Tips for Starting your own Facebook Group

Facebook groups have become the single biggest story in internet marketing and PR over the last few months. When Facebook first started out as a student only social network, Facebook groups were small gathering places for students to look outside their circle of friends and find people with similar interests and discuss anything from their favorite bands to their favorite sports teams.

Students soon realized the power of these groups and began using them to organize and even protest. Now that Facebook has been opened up to the public the number and variety of Facebook groups has exploded.

Facebook groups are now being used for news gathering and sharing in times of crisis like the Virginia Tech shooting and the more recent 35W Bridge Collapse in Minneapolis. The CIA is using its Facebook group as a recruiting tool, the Humane Society is using Facebook to raise awareness and fund raise, and Wallmart started its “Roommate Style Match” Facebook group to try and increase it’s back to school sales to college students.

Using Facebook Groups as a Promotion and Public Relations Tool is a great opportunity for businesses to start conversations, and build relationships with their customers.

Here are a few tips for starting your own Facebook Group

1. Define Your Goals - Before you create your group decide on what your goals are. This might include building brand awareness, improving customer relations, and finding new customers. Make sure to keep your goals flexible because over time your group will evolve based on the interests of its members. Remember social networking is not about control, it’s about starting conversations and building relationships.

2. Name Your Group - What you name your Facebook group will immediately effect people’s perception of your group. I recommend including your company and/or product name, this will help ensure that everyone joining your group is actually interested in taking about your company or product. Something simple like “Company X Snowboards” will do. People will be turned off if they join a group named “Snowboarders of the World Unite” only to find out that it was a place created to only talk about Company X Snowboards. When it comes to social networking, full disclosure is always a good policy.

3. Build Your Friends Network - This will take some time, but I recommend scouring Facebook for people who have interests related to your product and services and invite them to be your friend and join your Facebook group. You will get a lot of rejections, but each person that accepts your friend invitation and joins your group will be genuinely interested in starting a relationship with you and your company.

4. Join Related Groups - One of the best ways to increase the size of your Facebook group, is to join and participate in other groups that are relevant to your company and products, and invites members of that group to come and join your group as well. Make sure you continue to participate in these groups, and avoid spamming unrelated groups.

5. Cross Promotion - If you are active in other social networks or forums, be sure to mention them on your Facebook group. You can also attract people to your Facebook group by linking to it from your webpage, your Myspace page, your forum posts, your blog, and don’t forget to send out a link to your e-mail list. Many people spend time developing multiple streams of internet marketing, but forget to cross promote them.

6. Keep the Conversation Going - Make sure you are active in your own Facebook Group. Don’t just start it and then walk away. Keep the conversation fresh and updated. Visit your group daily, and make sure you respond to everyone whether their comments are positive or negative. Your Facebook group could be a great place to find out about specific problems people have with your products and services and resolve them before they have a negative impact on your company.

7. Keep your Group Informed - People love hearing things first, so any new information you have about your company, your product, or your industry will make a great topic of discussion. A Facebook group is a great way to promote your products and services with a two way conversation without sounding like too much of a salesman. Just make sure you have permission before dishing out too many company secrets.

I’d love to hear other peoples tips on how they are using Facebook Groups to connect with their customers, please leave a comment below.

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I agree that companies should use full disclosure when marketing inside social networking spaces. If someone is interested in your company, then they can join your group, and if they’re not they can just ignore you.

Excellent tips list! Thanks for posting… I’ve been looking for something *exactly* like this!

I’m off to create my FB Group now.

Cheers,
Mari

cool tips.

is it working for you?

Facebook seems to have taken the nation by storm

Personally I have avoided joining Facebook, but almost everyone I know has an account. It is mentioned weekly in either an internal breif or concepts for possible marketing strategies in the future much like these face book groups that were mentioned in the article.

I’m curious to see how it develops? since it’s gained so much popularity. Will they continue to be a thriving success and be the largest social networking site on the internet? or will they way of Friendster like ones before.

According to Facebook;

Facebook is now the #1 visited site in Canada. It is the #6 most trafficked site in the USA

Facebook has a total of 54 million users
Canada has 3.3 million active users (active user=over 1 visit per month)
724 000 members from Toronto, the second most biggest population next to London England (they passed us last week)
5 of the top 10 cities are Canadian (Winnipeg has more users that San Francisco)
~150 000 new members join facebook everyday
15 billion page views a month world wide
8.5 billion of them are from Canada.

[…] Virtual Marketing Blog offers 7 tips for starting your own Facebook Group, a guide to creating your own sub-community within the Facebook universe. Whether for sharing news, […]

Hey Nial,
any tips for when it’s a bad idea to start a Facebook group? Like when your brand is already quite strong and might warrant its own network?

Hi Uno de Waal,
Many large brands are participating in social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and they are not always successful, but at least they are participating. And companies who are open and honest about their intentions rarely see a negative impact to their company image.

I do recommend that companies don’t waste their time with social networking unless they are comitted to truly participating. You can’t just start a Facebook group and leave and hope to come back in a month and find a thriving discussion.

You should first learn as much as you can about how Facebook works, how people are using it to communicate and share information, and what people are talking about. Then start participating, join groups, ad friends, and join in conversations. And once you know how things work and are already participating then you should decide whether you want to start your own group or not.

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[…] of post provides instructions for accomplishing some kind of goal or task. Examples: LifeHacker and Virtual Marketing Blog (this one is also a list […]

In terms of outreach to other FaceBook users, how do you avoid being flagged as a spammer, if you’re reaching out to different people with a similar message. If you send too many e-mails too quickly with text that’s too similar, you get warned that you account could get frozen.

Can you elaborate on your outreach methods?

Thanks!

Doing outreach one email at a time on Facebook can be very tedious, but depending on who you are trying to contact and what you are trying to achieve it can be worthwile. One way to avoid being flagged a spammer is to create 3-5 messages that you rotate, and only send out a few every day.

Another ways to reach people is through Facebook groups. At first don’t even bother setting up your own, just spend time contibuting to groups that are relevant to you. Join in the conversation and provide useful information.

Then, once you have befriended a significant amount of people through your email outreach and are active in groups, it will be a lot easier for you to get the word out when you decide to start your own group.

Also if you have a budget and you are trying to reach people with an advertising message, the two quickest ways to reach a lot of people are through Flyers and facebook apps.

[…] Tips for Starting your own Facebook Group (tags: chapter7) […]

would you put all your limited non profit art group’s resources into putting a blog together or a facebook group? If you create one then link to the other, which is the best primary thing?

i help run an artgroup for people with disabilities which receives no funding so we definitely want to promote what we do… at the same time we have no funding to pay anyone to create posts, pages, upload photos etc and i have almost no free time myself. So i need to know the most efficient and economical use for our limited resources (me).

Hi Andra, great question.

If you have to choose one, I would definitely recommend starting with a blog. It is by far the better long term strategy. Facebook may loose popularity in 5 years, but the content you create for a blog can have long lasting benefits. I would also recommend starting your blog with 1 or 2 partners, I could never run this blog by myself.

That said, once you have your blog underway, you may want to recruit someone else within your organization who is already active in Facebook to start a group there. Facebook can be a great way to communicate, and if a lot of your members are already active on Facebook, your Facebook group could take off with very little effort.

Also, I’m not sure if you know about Etsy.com, it is a great place for artists to sell their creations. My wife sells pottery there, and there seems to be quite an active community of artists there that you may want to reach out to.

Great article! Very helpful! I recently started a facebook about a local business man and it’s taken off! 40 users in 3 days

Does facebook work for local RV Parks and Campgrounds or is it specifically for Causes and Fan Pages?

Useful article..

Hi,

Thanks for the article, very helpful.

Just wondering if anybody knows how to do higher end facebook group webdesign. For example, Red Bull has several interactive features (applications, banners, etc.) on its group page yet standard group editing does not permit this (unless I am missing something quite obvious). Any and all help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Wouldn’t LinkedIn be a more acceptable and business-friendly alternative? I would respond to a group request on LinkedIn far differently than I would on Facebook.