You may have heard, but Facebook changed their algorithm…again. Facebook wants you to spend more time seeing your uncle’s Mafia Wars score and less time fending off sponsored posts from Raising Canes.
After the announcement advertisers collectively wrung their hands. What can we do to help our clients reach more people? The reality is, not very much. The days of organic reach are over.
Facebook is pay-to-play these days, but they are dumping a lot of resources into building a feature that may help: Facebook Groups. As part of their update, Facebook has pushed this feature as a way to get back to community engagement and encouraging meaningful conversations.
Facebook Groups are built around common interests or goals like Hiking With Dogs or mastering the Instant Pot. Your local community might even have a buy-and-sell group that distracts you at work. You can join one or a bunch all at once. Right now, more than 1.4 billion monthly users engage with Facebook groups. The best part for page managers? If they don’t turn off notifications, your community members will receive notifications every time someone posts to the page.
Building a group can be intimidating. After all, nothing’s worse than throwing a party and no one shows up. But we’ve got a few tips to get you started.
Setting Up Your Facebook Group
Welcome!
Choosing a name that conveys your goal is one of the most important things you do when you create a Facebook Group. What do you want your new community to talk about? Create a name, write a description and choose the keywords. Keywords help people search and find your group so choose wisely!
Build an Audience
Whether you do an open or closed group you need to invite people to join when you start out. Choose people who regularly interact with your content and encourage them to invite their friends too! You can also get the word out in a lot of other ways including social media posts, email blasts, blogs, or a little blurb on your website.
Establish a Code of Conduct
As people know, we aren’t always our best selves on social media. We’re quick to write a comment on someone’s recipe or picture that we don’t like. The most important thing is that your community members feel safe and secure enough to have a conversation about the things they love. At some point someone will need to be warned, but this way you have something to reference for action.
Be a Good Host
Don’t be a content dictator. Let conversations happen organically on the page. This doesn’t mean abandoning your group though! You need to cultivate the discussions on the page by prompting questions and engaging with comments. Do you need help? Activate your fans! Ask the people who love your brand or DM questions to post those on the group page. People may feel less intimidated to contribute if they think they are having a conversation with other fans and not you.
Facebook is pushing groups hard these days, and they do have the potential to boost organic reach. And with Facebook’s continuing effort to reduce brand “noise,” it may be worth trying.
We want to hear about your strategies for dealing with plummeting organic metrics. Let us know in the comments!
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