Harnessing the Power of Facebook Groups: Marie Page's BrightonSEO talk

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Hi
I’m Marie Page
I’m a co-founder of The Digiterati and the Digiterati Academy.
We provide digital and social media marketing consultancy and training. I’m the resident Facebook aficionado and I’m going to talk to you today about harnessing the power of Facebook Groups. You’ll find the slides over on Slideshare as well as a video of this talk AND the content that inevitably got culled to get me into 20 minutes!
I’m using examples mainly from 3 commercial businesses I am involved with that have highly effective Facebook Groups. Two are B2C and one is B2B.
I truly believe that Facebook Groups can work in the commercial world and not just for community groups or for those with special interests.
But let’s start with looking at why Facebook itself is so keen on Groups and why Pages are simply not working any more

Over a year ago the media started reporting on a phenomenon called Context Collapse. Facebook was apparently terrified because despite spending increasing amounts of time on the platform people were sharing less and less intimate information about themselves.We’ve since seen a slew of new features such as “On This Day” that encourage people to share updates.
But the behavioural change was already firmly set in and since then Facebook has made further changes.

At the heart of this was a change of mission statement aiming to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”
You can see how Facebook Groups neatly help achieve this

Then in January this year a major announcement was made which was heralded as the Facebook Apocalyse or Facebook Zero. It appeared that Pages could be facing an era of zero organic reach.
Facebook decided it was sick of passive consumption of content and will, in future, be focusing on pushing out content that drives meaningful interactions with a focus on content from friends and family rather than businesses

And certainly organic reach is falling.
Average reach is currently around 7% but some Pages have seen it much lower than that, particularly those using click and engagement bait tactics which the new updates to the algorithm have severely punished
https://locowise.com/blog/facebook-january-2018-edition

The Oatmeal has neatly summarised what has happened over the years
We used to spend all our time driving traffic to our websites

Then Facebook appeared and people preferred to engage with our content there. And reach was pretty good

Then the brakes were put on organic reach

And Pages needed to start shelling out quite considerable sums for exposure

So Facebook Pages are now a total nightmare, especially for organisations without a lot of budget to spend boosting posts
Facebook Groups are Different
At least for Now
Groups have more of a community feel
Because Groups are generally not public people feel safer to talk and engage
They know they are in a community of like minded people

And Facebook itself is focussed on Groups.
If you are going to be putting Facebook at the heart of your marketing it is wise to go where they lead
Here’s Matt Navarra tweeting from South by Southwest. Alex Hardiman is Head of News Products

Yes!
It just requires a longer term view and something of a paradigm shift

Groups enable a multi-person conversation that you are far less in control of
Groups won’t work as interruptive marketing
The best Groups are where members feel a sense of ownership and any brand behind the Group spends most of the time playing a facilitation role rather than driving all the content themselves.
In a world where millions are spent on sponsorship I simply don’t understand why Facebook Groups have not enjoyed more take-up by commercial brands. Groups could so easily be viewed as a form of sponsorship around a topic or interest area.

So why are Groups better than Pages?
Well reach is soooo much better
In any given month I am seeing a reach of 70% (this is using the Active Members metric) with top performing posts getting about 30-50% reach
You’ll never get that level of reach in a Page now unless the content is super viral or you are paying to boost it

Engagement is through the roof in comparison to the equivalent Page. The News Feed algorithm loves that active engagement which further pushes reach.
And the engagement tends to be peer-to-peer which these most recent algorithm changes favour rather than driven by Group Admins. It’s a meaningful conversation

This leaves your Admins a lot more time to spend on the beach

Here’s some fantastic User Generated content in Motability’s Facebook Group.
In the first picture, the content is beautifully promoting Motability’s One Big Day – their most important commercial event of the year
And in the other we have Sat Nav the dog. And we all know how cute dogs and cats drive reach and engagement. And here are members of the Group doing that for Motability. Sat Nav is fast becoming the new Motability Group mascot.

More user generated content here in the Team Digiterati Facebook Group.
You may well know Dawn Anderson – she’s a familiar face at Brighton SEO. Here she is curating some content for us from Search Engine Journal

So far so good. What’s not to love about Groups?
Well they appear to still be pretty hard to sell in at Board level. So what other arguments can you put forward?

Groups can provide a customer service option that takes the load off your own internal teams.Dell did this years about with their Dell Community. Independent experts and tech enthusiasts solve Dell technical issues in a forum Dell hosts but does not provide staff support to. All saving Dell month. The customers are happy because they get timely support and the enthusiasts get the badge of Dell Rockstar.
Some people are easily pleased!

As well as the kind of user generated content we’ve already looked at, Groups tend to be a place where users ask loads of really useful and interesting questions.
As a content marketer, this is my happy place.
In this examples Par is asking the Digiterati Group for advice on SEO for YouTube

If you know the Business Model Canvas you’ll be familiar with the concept of customer pain points
Again as a content marketer, hosting a community where these pain points are raised, and with our solutions only a click away makes a lot of marketing sense.

Here are three examples of users expressing their pain points.
People will post questions looking for advice. If appropriate, you (or even other users) can position your own products and services as a possible solution
They also provide the business with content ideas for blog posts, ads and even new products

Simply by actively hosting a Group helps position you, and your team, as experts.

The association that comes from the sponsorship of the Group – a Group dedicated to a topic of relevance to your brand and bang on the interests of your members – will bring you and the brand kudos. You’ll enjoy more brand awareness and more brand consideration when it comes to purchase.

And as time goes on you demonstrate that with your own content and response to questions

Normally the community *can* and will answer even the trickiest of questions. But I find that it’s rare one of our team can’t Google a response even if we don’t know it immediately ourselves.
The Jumping the Shark post was a big opinion piece. The Group was a great place to seed that article for further sharing

A Group provides you the opportunity to showcase your expertise, the leader in your field with your finger firmly on the pulse of what’s new and what’s worth investigating.

I don’t advocate lots of overt selling in Groups but occasionally you earn the right.
Here one of our members is asking for advice on Facebook ads for a Crowdfunder product. I gave a detailed response offering free advice. I will have included some links to guides I’ve written on the topic and to the Facebook ads course in the Digiterati Academy. Of course if I wanted to I could also follow up with a PM and offer some further possibly paid support
And on the right is an occasional post that we allow ourselves to promote some of our own services. In this case it’s the launch of a course on content marketing.

Groups are a place to tell stories and show the people behind the brand
People buy from people not websites
And you don’t need me to tell you as marketers how important story telling is

The result is connection
Between you and your customers
And between the tribe that will grow out of your Group
This will all drive loyalty

Groups are a great place for on-the-ground market research
As well as giving insight into your customers you’ll get ideas and inspiration for new content across all social channels

You can use this to improve your products ad services.
Here’s a post in the Motability Group where people are criticising an aspect of the website.
This is really useful UX feedback that you can also go to work on improving
You’ll also uncover work to be done on product improvement and new product development ideas

Groups are simply brilliant places for your community to advocate for you. We find that if someone kicks off, we rarely need to do anything ourselves because our community rally round and put the record straight.

In these examples on the left you find some unprompted testimonials about Digiterati Academy courses and on the right is a member of the Veganuary Group talking about how supportive and helpful she has found the Group in comparison with other Pages.

And here is Motability with some unprompted testimonials
We were working with Motability for something like two years before we finally persuaded them to take the plunge and form a Group. They are classically highly risk-averse and were concerned about any potential bad publicity.
But conversely (and partly because they are such a superb and caring organisation that delivers what it promises), the Group has been awash with praise.
The Group is likely to be biggest Facebook Group in the world for people with disabilities. And it is all “sponsored” by a key commercial player in that space with a focus in the content on cars, mobility and freedom of movement.

Clicks to website ads work for public groups but not for closed or secret groups
So 3 workarounds:
Use a url shortener to bypass the facebook.com domain restriction in the ads create tool
Use a link ad and send to a web page that has a forwarder in place to the Facebook Group
Create a post on your PAGE with a link to the Group
Boost that post
So three different ways you can promote your Group in a Facebook ad

Tempting as it is to have a vanity metric of tens of thousands of members, large Groups are massively time consuming to manage and a magnet for spammers so:- Set your membership criteria
- The tighter your criteria the less hassle you will have with spammy posts annoying members and causing you admin headaches

Some Groups are offered only as part of a VIP membership package. Jon Loomer’s Power Hitters Club is a good example. You get access to Jon as well as all the training on his website.

Your community will post plenty of content but if it gets quiet you might like a few ideas to fall back on

Theme days work well for when the Group is a little quiet.
I don’t follow them religiously though. I tend to “feel” what is needed rather than sticking to a strict schedule.
The Friday Free For All works well as a thread where members are allowed to push out their own self promotion. So these include links to their own projects and websites. Keeping them in a single thread minimises the timeline spam for everyone else

Here are a couple of Motability theme days. They’ve also gone for the Free-For-All but have created other theme days in line with the pillars of their content strategy.

Moving now to look at Admin Tools
In addition to the Admin Tools hub admins can
Mute and ban members,
message members
Schedule posts
View the activity of other Admins and moderators
And see which posts have been reported to Admins or to Facebook

Recognising the time running a Group can take, Facebook is pulling together the 6 or 7 most important things Admins do in keep membership and conversation healthy to a single hub. This should streamline workflow and release admins to spend their time attending to people rather than doing admin.

You can now link your Page to a Group
And link Groups to Groups

You can post as the Page in a Group
This is great for Groups that need to protect the identity of Admins, for instance when dealing with vulnerable people

Use the Description to explain what the Group is all about and who is eligible to joinA good idea to put a link to the Group rules here – we have these hosted on our website
If you are using the three optional questions for membership refer to them here
You can also recommend other Groups

Use the Tags in order to guide Facebook in terms of who it shows the Group too as a suggested Group

Locations – choose from specific geographic locations or Global – again useful in guiding Facebook on who to suggest the Group to

Plenty to explore in Group Insights
Active Members gives a good idea of reach numbers
Some of the data can also be turned into fun posts or competitions

Facebook has trailed a number of features that are coming soon to Groups
These include:
Personalisation – colours and theme
Prominence of Rules
Multiple Pinned Posts
Topics – buttons that appear at the top of Groups a little like tags work on a blog with contents grouped into subject specific headings

We’ve also seen some trials of Boosted posts. It does indeed look as if advertising is coming to Groups

Finally a trick and a tip for running your Group

You get to ask up to 3 questions when people apply to join the Group. Offer a freebie in return for the customer email address

Facebook is increasingly throwing people into Facebook Jail for their online misdemeanours.
Don’t auto add people to the Group without permission
Don’t PM people you don’t know asking them to join the Group
Don’t post too often especially if content is spammy/salesy
It doesn’t take many complaints to trigger jail time

That’s it from me.
I hope you’ve been inspired in relation to Facebook Groups
Membership to our own Team Digiterati Group is usually exclusively for Digiterati Academy subscribers but if you answer BrightonSEO in the questions we’ll let you join!

You are also welcome to grab some freebies from us
These include our cover photo size guide and photoshop template, a checklist for setting up a Facebook Group and our Ultimate Guide to Facebook Marketing.
Go to www.FreeDigiStuff.com

Most BrightonSEO talks are just 20 minutes long. It’s tough cramming everything into a topic in that time. So inevitably I ended up culling a lot of my slide deck. Watch the video and blog post on the bits that got edited out. Still super useful for anyone about to launch or thinking about launching a Facebook Group.

https://thedigiterati.com/harnessing-power-facebook-groups-brightonseo-uncut/

Inevitably there was a batch of content that didn’t make the cut for this 20 minute talk. If you’d like to see them do head over to our website and search for BrightonSEO where you will find a pre-recorded video of both this talk, a transcript and the bonus content.

Hi
I’m Marie Page
I’m a co-founder of The Digiterati and the Digiterati Academy.
We provide digital and social media marketing consultancy and training. I’m the resident Facebook aficionado and I’m going to talk to you today about harnessing the power of Facebook Groups.
I’m using examples mainly from 3 commercial businesses I am involved with that have highly effective Facebook Groups. Two are B2C and one is B2B.
I truly believe that Facebook Groups can work in the commercial world and not just for community groups or for those with special interests.
But let’s start with looking at why Facebook itself is so keen on Groups and why Pages are simply not working any more

Facebook Groups are also a quick way of getting messages out
Afterall, if Kennedy was shot today it’s likely that the first place we’d here about it would be Facebook.
That problem of reach is not going to deliver such guaranteed exposure with a post on a Page
Here’s an example from Motability busting some fake news about car insurance and read weather warnings

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