Why I’m going ALL IN with Facebook Groups (and you should too!)

If you’re anything like me, maybe you’ve been a bit on the fence about having a Facebook group. Or maybe you’ve created a Facebook group, and it’s a bit of a group graveyard.

I’m going to share with you the reasons why I’ve decided to go all in with Facebook groups and why you should too.

In the past, many mentors and gurus have said to shut down your free groups and to focus only on your paid groups because they can take up a lot of time and energy. Also, they wanted to avoid people spamming in the group THEY invested in, which is super frustrating because it takes a lot of work to effectively manage a group!

It’s no wonder why group-apocalypse happened in 2017…

Do you remember that?

As a business owner, I already have to spend time and money putting out content and ads for an unlimited audience to see. When a lot of groups shut down and I was actually very relieved. I didn’t need to worry about building my own group anymore.

In 2018, Facebook said newsfeed is going to show a lot more precedence to friends, family, and groups. All of a sudden, people were getting back on the group train. However, it all comes down to the issue that they can take a lot of work; building an audience on a third party platform, providing all the content, and nurturing for groups. There were groups that had spent about $60,000 that Facebook just closed down because of all sorts of infringements, it was a case of mistaken identity.

Recently at Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg was on stage talking about how important groups are going to be in the Facebook ecosystem.

Now, I don’t know about you, but as soon as he said that, I started to see more posts from Facebook in my newsfeed asking me to suggest groups to friends. It’ll pop up and say here are your friends, what groups would you like to suggest to them? You can actually see from desktop and mobile the easy access icons to join groups show up near the feeds.

If you are building an audience, if you want to establish your own brand and identity, you need to have a Facebook group.

I have finally jumped off the fence, and I’m building up my Facebook group, promoting more engaging content into my group to nurture that community. It’s a great way where people can come in, ask their questions, and the community can support each other. As well as being able to share valuable tips, knowledge, and expertise with this audience.

However,  I must mention that there’s a great risk about building an audience on a third party platform, this is where I started using a tool called Group Funnels. This allows me to set up some qualifying questions when people request to join the Facebook group.

Group Funnels can integrate with Facebook so that the answers people give can get zapped over to a spreadsheet (which can be very time-consuming when people are joining groups).

Normally, once you accept them, you lose that information. Group Funnels is a way to easily capture their information and send it over to your CRM to build your email list at the same time. Within the questions, I’m also inviting them to access my free training for Facebook ads for list building. This will automatically go in their email, easy peasy. This is a great tool that I really recommend.

You do not wanna just rely on a third party. While it’s great to build your audience on Facebook and build up that group, you definitely want to get their very precious email and their contact information over to your CRM because, in case anything happens, you can still contact your audience.

Facebook is encouraging business owners to use groups more and more.

It may even get to the point where that is all people are going to see in their newsfeed, the groups they are in, and incorporating tools like Group Funnels to very easily streamline that process of getting approvals and zapping the information over to a spreadsheet so you can actually ask some valuable questions.

With Group Funnels, you can send details over to your email list and know what content to create for your audience based off of their answers. You can see who’s joining your group and why to create more valuable information that’s going to suit that community. So to group or not to the group is no longer the question. If you want to build an audience on Facebook if you want to have an influence and an impact, then having a Facebook group is certainly the way to go to build up that engaged community.

Let Facebook do some heavy lifting for you and promote your group to people in the newsfeed.

I mean, they’re not doing that with your page, are they?  

It’s only a matter of time before Facebook will allow us to do ads, particularly for our group. They did tease with it a few months ago now, and some pages did get that ability, very hit and miss, and it is rolling out a bit more.

But in the meantime, what you can do is just create a landing page where you can create a Facebook ad, and people can click on the ad and then go over to the landing page. Then when they click the link, it’ll also go to the group.

Also as a side note, ManyChat’s fantastic to use with ads. You need to be using bots. You can create an ad that will go to a ManyChat page, which acts as a landing page that, again, you can capture your audience in there through ManyChat, as well as get them into your group.

Also as just an ad that could be directing them to messenger, and they can get the link for the group via messenger.

So there are a few ways that you can start building up your group with paid traffic, even if you don’t have the ability to promote your group directly on Facebook.

But just wait.

It is coming.

Well, actually don’t wait.

Just start building your group now because when the group ad feature does roll out to everybody, it’s going to be competitive, mark my words.