Facebook Groups: How Your Brand Can Benefit By Joining Them

Social media is an advertising powerhouse. It’s changing the way brands communicate and display their personalities every single day! With platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, there are several ways to reap the benefits that each channel provides your brand, but one stands out among the rest as far as community-building goes; Facebook.

With an active user-base of over 1.69 billion people, Facebook is it’s own online community. This isn’t to say that all 1.69 billion eyes will be on your page, but if you’re not currently on Facebook, your brand is certainly missing out on a bigger audience.

The Rise of Facebook Groups

In recent years, Facebook made the shift to prioritizing the use of Facebook ad spend for visibility as opposed to user-generated content creating difficulty in gaining organic reach. The solution to this issue: Facebook groups. Facebook groups have existed since 2010, but didn’t really gain traction until the last few years.

In a statement made from CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2018, he explained that their team had received feedback “from the community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”  In essence, this meant the phasing out of brands and businesses posts populating in user’s newsfeeds. Anyone that works in the communication business truly understands the difficulty this posed. Organic traffic would, and has, gone down significantly due to this massive algorithm change.

The best move for businesses meant spending dollars on boosted posts and ads to reach their targeted audience’s news feeds once again. While this isn’t an issue for major corporations around the globe, it creates tension for smaller businesses who rely heavily on organic content to build brand awareness in order to gain revenue. Businesses needed to get creative in order to build a fanbase and gain customer retention.

Building a Community

Brand awareness and staying connected is crucial to every brand in existence. Facebook groups offer the chance to build a community of like minded individuals who are purposely seeking out a specific topic. Facebook groups have the ability to be set to public, or private with the option to request joining. Private groups provide the chance to weed out negativity and those who aren’t the industry’s target audience.

Pro-Tip: We recommend always joining a private group, or if you create a group, set it to private. Adding people to a group without asking their permission first comes across as spam and can turn people away from your business/overall mission.

There’s a quote that our agency admires; “community over competition.” The existence of Facebook groups has time and time again, proven the power of this quote. At the end of the day, we’re all in this together. If you weren’t already keen to this knowledge, our agency is based in Lakeland, FL. Our community is very tight-knit and lives by this sentiment. Due to COVID-19, plenty of businesses struggled and continue to struggle under current WHO and state mandated guidelines. Restaurants are just one example of the many industries that have been impacted by these guidelines. How these local businesses have adjusted their strategies with community support has been incredible to witness!

“Rally Around our Restaurants” was created out of love for our community and with over 22k members, gained huge traction seemingly overnight. Businesses and consumers alike were thrilled to join and spread the word to help small businesses within the community. Aside from the ability for brands to market themselves, reviews and feedback from customers within these groups help a lot with the power of word of mouth marketing. 

While the group is now archived with the launch of phase 1 of our state’s re-opening, it still exists for members to scroll through and find local eateries they might have never heard of.

This simple act is a great example of the value and power Facebook groups can hold for your business! Leverage the opportunity to join, post who you are, and gain notoriety! If you’re not advertising your business, especially in hard times, who is to know that you’re in need of support?

Better Engagement, More Accurate Targeting

Let’s face it — we’ve seen plenty of comments on Facebook pages in regards to a brand’s relevance on the user’s feed. Even with specific targeting, there’s always going to be at least one person who “didn’t want to see your ad in their feed.” You won’t please every viewer with boosted posts or ads, but it’s definitely the end goal; drive people to want to learn more about your brand and what value it provides them.

Facebook groups are quite literally intended to reach a set group of people. According to Facebook, there is a higher chance that a user would see a post in a Facebook group rather than a Facebook page update. This means you drastically increase your chances for engagement due to real-time impressions from users that want to hear from you.

Pro tip: If you’re creating a Facebook group for your brand, be sure to add it to your brand’s Facebook page so that newcomers can join and invite others to join as well.

Engaging with these groups regularly will keep your brand top of mind, increasing customer retention. Within each facebook group there is an option to save threads and documents. If you communicate regularly, your saved and active posts have a better chance of ranking high in the feed, which in turn can cause them to show up in other user’s group suggestions on their regular newsfeeds. Not only does this increase member engagement, it’s a means for more accurate targeting to improve impressions and reach.

Feel the Love, Feel Connected!

As we face the ever-changing algorithms that social media presents us, getting creative will always be the number one priority for brands to have their voice heard. Facebook groups are a great opportunity to showcase your brand for awareness, and engage with your community, whether it be local, national, or global!

Many users in these groups join to learn about local businesses they can support, review, and have a conversation with. Don’t miss out on an even bigger audience by not looking into Facebook groups within your industry! You’re sure to feel the love of longtime and new supporters alike.

As the nation prepares to re-open, it’s still important to take care of yourself and others to continue slowing the spread. Remember to take time to do the 5!