
As consumers actively communicate on social media, businesses have to build social customer care efforts, including on Facebook Groups. If you can quickly resolve consumer concerns over this platform, this positive experience can cultivate a loyal customer fan base. To maintain fast and responsive customer support, you must ensure that your market can easily reach your platforms.
Since you already know that maintaining an interactive Facebook Group requires a lot of effort and commitment, you must double-check your admin’s performance. If you’re beginning to incorporate notable customer support techniques, appoint a Facebook Group administrator who swiftly responds to the group’s members’ questions, concerns, and the like to start.
Many consumers now turn to social media in hopes that they’d receive faster customer service. Thus, a quick response is vital to provide a positive user experience.
If you have an abundance of activity and see increasing ROI, you can add multiple admins to manage your Facebook Group effectively. By outsourcing more than one Facebook Group manager to help out, you can delegate customer service tasks to keep up with your group members’ needs and demands.
5. Partner with Influencers to Promote Your Brand
If you want to collaborate with influencers, why not invite them to your Facebook Group where they can help liven up activity with their content and engagement?
Influencer presence in your group, especially if they are recognized by some of your other Group members, can bring unprecedented social proof and other benefits to your marketing efforts.
Furthermore, as the influencer advertises your brand in their stories, posts, and the like on your Facebook Group, their existing fanbase will naturally become drawn to your brand and offerings.
It’s believed that followers trust the credibility and taste of social media influencers; therefore, if you want to increase active engagement in your Facebook Group, partner with a social media influencer with an established and highly engaged following.
The Key Takeaway on Facebook Groups for Business
As consumers continue to flock to multiple online social media networking platforms, businesses need to follow where their target market goes. While there is a lot of buzz about TikTok and Instagram, creating a Facebook Group for your business enhances overall brand engagement on the largest social network of them all. And if social media is all about developing relationships, investing your marketing budget into a Facebook Group presence will reap benefits far beyond what the publication of any single piece of organic content can.
This is a post contributed from one of my marketing partners.
Hero photo by Margarida CSilva on Unsplash
