Facebook Group is continuing to be one of the best channels to engage with the audience on a regular basis. If you want to build your digital tribe, Facebook is the best place mainly due to the good engagement that Facebook offers.
If you are relying mainly on SEO traffic for your blog, what will you do one day if Google stops sending you traffic? There comes the importance of building an audience that you have control over.
Some of the best ways to build your audience base is by engaging them on a platform they are already on like email marketing, FB groups marketing and also chatbot marketing.
In this post, you’ll learn some of the best ways to grow the audience base of your Facebook group.
Top Strategies to Grow FB Group Audience
#1. Use Content Gate
This is one of the less-known strategies to grow your FB group. People just share the messages like “join our FB groups” all over the place.
But the thing is that, you need to give your visitors a clear reason why they need to join your FB group.
Here’s the workflow:
- Share a free case study on your FB group
- Copy the permalink of the group’s post
- Now, you need to promote the above link so that if people need to read your case study, they need to join your FB group first.
Above is a classic example of a content gate strategy I implemented through Manychat. Whenever I go live in my FB group, I create a prior post and send the link to that post via chatbot to get my subscribers join my FB group.
You can implement the same strategy for promoting your FB group on your blog, in webinars, in FB lives, Quora answers, so on.
#2. SEO for Facebook Groups
You need to include your niche keyword in the name and description of the Facebook group. By this, your group will attract people looking to join relevant communities.
Rather than keeping your Facebook group name as something that’s irrelevant, make sure you use the keyword in the title. Our group ranks for the terms like Digital Marketing, growth hacking and garner good attention organically.
As your group grows and more the number of members you have in your group, the higher the rankings will be.
I always prefer the groups to be kept as closed, because by keeping it as secret I’ll lose organic reach of my group.
#3. Leverage existing users to add more people
Whenever I invite new members who joined the group, I add the above line to encourage the new members to add at least two people to our group.
You can also implement gamification strategies like offering a free consultation for people who drive more members to your Facebook group and so on.
To encourage people to make other people join, you can run periodic contests on your group rewarding the people who referred most people in your group.
#4 Manage Influencers to Join Your Group
If you manage to get major influencers to join your group, you can easily make other people join the group with strong social proof.
This is the email I got the other day from Nicolo. He is implementing the cold outreach strategy to make bloggers and digital marketers join his community. Just notice how he made clever use of social proof.
It’s almost impossible not to join the community as the mail includes FOMO element. Also, do notice that how the mail made me feel special about myself that I’ve been invited.
You can implement the very same strategy to reach out influencers to join your group, and use the very fact of them joining as a social proof.
#5. Include link to your FB group everywhere
There are some of the places where you need to include a link to your FB group.
- Invite people to join your FB group on the thank you page of your blog after they sign up for your newsletter.
- Include link to your FB group in some of the newsletters you send to your subscribers
- Include link in the Gmails you send
- Include group invitation as a bonus to someone signing up for your newsletter, and thus increase its perceived value
- Include shortened FB group link right inside the YouTube video and include it as one of the call to actions.
To make the above process easier, many people also buy a separate domain name like GROUPNAME[DOT]COM to promote their group effectively.
While promoting the group this way, it increases the perceived value and the conversions will be more.
You can promote your group in workshops or training sessions you conduct. So make sure that the short-and-sweet version of your Facebook group’s URL is available for you to promote.
A valuable tip to grow engagement
In order to make people engage in the group, you need to have a consistent approach when it comes to posting in groups. Don’t leave your group dormant.
Regularly welcome the new members who joined your group and ask them to introduce themselves. Go live on your group at least 2 times a month so that the cold audience present in your group will be warmed up.
Wrap up
These are some of the ways I found very useful when it comes to promoting FB groups to get more people join.
Providing value in the community and having a properly laid out promotional strategy are very important after you get more and more people to join your community. Or else, there’s no point in building the audience base.
Hope you loved the blog post, looking forward to hear your views in comments section.
