4 Smart Ways to Use Facebook Groups for Your Business

Facebook continues to dominate the social media landscape; however, you may have noticed that it is hard to get traction on your Facebook page posts. The companies behind social networks want you to advertise with them, so they place limits on the visibility of your posts. It is more challenging than ever to get your posts seen, let alone get any engagement on them, unless you pay to advertise.

How can you get more out of Facebook while staying within your marketing budget? Consider setting up a Facebook Group to help achieve a specific business goal. Facebook Groups can be public or private spaces where people with shared interests can connect and communicate.

Facebook Groups can provide a platform for greater interaction with members versus followers. Like any online community, Facebook Groups can require more time and effort to maintain, but the engagement and response rates could make it worthwhile.

Here are four ways you could use a Facebook Group to benefit your small business.

Premium customer relations

Taking care of your current customers is one of the best ways to not only maintain your business, but to grow it as well. Happy customers can help attract new customers. Customer service has changed drastically with the Internet and social media. Customers expect real-time attention and solutions to their issues. Use a Facebook Group to invite your current customers into a space where they can gain access to information and resources about your products or services that they may not get otherwise. In a Facebook Group, you can not only troubleshoot issues and provide support to an individual customer, but simultaneously provide information that can be helpful to the entire group. You can also provide early access to specials and share exclusive discount codes to promote sales.

Focus group

Gain customer insights from your Facebook Group members through polls and quizzes. Facebook Groups has a built-in polling tool and a quiz tool to get quick opinions or answers from group members. For most Facebook Groups, you can even set up a community group chat, similar to the Messenger function, allowing members to engage in a real-time conversation to get immediate input. You can survey Facebook Group members using a tool such as SurveyMonkey and posting the link to the group.

Virtual classroom

For many businesses, education is a key part of both serving current customers or clients, as well as attracting new ones. Education might even be built into your business model. Facebook Groups are useful for either supplementing and supporting offline education or they can be the actual platform you use to provide learning opportunities including conducting virtual classes and workshops. You can share PPT, PPTX, DOC, DOCX and PDF files to Facebook Groups in addition to posting photos and videos.

Influencer community

There is no denying that influencer marketing can be an effective way of garnering attention and getting a third-party endorsement that can potentially generate sales or some other kind of conversion or transaction that is valuable to your business. While unsolicited praise in a post or comment is the gold standard of influence in social media, partnering with or hiring relevant influencers is a common social media marketing strategy. Use a Facebook Group as the hub for your influencers, a place where you can provide them with resources such as key messages, creative assets, and custom affiliate links to help them promote your company through their social media channels.

You can manage and post to your Facebook Group either using your individual personal Facebook profile or act as your Facebook Page by adding your Page as an admin of the group. You can feature your Page on your Group as well as feature your Group on your Facebook Page. To manage who joins your Group, you can set it up to require your approval or send invitations to specific Facebook users to join your Group. Depending on the nature of your Facebook Group, you can set up your Group with full moderation where you need to approve each post before it publishes or allow more open discussion.

If you’re looking for a way to better connect with customers, prospects, partners, vendors, influencers, or other Facebook users, Groups may be a viable option.