My Year-long Facebook Experiment: Facebook Groups

What’s Going on With This Facebook Thing?

I took a little break from the Facebook experiment to test out another social media marketing program – Pinterest Promoted Pins.

My results continue to be amazing! But that’s another topic for another post.

So to get caught back up to where I was with the Facebook thing … check out my Facebook Experiment post about what’s working for my fan page and what’s not.

I’m still posting on my fan page and testing out new content and posting times. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my year-long experiment with Facebook is that consistency is just as important as frequency.

After watching and monitoring, checking and shifting things, I get it now. We can’t control that crazy Facebook algorithm and determine what fan sees what post.

The only thing we can do { without paying any money! } is post content that our fans will Like, share or even comment. And the more often they engage with our posts, the more often our content will show up in their Facebook home feed.

It’s like this: have you ever noticed that even though you’re friends with over 100 people { or for some of you, this may be hundreds of people! }, you always seem to see the updates from the same people? When I log into Facebook, I almost always see a post from one of these five people – my friend who moved to Atlanta, my old college room mate, my accountability partner, one of the first friends I met when I moved here to Orlando and the mom of one of my son’s friends.

At one time or another, I engaged with these folks in Facebook. We liked a post or carried on a conversation in the comment section. No matter how it happened, Facebook now thinks that we’re all BFF’s and that I want to see every update status that these people post up on their profile.

You know what I’m talking about, right? Think about your Facebook feed. Doesn’t it seem like you see the same people and their updates all the time but you keep missing out on posts like your niece getting her driver’s license?

The same thing is happening with our fan pages. The more your fans engage with your content, the more often they’ll see your posts in their home feed.

So what did I learn over the first half of the year and my Facebook experiment? As small business owners, we need to stop thinking of those people who hit the Like button as fans.

We need think about them as friends and interact with them more like we would the folks who we sent us friend requests.

Friends, Fans or Both

The best place I’ve discovered to make friends and turn them into Facebook fans is participating in Facebook Groups.

Facebook Groups is really what all the experts told us we would experience when we set up our fan pages. Groups is the place where you’ll meet other like-minded people, having conversations about topics you’ve been running Google searches for online.

This the place where the networking magic happens. We ask questions and get responses back from people who’ve been there, done that and bought the plugin.

We answer questions and help others out with the information that we know. And because we’re only able to interact in groups as our personal profiles, we start to build relationships with people, not just their fan pages.

Facebook Groups work because of one simple principle – people are already on Facebook for personal stuff so it’s easy for them to click over to the group to see what’s going on. They don’t have to log into a separate forum and click into a category to see what the latest question was asked.

They’re already in the social site so participating in groups becomes one more thing they do when they pull up their Facebook app. And because Facebook Group participation is growing so fast, Facebook created an app to make it easier for you to log into the groups you joined and just see those conversations.

My personal experience with Facebook Groups

I can personally speak from experience of Facebook Groups from both the admin of a group and a participant.

The Admin of a Facebook Group

I started my own Facebook Group called Peace, Love and Pinterest because I knew there were other Pinterest fans out there in Facebook who wanted to connect.

It’s a bit more work than to just participate in a group but if you take the time to create a strategy with your group, it’ll help you connect with new people and potential fans.

As for your strategy, I’m not talking about creating a 10 page business plan about how to run your group. I mean to spend some time thinking about the content you’ll share with your group.

When I worked out the strategy for my Pinterest group, I set the expectations about how the members could participate in the group.

I knew that I wanted to give everyone a chance to share their Pinterest pins. So I let everyone know when and how the group members could share their content in the group’s About description as well as added the same copy to the group information file that members could download.

Once a week on Mondays, I start a new post letting everyone know that this is THE place to promote your latest products, services or blog post. They can post whatever they want as long as it’s a Pinterest pin.

Personally, this is one of my favorite features of the group. I love giving everyone a place to promote their stuff! It’s a great way to for people to meet and to see what everyone else does in the group.

The other part of my strategy included planning out what content I wanted to share. I usually ask questions to get conversations going and mix those in with the Pinterest resources that I find to help you grow your Pinterest account, get more followers and how to create images that get more repins.

I can honestly say that I get more Likes and comments with the posts in my group than I do on my fan page. This is a community of people who are interested in this specific topic AND the members see all of the posts, not just what Facebook decides they want to show you in your home feed.

Being a member in a Facebook Group

I’ve also joined quite a few Facebook Groups. Some of them were connected to a program that I purchased online and others were ones that I found through searching on Facebook.

I’m not active in all them, even the one where I paid money for the program. There’s just not enough time in my week to go into every group, read every post, comment or ask questions.

Unless it’s your full time job to be a social media marketing coordinator for a company, it’s hard to justify spending all day, every day chatting with other members in Facebook Groups.

So I had to figure out which groups made the most sense for me to add to my weekly to-do list.

Every time I join another Facebook Group, I spend time in that group to get a feel if this Facebook Group is a good fit for me. I read posts and ask myself, “Is this information important for me to know or learn?”

I watch the interaction with the group. Were people asking questions and helping each other? Or were they just dropping a promotional link and running to the next social hit?

And seriously, there’s nothing wrong with the promotional types of groups. I think it’s great that there are Facebook Groups out there that let us share our services and products with others. You just have to decide if that type of group is the place for you.

I have found that the Facebook Groups  where I’m most active are the ones that have provided some kind of value for me. A couple are great blogger groups where I can connect with other bloggers and I can share my latest blog post with the group.

Another one of my favorite groups is a sales community.  The group leader Kendrick Shope shares sales tips and sets up free mini-sales sessions for us learn more techniques.

And then I have a couple more groups that feel more like an online mastermind community. In these groups, we share our problems or questions and others jump in with suggestions, links and ideas to help you work through your issues.

I’ve made some great connections in these groups. There’s something that happens when you share from a vulnerable moment in your life in a safe place. It brings people closer together.

And the more people I connect with, the more people click the Like button and become fans. Then these fans click over to my site and join my email list, giving me the chance to share my products and services with them.

Facebook Groups are what building relationships in social media is all about. This is how we can really see the “social” in social media.

 

PS If you’re looking for time management tips to help you handle your social media marketing, download your FREE copy of my 10 Social Media Time Management Strategies ebook. You’ll learn some cool strategies to help you create a social media routine that works with your crazy busy world.