Revisiting Facebook Groups

When it comes to building community on Facebook, the Groups feature is more geared to ongoing dialogue betweenmembers than Pages. While people who follow your Page can communicate with you and others publicly or with youonly privately through your Page inbox, Groups are set up to facilitate conversations and more direct contactwith group members.

If you're looking to have more direct communication with customers or clients on Facebook, setting up a Group maybe beneficial to your business. Anyone can set up a Facebook Group, however, as a business, you have a greaterimpact if you have a Page and then link a Group to your Page. Use your Page for public-facing messaging,announcements, and advertising - in an engaging way, of course. Then spend more time interacting in your Group.

How Can You Leverage a Facebook Group?

Before you set up a Group on Facebook, decide how you'd like to use it. There are so many ways to manage a Groupand steer the conversation. Some ways a Group can be helpful to your business include using it as:

1. A customer service channel. While your Page and Facebook inbox are your first lines ofcontact to your customers and prospects, you can invite them to engage in your Group to benefit fromadditional peer-to-peer support. If you build a strong and positive community of customers, they are oftenwilling to step up and help others by sharing tips and experiences. A camping gear company can provideproduct demos and support while customers can provide photos of the gear in the wild and their personaltips.
2. A virtual focus group. With an engaged online community and a strategic plan for surveyingthem, your Facebook Group could be a vibrant platform for gaining customer insights. Use surveys, quizzes,and polls and build in incentives such as discounts or gift cards to find out more about your customers orprospects. A florist can introduce new arrangement ideas and get feedback.
3. An organized community. While groups make sense for actual organizations or real-lifegroups to communicate and organize, companies don't always think about how their customers are a communityas well. A winery can hold events and have a built-in pool of potential attendees in their FacebookGroup.
4. An education channel. Whether you own a yoga studio or are an accountant, are promotingyour catering company or a pet store, you have knowledge that you can showcase in a Facebook Group.

Facebook Pages have built-in visibility limitations to try to convince you to advertise or pay to boost yourposts. Facebook Groups, on the other hand, are built around the idea of conversation so your content is morelikely to be visible to members of your Facebook Group without ads.

Videos and live video streams are popular on Facebook and while you can publish and host them on your FacebookPage and potentially reach a wider audience, you are more likely to garner attention and engagement from yourdedicated Group. Using visuals is important when posting to your Facebook Page to try to capture attention. InGroups, text-only posts can do well if the content is compelling and encourages responses.

What You Need to Manage a Facebook Group

Treat your Facebook Group like any of your social media channels where you plan out the posts and your publishingfrequency and craft content that encourages conversation. Groups may require more frequent posting to keep themomentum going.

A social media best practice is to set up a detailed Community Guidelines document for all of your social mediachannels. Typically, you need to post these guidelines to your website and link to them from your variouschannels because most do not accommodate that much text. The two exceptions are Facebook Pages where the Aboutsection has more room to publish paragraphs of text and Facebook Groups where you can actually upload a PDF fileto the Group and pin an announcement post so all members can see it and access it.

If you're ready to nurture an online community of your customers and have a Facebook Page, make sure you areusing Facebook as your Page and not your personal profile, then click Groups on the left side of your feed andfollow the prompts to set it up. By doing so, you are associating your new Group with your existing Page. Youcan then determine if your Group will be public, private, or secret. Public will be more challenging to manage.

Private Groups require potential members to request access and you can vet them with a short questionnaire beforeadmitting them. Secret Groups can help you have better control over who becomes a member and can be used tocreate a sense of exclusivity such as a group for your top customers to get extra customer support.

No matter how you decide to use a Facebook Group, understand that running a Facebook Group takes more time andattention to make sure it remains useful to both your company and your Group members. This means that you shouldhave at least one Group moderator who dedicates time to start conversations, respond to questions and comments,and ensures that the Group is a safe space for all members.

The upside of Facebook Groups? You will have more opportunities and features that can help you strengthen therelationship you have with your customers and any business can benefit from that!