Today, I want to talk about something that may seem quite basic and obvious to most people within the digital marketing industry, but based on the experiences I’ve had with people over the last few weeks, it does actually need to be expressed.
What is it, you may ask?
How to promote your business via Facebook groups.
Now this may seem very simple – you make a post in a group about your business, the hundreds or indeed thousands of people in that group see it, and then they become your clients. The best part, you can do this in as many groups as you like! Right? Wrong! This is not the way it works.
I run a number of groups on Facebook, and they vary in activity. Some have maybe several dozen posts per day, whereas the least active may go a couple of days without a post, and it’s not necessarily to do with how many people are in the group. I think the most active group I’ve got probably has about 4,000 or so members in it, so it’s not that many by Facebook group standards.
However, it’s a very active group. It gets a lot of posts, a lot of engagement, and every time somebody makes a post in it, a lot of people see it — thousands of people. Whereas other groups I’ve got have more people in them, they don’t get as much engagement or posts, and that’s largely due to the kind of people who are in the group and the kind of things they use the group for.
Now, the problem arises when people who run businesses or are in business for themselves decide to promote their business on Facebook, and they decide that they’re going to go into a group for a local area, share a post from their page and say “if anybody needs any help, just give me a call on this number” or “we’ve got this offer ending soon”. They think they’re going to get loads of business from it, but I’m an admin in these groups, so I see the reach and engagement of these posts, and I can tell you that it doesn’t work. Why? If a post in a group doesn’t get anybody engaging with it, then the reach of that post is going to be severely limited.
So, if you’re going around sharing essentially the same page from your Facebook page through different groups, you’re not sharing it with thousands and thousands of people – you’re sharing it with nobody, because nobody’s gonna bloody see it!
I recently had an argument with somebody who was a business owner in the local area who insisted that what they posted in a particular group was helpful to the people in the group, didn’t break any of the group rules and that I should reinstate the post because he thought it was absolutely okay. When he was complaining about this in his message to me, he even called it an ad – “could you just put my ad back in the group”. Mate, you’ve just called it an ad, you know you’re not offering help. You have literally just called it an ad, and there’s no ads allowed in the bloody group.
The way it actually works is the more people who engage with posts within a group on a regular basis, the more Facebook’s algorithm puts posts from that group in front of them, whether they are in the group or not at the time, and that’s the key function here.
People do not have to be looking at a group at that point in order to see posts from within the group. All they need is to be a member of the group and have engaged with posts within it to then see group posts on their normal Facebook feeds. The majority of people who see posts from a Facebook group are not actually in the group at the time looking at what posts the group has got to say, so if you’re putting posts in a group and nobody is engaging with it, then your post isn’t being seen by people, and the more times you do that, the less likely your post is actually going to be seen by anybody.
So, what should you do? Well, you should put posts in a group that people actually want to see – that advise people, solve problems, even ask questions that will engage people into reacting. You could post stories of particular clients or customers that you’ve helped, for example.
The more engagement you get on a post, the more people will see it, and then when you post next time, the more people will see that post, because that’s the way Facebook’s algorithm works.
Now, don’t go too far with it and start posting engagement baits – you know, the kind of thing where you put four pictures up and then four emoticons over the pictures and say “hit like for this one, hit care for this one” or “which one do you like best?” Don’t do that because Facebook’s kind of on to that sh*t as well. Post stuff that is genuinely useful. To give you an idea, think about the questions you get asked by your clients or your customer – those could be the start of a Facebook post.
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