Facebook is one of those social media platforms with the power and potential to become a valuable business asset, and a vital part of a comprehensive lead nurturing strategy. There are many ways you can leverage Facebook for inbound marketing and conversions, from simply posting quality content with inspirational storytelling to placing the right ads in front of your target audience.

But beyond these obvious tactics you should already be using, have you considered creating a social media funnel and a growth strategy through Facebook groups? Have you considered the power and potential of a dedicated brand community on FB? If you haven’t, then now is the time to invest in this approach and take your brand to that next level.

Creating a FB group is the first step towards building a brand community and a following of devoted brand advocates who are actually interested in what you’re selling or what you have to say. But that’s just the beginning, so let’s take a look at what you need to do in order to grow your FB group and achieve better marketing, sales, and brand-building results on social media.

Start with a Posting Schedule

First things first, understand that the modern online audience likes consistency. If you want your following to grow organically and continuously, you need to be consistent in your branding, values and identity, tone of voice, the content you create, and your posting schedule. After all, how can someone develop a meaningful relationship with your brand if they don’t know when and where you’re going to post next?

This is something that everyone learns at entry-level marketing jobs when they’re tasked with creating their first social media strategy – ensure consistency. So first, make sure you know how to reach more people with good facebook posts and what kind of posts you’re going to publish.

There are many types of content your can post in your FB group, and the selection is quite diverse so that people don’t get bored:

• Asking meaningful questions
• Talking about trending issues and topics
• Posting infographics
• Adding original images
• Posting inspirational quotes
• Posting announcements and teasers
• Sharing behind-the-scenes content
• Publishing case studies and testimonials
• Bragging with user-generated content (don’t forget to give credit)
• Posting a variety of videos

These are just some of the content ideas you can use to get started.

Once you know what you’re going to do post, it’s time to create a schedule. This requires some research on your end into the online habits of your target demographic. Aim to understand where the majority of your followers are from, when they are online and for how long, what their preferred content types are, and more.

You can use the features in Facebook’s advertising tool to get more insights about different audiences, but you also need to do your own due diligence and create detailed audience personas. The goal here is the same, gather as much information about your audience and existing followers.

Once you have the data, create a posting schedule that will deliver engagement and interactions, and consider some social media management tools for scheduling and posting automation.

Create a Contest to Elevate Engagement

When it comes to some concrete ways to grow your group through engagement and genuine interest, there’s probably nothing better than running an occasional contest. People love competing for prizes, and even if it’s just a random draw and not a competition, they will still jump at the chance to win a prize. This is your opportunity to spark engagement and interactions, and get more people to join your group.

Launching a Facebook group contest is easy with the right tools and templates, and there’s a variety of ways you can make each new contest more unique than the last. There are many ways your business can benefit from Facebook groups, and the key is to keep things interesting every time, but also to continue offering valuable prizes.

A branded pen and a trucker hat with your logo on it is not going to do it, so make sure to sprinkle on some more value for your cherished members. What you give them is up to you and will depend on your brand and the industry you’re in, but keep in mind that valuable prizes attract valuable customers.

To boost entries and get more people to join your group, simply make it a requirement for people to become members of your FB community to be able to enter the contest.

Promote Products that Matter to Your Members

Outside of contests and giveaways, you should use your Facebook group as a new sales touchpoint and leverage the community to boost your sales processes. Now, you can’t be blatantly sales-focused in your posts and spam people with deals and new products all day long, because when you get too much in their space, people start to leave.

No, you need to inspire and incentivize them to check out your products, follow the link to your landing page, and just follow the road signs to conversion. For product managers, social media shopping is all about elevating the value of every product post through storytelling, problem-solving, and of course, high-quality products on social networks.

You see, promoting products in your group is not just a job for your social media managers. You need to get your sales experts involved in order to bring customer-centric copy to life that will inspire them to take that first step. 

With that in mind, be sure to:

• Choose relevant products according to popular demand, pain-points, and consumer and market trends
• Always offer a small discount for your loyal community members
• Don’t be overly promotional
• Focus on solving concrete problems with every product
• Use storytelling to inspire and connect with group members, make them relevant
• Make it a thing – schedule your product promotions so that people know exactly when to expect another great product post

Publish Valuable Content

You might think that people have joined your book for those sweet deals, but rest assured that the majority of your members are not in that stage of the buyer’s journey. Most people are here to learn something, to get some valuable insights, read some interesting stories, connect with like-minded individuals, and support a cause that resonates with them. 

So, you trying to sell them something all the time is not going to work – you have a much higher chance of turning Facebook followers into paying customers by prioritizing quality, informative content. 

If you’re working with an inbound marketing agency on your Facebook strategy, the team should prioritize quality content over product promotion, and they should focus on:

• Long-form and short-form articles
• Detailed infographics with valuable information
• Relevant statistics and trends
• Answering individual questions and solving individual problems (make it into a Question of the Week)
• Running live Q&As and AMAs
• Posting comparison charts between products and brands

All of this will get people interested without making them feel like you are desperate for a sale. Once they engage with the post, they will follow the link to your landing page all on their own.

Engage with Members in Meaningful Conversation

There is a difference between being in a group and being a member of a community. Your goal should not be to run a group, but to build a devoted brand community with members all over the world who will actually interact and engage with your brand and each other.

To do this, you need to spark interest and meaningful conversations through Messenger marketing and especially through engaging posts. People might post something on their own from time to time, but it is your job to post daily, ask the right questions, offer advice and guidance, and engage with people in the comments.

You might think to yourself “easy enough” but hold up, it’s not that simple, not if increasing brand growth on FB is the goal. To engage with people and inspire them to keep the conversation moving forward, you need to ask open-ended questions.

Before replying to a comment or before asking a question in a post, ask yourself “how would I answer this?”. If the answer is a simple yes or no, then that’s not the question you should ask.

Instead, make sure that everything you write sparks a debate and a healthy exchange of opinions. Most of the time, you won’t even have to ask a direct question, but simply make a statement – the goal being to pose a problem and reach a solution.

Inspire People to Spread the Word

Thriving communities can get very popular, very quickly, and if you do word-of-mouth right, pretty soon people will start sending you requests to join from all corners of the world. There are many ways you can promote your group, including through ads and by implementing some great Facebook ad ideas, through regular social media posts, announcements and email newsletters, blog posts on your site, discussions on forums, and more.

But one of the best ways to boost WOM organically is to leverage the existing community. To do this effectively and grow your online community through WOM, it’s important to:

• Use CTAs with every post
• Weave soft calls to action into your content
• Ask people to bring others into your group who could solve concrete problems
• Create a need for more high-quality members when you can’t solve a problem
• Incentivize members to share your group with their friends as a part of a contest or giveaway
• Spread the word of your group through your other marketing channels (include a clear value proposition each time)

Weave Your Brand’s Values into the Group

When people come together to become a part of an online community, they do so by rallying around common causes and values. Needless to say, they’re not going to do this all on their own, nor are people going to join your group just to find good content, an occasional meme, and some cool discounts.

No, people need to feel driven to join. Moreover, they need to feel driven in order to stay. One of the best lead generation strategies you can implement in your FB group is to weave your values into every piece of content you post. This includes visuals, and you can use a free Facebook cover maker to create beautiful cover photos that will capture their attention and inspire them to take action.

Everything you do and say in that group should help portray your brand’s values and resonate with the hearts and minds of your members.

For example, a clothing brand should talk about more than clothes, such as sustainability, ethics in fashion, green practices, fair trade and worker exploitation in the industry, and more. This is what will rally people around a common cause and inspire them to become lifelong brand followers.

Reward Members when You Hit Important Milestones

Your company will reach many important milestones through the years, as it continues to grow, innovate, and evolve. Each of these milestones is an opportunity for you to use Facebook groups for marketing and better engage your community members, strengthen your bond, and attract new members to your group. 

You can do this on all social media platforms, including Facebook where you should invite members to celebrate these important milestones with you. Simply posting about what you have achieved and thanking your valued community members for making it happen is often enough, but you can go even further and reward them for their loyalty, as well. 

The emphasis here is not one the rewards so much as it is on bringing people together. Remember, you have achieved something with their help and support, but if you want to give them something, then make it a small discount or bundle some products together to create a nice thank-you package.

Set Clear Rules and Expectations for Your Community

When people find a group, they might be a bit apprehensive to join because they don’t know what to expect. There are a lot of groups out there that only post promotions but offer no quality or substance, and quality customers crave both. This is why the no 1 cool trick to managing social media nowadays is to set clear expectations while at the same time engaging your community through quality posts.

Thankfully, you can set clear expectations and put their minds at ease by putting all the rules, guidelines, and information about your group on the application page. When they click on the join button, they should see a detailed description of your group and its community guidelines, telling them exactly what to expect, what kind of behavior is allowed, but also talking about your values and why they should join.

The more detailed you get and the more value you offer, the more quality members you’re going to attract to your group.

Don’t Spam People

Last but not least, don’t spam people. Don’t tag people out of the blue in your post without a good reason, don’t tag people in the comments unless addressing them directly, and whatever you do – do not slide into their DMs.

Remember, DMing people is only a valid strategy if you have a good cause and if you have expert sales agents behind you. People are not joining your group only to be spammed in the chat with promotions and discount codes, they’re there to be a part of a community.

When you do send them direct messages, make sure to personalize them, make them relevant to the individual and their buying intent, and create a compelling narrative. Here’s what that looks like.

Bad: “Hey Sheila, thanks for joining! Here’s a coupon code you can use right now to get 15% off your purchase at our online store!”

Good: “Hi Shiela, we just want to thank you in person for being such an active member of our community. You’ve been on this journey with us for a while now and it means a lot to us to have someone like you support what we do here at [Your Brand]. 

Rest assured that you are exactly the kind of community member that keeps us all moving forward, and we want to thank you for sticking with us. When you’re ready to use it, here’s a little discount we prepared just for you. Thanks again for being a part of our little community.”

The difference between the two is obvious, but let’s break it down. The first example is overly sales-y and it strikes at the new community member immediately without offering any real value other than a small discount. As far as personalization, there is none, and the member is not engaged or incentivized to buy anything.

The second example, on the other hand, creates a personalized narrative and keeps the message focused on the individual. More importantly, it engages with the individual only after a certain amount of time has passed, allowing them to become a valuable member of the community with a high conversion potential.

After that, you just seal the deal with a little discount code that they can use only when they feel ready.

Over to You

Anyone can create and run a Facebook group, but few can unlock its true marketing and sales potential. Make sure not to make the mistakes that so many social media managers and business owners make, rather, use these tips to build a thriving online community.

Instead of focusing on yourself, focus on solving real-world problems and addressing peoples’ pain-points. Instead of pushing products, push engaging stories and content that will rally the community. Use your values to forge lasting bonds and inspire people to spread the work of this amazing online community – this is the way to achieve your sales and marketing goals organically on Facebook.