Facebook groups are not only a great forum for subscription clients to interact with each other, learn from each other, they also pose questions to you/your team. That is so you can interact with people on a little bit deeper of a level, but they can also be a place for new releases to come out early. If you're someone that sells products, or if you have a new service that's going to come out, you want to have your loyal customers inside of your group, so they are able to get early access to products, or services.
You might even be simply testing something. This would be a great place for marketing your business. I'm sure a lot of you have probably seen it at some point, if you're not even a part of a Facebook group currently, or VIP group, Which isn't really anything special apart from a normal group.
Most of the time, VIP groups are actually locked and set to private. If you do set a group to private, you can never go back to public. Be wary of that! If you're going to create a group you can start public, but if you go private, you can't go back. Between VIP groups, and normal groups, VIP groups are usually better.
We will be talking about that a little bit more later on when I talk about the new feature that's going to be coming out. VIP groups are a tiny bit better just because again, that level of connection is more present. Then when you have the exclusivity factor included, people feel special, which is important, and what you want!
The next question I wanted to kind of go over is, what content should I even post into groups versus a page?
If I create a group, I've got an entire other feed that I have to pay attention to now, apart from my page feed. If that is the case, the first thing that most people would want to do is probably just copy paste the content from one to the other. Best bet is that you should try to avoid that if possible.
Why are pages more outward facing? Meaning the page is more about new customers, and/or new client aquifers. Where groups are for only existing customers that already know about you have most likely shopped with you. That means the content inside of the page and the group should reflect that. You also don't want to shy away from everyone that just follows the page that's not in the group that is a current customer.
Your page needs to stay the same in terms of organic, a good mix of new customer acquisition, new client acquisition posts, and offerings and about your products and services along with kind of the nurture portion of it all for the people that are already a part of your client list or your customer list.
For groups specifically, what content should go in there? Think early releases, or exclusive content. Both of those are awesome for groups. Anything where you and your team can be more vulnerable and open to your customer list, especially private groups. I think that's really cool. It could literally just be your kid's third birthday or first day of school, things that are relatable that just show you're human and getting on that level of.
Openness and having a deeper connection with customers will ultimately reflect more brand awareness and more dollars.
On top of that, you'll just have more pleasant interactions with your customers and hopefully that'll fuel the drive for your business as well. A big thing I wanted to touch on here is, groups have notifications sent out to everyone inside of the group, whereas pages are just subjected to the feed.
Content going to the groups typically needs to be more exciting and interesting. Or helpful to the person because when they see that notification pop-up, they've only got about 10 words of the preview of the thing along with who posted whatever it was.
If those first 10 words aren't something that will draw them in to click on that notification, pull them into the group and then see whatever you're trying to get them to see. They may not click it. That's just something I wanted to note there as well with that. A big question that I get all the time for this podcast are examples for this.
So, what groups of I've seen killing it out there? Most of the boutiques we work with have a group, if not two. They'll have a normal group and a VIP group. You have to do certain things to get into the VIP group. These boutiques have been killing it. Inside of the group they're pushing for their app installs.
If they, or if you do have an app with products present, or maybe you want to push them to like website collections, that would be fine. A lot of people want to get the app downloaded there, the amount of sales that they have come to 80 or 90% through the app.Getting your customers on your social platforms, to the places where they can shop with you, be it, your website or your app or whatever it may be, is very important.
I think that's one big thing to just keep reminding the people in your group. “Hey, if you're not on the app yet, use this code for the promo “If you've never shopped on our website”. You're somehow in this group for the first time, 10th time, or whatever for temper. They also are really big on posting their lives.
When they're going to be live streaming and all of that, they do the promotion in the group. As you can imagine, that's what makes sense because these people are already customers with them. They're in the groups that are going to be like, “Hey everyone, come and join us for this live stream”, which I think is great.
Small groups, like my business, have less than 20 to 25 people in there. We have also been having some, actually a good success there just because it is a more intimate group. This again, we'll lean into the new feature that's coming out here later in 2022 with Facebook groups.
When it's a little bit smaller, more intimate, I think people are less scared to post because it's not subjected to a feed of 7,000 people. It's only like 50 to 100. That will kind of provoke and promote them to post there, learn from each other, interact with each other and do all of that.
Ultimately, your group now becomes a safe place for them to come and talk about any issues they may be having or any insight they want to give to the industry or whatever that pertains to the inside of your business. Another big question I wanted to answer is how do I get more people in the group?
So it's like, “Hey, you convinced me to start one. How do I get more people in there now?”. We're going to cover a couple of the obvious things and then we'll go into one tip that I would give you for that. So obviously you'd want to promote this on your page. Email campaigns are huge.
If you have a customer email list, when you start the group, that'd be, I think a smart thing to send out an email to everybody letting them know about the group possibly a month later. Two months after that, send out a couple more follow ups, trying to close that gap of people that are actually customers and people in the group.
Verbal advocates are possibly the biggest way to do this. If I had somebody on the phone or if I was a customer in my store, I could be there right with them. “Hey, have you heard about our groups? Our VIP group?” “No, what's that?” “Well, this top that you love right here. We actually posted this a week ago in the group and it wasn't even in our store yet, but we had this exclusively set for the people in our VIP group. Do you want to join that? I can send you the invite right now”.
Boom, right there. Very easy. So, what I just did right there was I showed value up front and that's what you're going to have to do in order to get people into these groups.
The only thing really needed for groups that are in the growth stage, like doing some sort of promotional join on. Some groups that are at 10,000 people or 20,000 people want to get to a hundred thousand people. That means you're in the growth stage.
Providing some sort of value, whether it be a joining promotion, or just giving them early access to whether it be content, products, or maybe just exclusive discounts to the group itself. Letting people know that all of that happens in there and then that's the value for them and the reason for them to do so.
Lastly, the thing I'm going to talk about is the new feature I'm skeptical about. I don't know where Facebook really thought of all of this stuff at, but it's called subgroups. They're going to have a feature. This is coming from a source that is a big time in the marketing and social media world. I'm 80% and believe that this will become a real thing.
It is called subgroups. They're smaller groups inside of groups that can basically be monetized or become like info collectors or data hubs for you. When are they coming? We don't know. We also don't know exactly what features are going to happen inside of the subgroups, but something that was rumored again, from a source that I read was that you can create the subgroup inside of your group.
So, say let's just keep using the round number of 10,000. If you have 10,000 people in your group and you know, maybe you have like two or three sub niches in your industry or in your business, you could kind of create a subgroup for each of those three.
Then you could say, posting to the group of 10,000 and say, “Hey all, here's the subgroup. If you want to join it, go ahead and click ``join in there”. You might have 2000-3000 people funnel into each of those subgroups. The cool part about all of it, again, rumored is that when they go to join the subgroup, you can ask them for information like their phone number, their email address, or anything like that.
I don't know what they're going to have there. But, the point being was that the level of engagement goes farther. It gets a little more vulnerable, kind of like I was talking about earlier with the smaller groups and on top of that, it's going to just become a data collection hub for everybody.
You have more customer data and more ways to upsell on them inside of these subgroups, because it's even more niche down to the service or item. For a general customer, it's generally going to mean a deeper relationship with your customer and more revenue at the end of the year.
Why would you want to get into groups? I think with even just the potential of subgroups coming out, if you have a larger customer list like over a thousand or so, you should start right now on the subgroups! If you have questions on the things that you would want to include inside of your group just DM us and ask us some questions.
I have no problem helping out there. You need to start now so that when the subgroups do roll out, you're already gonna have people inside of your group. You can immediately get into the subgroup game and start collecting. Either a fee to join the subgroup, which again, I don't know if that'll be a thing or not, or a bunch of customer data and info so that you can get email campaigns to be better.
Your marketing campaigns can be better. We can take our client's customer emails and I can use all of those inside of Facebook marketing. So if you work with an agency it's great to give them emails that's super helpful as well as useful. Lastly, just one more little thing about groups and why I think you should start is getting people to spend more time with your brand is crucial for growth and groups are a wonderful way to do it.
