46: How to use Facebook Groups
It’s no secret that posts to your Facebook page are reaching practically no one these days. Just about all social networks have grown to the point where you have to boost and pay for ads. So with this in mind, where do Groups fit in? This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 47… Making Facebook Groups work for you. It’s only in the last 6 months that I’ve finally stopped hearing from marketers and small businesses complaining about the death of organic reach on Facebook - in English, that’s the death of simply posting to your Facebook page and seeing tonnes of people respond to you. The real fact is that organic reach on Facebook died it’s death way back in 2015\. So, those days where you could start a brand new at-home business and simply grow it via your Facebook page without paying a cent are well and truly over. But there is another part of Facebook that is getting remarkable levels of engagement and action - and that’s Groups. Last year, Facebook Groups membership grew by 40%. And by October 2018, more than half of Facebook’s 2 billion-strong community were part of Facebook Groups. And if you’re part of some particularly active groups, you’ll notice that a lot of your feed on Facebook is now taken up by posts in those groups, rather than posts from Business pages and news stories. And given that you tend only to join groups that are of similar interests to yourself, it means that you’ll see more from them, because you’re more interested in what they are saying than that random business page you happened to follow unwittingly 7 years ago. The other reason why you’ll see a lot of posts showing up from the groups you’re active in, is because… you’re active in them. If you were active on the Adidas sportswear business page, commenting and liking everything they did, you’d see a lot more Adidas on your feed. Likewise, you see a lot of your best friend’s stuff on your feed because you interact with their stuff a lot. The common key to what you see lots of when you’re on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn for that matter, is that you see more of what you like, comment and interact with the most. Facebook isn’t manipulating your feed, your choices are. Once you understand this, then you start to understand how to make this fact can work for your business on Facebook. And while it might be tempting to try and increase your influence via your page, you’re going to do it faster via Groups. For example, if your business is a plant nursery and your Facebook page isn’t getting a lot of traction, it’s probably because everything you’re posting is promotional. Buy this. Save on that. We’re open then. We’re closed until. The kind of stuff that, to you seems informational and beneficial. But to your audience it’s just more spam about you, you, you. Not them, them, them. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about social media, it’s that no one cares about you. They just care about what benefit you bring to them. And your opening hours and sales are not a benefit to them. They are just expected from you. Where Groups come in for this nursery, is in the realm of expertise and advice. You don’t add value to your relationship with a nursery customer by sending more advertising at them. You add value by helping them with service, advice and expertise with the plants you’ve already sold them. But not every plant is the same. People are quite parochial about their plants. Rose people aren’t Azalea people, Azalea people aren’t palm people. Palm people aren’t perennial people. You get the idea. With a country as big as Australia with so many climatic zones, chances are that the usual plant forums online don’t really cover much info on how to grow things in the tropics. So places like Darwin, Broome, Cairns, Townsville and Mackay aren’t really served by Sydney and Melbourne-centric advice and forums. This is where a local nursery can kick in real advice and ideas for their local region. That local nursery can moderate and ru...