During a recent speaking event, I explained to the audience why I’m so bullish on Facebook groups. Here was my explanation:

Ever since Facebook’s IPO, they’ve been much more aggressive in looking for ways to drive revenue. Their primary target has been Facebook business pages. A few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to reach a high number of your Facebook fans when you posted on your page. Gone are those days. Now, if you post a message on your business page, you’re lucky if 20% of your fans even have a chance to see the message. Facebook wants you to boost (or promote) the post to get the engagement you use to be able to get for free. 

That’s a challenge for all of us using Facebook for business. 

One of the ways we’ve worked around this issue is to increase the amount of money we spend our client’s Facebook business pages. 

But the other is Facebook Groups. 

For those of you who are Facebook users, you know that you often see group messages as much as you do personal messages from friends. Facebook assumes that if you’ve joined a group, your commitment level to that page is much higher than liking a business page. Therefore, you have a much better chance of seeing a group message than a business post. 

So, how do we work with this info? 

When applicable, we’ve started to create Facebook groups for our clients. These are typically private groups and the goal is to make the group a community for its members. The more valuable the content, the more group members become engaged. 

The good news? You’ve got a much greater chance of your content getting engagement. 

The bad news? These groups are typically made up of customers, not prospects. This isn’t always the case, but more often than not.

If you make your group public, than there is a better chance of getting prospects to join. But the downside is the value/quality of the group often dips. 

So you’ll need to decide if a private or public group makes sense for your business. If repeat customers are part of your business model or maintaining strong relationships with existing clients is important to you, then this might be a great strategy for you. 

Our goal with Facebook groups is twofold: 

1. To always give the members a high value experience. 

2. Offer members opportunities to continue their business relationship with the client.