You don’t necessarily need to spend money on Facebook ads to increase your reach! A custom Facebook group is a great way to expand your reach, engage with your audience on a more personal level through direct discussions, and get valuable feedback and insights from your audience in order to improve your content, brand, product, or service.
Build The Foundation
It’s important to solidify the overall goal of your custom Facebook group and explain your goal as much as possible in the description section of your group. This will identify your target audience and help dictate the interactions you want to foster within the community you create.
Your search bar on Facebook works like any other search engine, so make sure to optimize your Facebook group name with keywords that tell potential members what value your custom Facebook group will provide followers. CEO of Convosight, Tamanna Dhamija recommends that you reference your target audience and their pain point or passion area, like these examples.
- The Busy Mom’s Easy Crafting Community
- Cheap Travel Recommendations for College Students
- Training Tips and Care Advice for Great Dane Owners
Share Quality Content
You don’t need to overshare or spam your future brand advocates, but make sure you consistently create educating and inspiring content they will keep coming back for! Share a mix of original material and relevant content from other sources to provide value to your followers. This is also a great opportunity for you and other members to ask and answer questions they have about your service, product, industry, or expertise.
Encourage Engagement
People join communities to feel a sense of belonging and companionship. You can foster a community of like-minded customers by encouraging them to interact with each other and the content in the group. And according to Facebook’s algorithm, high engagement in your Facebook group increases the chances of your group being discovered organically. Some groups have incentives like a discount code for a member that contributes the most each month. This adds a layer of external motivation for your members to participate in discussions and build supportive relationships. Here are some other creative ways to boost engagement in your custom Facebook group.
- Live sessions
- Partnerships with niche influencers and other relevant groups
- Coordinated games and activities
- Contests, challenges, and competitions
- Webinars to discuss relevant issues
- Member recognition and birthday shoutouts
Observe Insights
Keep track of metrics to observe what kinds of posts resonated best with your audience or were most effective in creating conversations, encouraging interactions, and inspiring members to promote the content even outside of the community. Check on your demographics from time to time to make sure you are still reaching your ideal audience. Stay up to date with discussions in your custom Facebook group! The questions and pain points your followers mention will illuminate your opportunity to create content to advise, educate, or provide solutions for your audience regarding those topics. This is a great way to create advocates for your brand.
Expand your Reach
Once you gather a foundation of followers, you have a better chance of accessing new audiences and growing your community. Share your group on your personal Facebook page, send invite links directly to your contacts, ask relevant groups to promote your group, and include links in your email signatures, newsletters, emails, and bios. Always put your logo and company or custom Facebook group name on all sharable content like videos and images, so members can share your content and easily win you new followers. One popular way to expand your reach is to host a competition and encourage existing members to invite more people to your group, as one of the rules of the competition. Make it fun! Check out our other blog posts to see how the evolution of the Metaverse could impact your custom Facebook group or business. Or leave your social media management to the pros so you can focus on other aspects of your business!