How to Grow Your Business Using Facebook Groups (7 Effective Ways)

With Facebook’s 2.45 billion active users, there’s massive potential in using this popular platform to market your business and build lasting relationships with customers. In fact, Facebook affects more than 50% of people’s purchase decisions, so using Facebook the right way can help your business grow significantly.

But what’s the correct way to use Facebook to grow your business?

Facebook groups are one of the best ways to grow your business using social media marketing. It can help you build a community, improve customer relations, and increase your business engagement.

Facebook groups help you create more meaningful interactions with your fans. It’s not just about promoting your products and services and driving direct sales. You’re building lasting relationships and loyalty to your brand, which will help you create a sustainable business.

And developing meaningful interactions became essential after Facebook changed its algorithm back in January 2018. Mark Zuckerberg then announced that Facebook wanted “people to stay together” and that the newsfeed would start showing “more from friends, family, and groups” and less from “businesses, brands, and media.”

That meant that Facebook business pages were no longer enough to market your business. It was time to get creative and figure out ways businesses could stay connected and engage with their audience. And that’s where Facebook groups took off.

What Are Facebook Groups?

Facebook groups are public, private, or secret communities where fans can communicate, connect, and share thoughts about a common topic. The people in your Facebook group are likely your most loyal customers.

In contrast to Facebook pages, where page owners share content the audience can like and comment on, Facebook groups make it possible even for members to share posts, videos, and images on the group’s feed.

It’s a place for discussion, rallying around common causes, and learning about a company’s products and services.

Best of all, it opens up an opportunity for two-way conversations, which can give you deep insight into your customers’ needs. That said, a smart business owner takes this opportunity to watch, learn, and ask for feedback.

For example, WPBeginner has a popular Facebook group that offers WordPress help for beginners that don’t have any technical experience.

It allows WPBeginner to connect with their fans instantly, and group members can also help each other out and share experiences—reasons why this community keeps growing every day.

With that said, let’s move on to how to grow your business using Facebook groups.

1. Build Lasting Relationships

Did you know that 70% of B2C marketers got their customers through Facebook? That’s a lot of potential sales to tap into for your business.

Best of all, Facebook groups allow you to build lasting relationships with your customers and get them to continue buying from you.

Typically, customers tend to be loyal to companies that treat them well. And a Facebook group offers a chance to engage directly with your fans and build trust and loyalty. It’ll help you to take your relationship with your customers to the next level.

In addition, happy customers are also more likely to share their praises about your company and get other people to purchase your products.

2. Offer Exclusive Content to Group Members

Adblocking has increased from 15%-30% in the last four years (in the US). People are tired of paid ads taking over their Facebook feeds. But by leveraging your Facebook group, you can offer early bird promotions or exclusive deals without being intrusive.

In addition, you can also keep your Facebook group members engaged by creating content they can’t get access to anywhere else. This can boost the value of the group and make it feel much more significant for members to be a part of.

To maximize the value of your group, you can be the “support hero” and offer help to your members immediately. The fast and direct response to issues will make your members feel cared for. And by announcing the answers to the rest of the community, you’ll limit future support tickets as well.

3. Create a Facebook Poll

Creating a poll and asking group members what they’re enjoying and what needs improvement can help grow your business.

With a Facebook poll, you can check the pulse of your community, and at the same time, you get valuable feedback about your brand and products. So, consider your questionnaire to get the most out of the poll.

Again, taking action on the feedback and posting about improvements shows that you care about your audience, which will increase customer retention.

4. Encourage User-generated Content

User-generated content means all content that’s generated by your fans. It can be reviews, video testimonials, photos, blog comments, or social media comments.

You can leverage this type of free marketing even in your Facebook group. For example, you can request and encourage group members to share images using your products. Or video testimonials with their best experience related to your brand. To encourage even more content, you can host a giveaway.

More importantly, ask your fans for permission to use their content across your social media channels and on your website. Before you know it, you’ve grown your sales revenue by leveraging free UGC marketing.

5. Promote Your Business in Other Facebook Group

You can join other Facebook groups to connect with potential customers and business partners and timely promote your business.

However, the trick to successfully promoting your business in someone else’s Facebook group is not immediately going for the sale but offering value and building trust.

I recommend starting by joining a few groups that are directly related to your products or services.

And once you’ve found your Facebook groups, take some time to get to know the lay of the land before you start adding content. If you fail to provide value that relates to the topic or mission of each group, you’ll not have much success.

6. Use Auto Posting

Keeping up with Facebook groups can be quite overwhelming since you’ve to spend time and effort constantly interacting with your fans and posting engaging content.

But you can make this process a lot easier with social media automation tools like SocialPilot, Buffer, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, or MeetEdgar to automate your Facebook group posting. That way, you can create your content beforehand and schedule it to post regularly.

Using themes for the different days of the week is an excellent way to auto-post and boost engagement.

For example, you can schedule posts with informational content on Mondays, questions & answers on Tuesdays, and promotions on Wednesdays. And why not make Fridays a fun day, where you post fun photos or videos and ask members to post theirs. This can help you collect more user-generated content.

7. Generate More Website Traffic

Lastly, you can also use your Facebook group to generate more website traffic.

Facebook group members are more likely to click on your links since they’ve already shown interest in your brand.

So, take the opportunity to share links to enticing blog content in your Facebook group and get them to visit your site. Even better, if you share blog posts with videos, you have a 53x more significant chance of ranking on Google’s first page.

Wrapping Up

I hope you found these 7 tips to grow your business using Facebook groups useful. Remember that Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes content with high engagement, so the more you and your group are interacting, the more organic reach you’ll get.

Also, if you’ve got fans hanging out on other social media networks, like Twitter or Instagram, you can invite them to join your group and grow your business even more.

Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.