The main advantage of a Facebook group is not that it allows you to grow your audience and reach lots of people. Groups, unlike pages, are typically quieter and less public. If you have your privacy settings private, then other visitors won’t even be able to see the content of a group until they join!
The benefit of Facebook groups is more about growing engagement with the followers you already have. And to that end, you need to think about what goes in the group more than how you promote it.
BUT with that said, you will still likely want to grow your Facebook group to at least some extent so that you can get the best ROI for the time and effort you put into it. Here are some easy ways to grow your member count.
Link to Your Facebook Page
If you have a Facebook page, then linking to that will mean that your group appears at the top and this will attract more of your Facebook page members. This is a great way to treat your Facebook promotion as a kind of sales funnel – taking your viewers from a less invested form of communication to one that involves them taking part more actively.
At the same time, this can be a really good way to ‘wake up’ your Facebook page, if it has become somewhat stale.
Talk About It Elsewhere
Another great way to get more people into your Facebook group is to talk about it elsewhere. If you have a blog or a YouTube channel, then make sure to actually mention your page and make it sound enticing. Drop it into the conversation as often as possible, and choose your language carefully. Calling your members things like ‘VIPs’ can go a long way to making the whole concept seem more exclusive and exciting.
You can also use other types of incentives – for instance by offering something free from within the group only to members.
Run a Competition
Invite your members to invite other members to the group. The member who brings in the newest members wins something. This could be an ebook or something similar, or even mean making them moderators!
The Difference Between a Facebook Page and Group
So, you want to start promoting your business on Facebook?
The question now is whether you should create a Facebook page, a Facebook group… or both!
And the answer is of course both. But in order to make the most of this strategy, you also need to understand what the top benefits of each are and how they are different. Here are some key differences between Facebook pages and Facebook groups.
The Basics
The idea of a Facebook page is to provide your business with a kind of ‘shop window’. This is a largely static page that includes a call to action, a description, a photo, etc. While your followers can post on your page, you are likely to do the majority of the posting and they will then comment on those posts or react.
The best feature of Facebook is that people can share the things you post and this will then promote those posts to their own social networks. If you share a great post through a Facebook page, then this can end up spreading virally across all the different real-world social networks that are out there!
A Facebook group is different. A group does not allow people to share content with their networks and instead only lets them view or create posts. Most often, this is going to involve their reading what you have written or starting conversations with group members.
Facebook group posts are more often discussions with the community. These are assumed to be more personal and less advertorial, and as such, they are also more likely to appear on the newsfeed with more prominence.
The Power of Each
While a Facebook page allows you to create content that gets naturally shared then and can include a call-to-action, a Facebook group will allow you to reach more people with each post. It will also facilitate more conversation.
The question then is not which one you should use, but how you can better use the two together to maximum effect. A Facebook page can be a great way to attract the attention of potential fans and followers, and you can then use this in order to get people to sign up for your Facebook group, which will allow you to discuss with them more directly and increase engagement to thereby drive more sales and build more loyalty and trust.