Today, I’m going to talk more about Facebook groups. The first one was more about how to utilize groups and the basics around that. Today’s going to be a bit more advanced. If you’ve already built a group, let’s talk about how to impact those members in some way, be it for business, fun, travel, or whatever.
These are all super simple things that you can post to your group to help you do more, grow that group faster, and get more engagement. This is just handful of things I found as I was going through to put together stuff for this, you can always find more examples.
One of the things that I got a question about was “how often should I post in my groups?” This is Pat Flynn’s group. He has a theme for every single day. For example, December 9th, it is called Free Speech Friday. It says “That means that in the comments of this update only, you have my completely permission to promote the heck out of what it is that you’re up to. Your blog, brand, product. Share it, link to it, sell yourself. This community is spam free, but this is the exception.” This is one good example. What he does is every single day, he has a theme for that day. The idea behind the theme is to provide context and continue in conversation. So what you’re going to find is that when you start a group there isn’t going to be a lot of conversation because people are unsure what the rules are. So the answer to “how frequently should I post in my groups?” The answer is that it depends. The bigger the group gets the less you need to post, but you might want to post more. When you start out I recommend that you guys post to your group as you feel necessary, probably every day since you have to facilitate the conversation in that group. Like how Pat facilitates the conversation in his group of 28 thousand people. He makes sure people aren’t spamming but also encouraging people to talk.
Another example is Katie Bulach’s group. She does this every week. This one is “Where are you Wednesdays!” She puts the rules and the context for the post so that you know exactly what’s going on. She even included a nice little picture with it too. This group only has about 15 hundred people. What’s cool about this particular one is that this picture draws your attention. A bunch of people have liked it and people are all sharing pictures of where they are. Also, this is the same idea, she has a theme for a day: Where are you Wednesdays.
Another example is Jill Stanton’s screw the 9 to 5 community. When I look at groups that are really doing well that I can pull my ideas from, this group does a great job of facilitating conversations. This post has a little picture that says “Today, I’m going to _____” on it. The post also says “Ready to GSD?” which means Get Shit Done. In the comments it’s just a bunch of people saying what they’re going to do today. This isn’t exactly like Where are you Wednesdays or Free Speech Fridays, this is just “I’m ready to get stuff done today.” This is a very slick and simple way to get people to do things.
Another example from the same group: MatchMakingMonday, It asks you to say what you’re looking for so you can find your match in this group of other entrepreneurs. She’s got a theme going with the pictures like how this has a white boarder and a logo that says “Screw you,” and it really has the same style. So when people see a post of this style, people know it’s one of the daily posts for this group.
Another example from the same group, this is a schedule example. This is the private, paid membership version of the group. This post shows a picture with their schedule on it, like they have a Mastermind and Hot Seats call scheduled for December 14th at 1pm, and three other similar events on other days. An important thing to know about this is that this group is private and people paid to be in this group, so there’s a bit high of an expectation of what you’re going to get out of it. What’s cool about this is that it lets the group know what the schedule is and what’s happening. She has the day and time so you know exactly when things are going to happen.
Another thing is videos always work. Live videos are good. This example is James Setaro, I challenged a bunch of Master students in Vegas last week to go live so he went live instead of the “Fortune Builders Master Community” group. He got 916 view, 67 reactions, and so many comments. Live is going to do better because it is boosted even more and it’s an awesome piece of what we do, so do that more.
So that was one idea. It was a lot, but that was one; Daily posts, Weekly posts, it’s your group you define how often you want to post. What I recommend is that you post more frequently for new groups. The reason being is that you want to facilitate conversations.
Next thing I wasn’t to show you show you guys. This goes back to the travel group that I was talking about early. This post is looking for recommendations. That word is huge and the post looks cool. This post says “Anyone know of any other places to rent other than vrbo and airbnb?” You can see recommendations here.
Another example of this that I really like is this post. In this, Katie Bulach asks “Has anyone been to Iceland? I’m looking for recommendations” When you do this, it shows a picture of a map zoomed in on the place you that asked about. This shows a picture of a map showing Iceland and says “Looking for Recommendations in Reykjavik, Iceland.” This is a huge was for you guys to get more people to look at what you’re doing simply because it’s more noticeable. This could be great for contractors looking for real estate agents, anything of that nature. This is obviously a travel based one, but the same idea applies to an sort of group.
Next example is a poll. Groups are the only places where you can create polls right now. Polls are really cool because they enable you to get a lot of people to interact with your stuff. In this one, Erin Bemardus made a poll asking “If you could go ANYWHERE for Christmas would you rather spend it: Beachy and Sunny or Snowy and Cozy.” It shows that 21 people voted for each so that means that 42 people interacted with this post. You can add your own optiontoo.
Another example of a poll is this one by Shannon Sharesky. As you can see your answers could be long or short, water you want it to be. Just let folks dive in and see what’s going on. It’s really powerful.
Next, this group post is about webinars. This is an example from the people of the Internet Quickstart community and Mind Protein which is a private community for Mind Protein students. It has a picture that says to register for this week’s webinar. If you’re doing webinars use a bright picture like this to grab attention.
Just like that, you have a way to get people to go do something. If I were to post telling people to sign up for a webinar, I get their email address when they sign up. This how you get people onto your list off of Facebook. Your lists are your business.
The two last examples are of how to talk about and promote your group. Next is your ability to promote other things using your groups. Here’s a post with a bunch of text and a link to his youtube channel. He’s drawing people from Facebook into his YouTube channel by using his groups.
A group by friend Rachel asks if people are on Twitter and then she provides her Twitter. This is same idea as the last one. She’s drawing people from Facebook to her Twitter using her groups.
This is what you want to get out of having a group. Having a good Facebook group is great, but the one problem is that means you’re always subject to Facebook’s rules. If they get rid of groups then you’re SOL. You want to drive these people into your lists and channels so that you’re not 100 percent reliant on Facebook.
That’s some more advanced techniques on how to use your groups.
