Facebook Groups for Business Marketing

Facebook Groups can be a powerful and free tool that can be part of a great marketing plan. But Groups can also actually help you run your business and more. 
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Facebook has stated that they are assigning less priority to Business Pages from an organic standpoint. The simple reason they’re doing so is that there are so many Business Pages it’s impossible to assign them the priority they used to. Well, and they also want to earn your advertising dollars.

What this means to you is, if you post something to your Facebook Business Page, you have a much lower chance that your audience will see that post than in the past. 

What Facebook is doing is prioritizing the people and pages that users tend to interact with so if your posts from your business Page get little or no response, the only way you’re going to boost that message is to pony up with some money behind the post. In other words, paid advertising. 

But Facebook really, really wants to be the place you’ll turn to for Groups and Video so all is not lost. If you’re creative, there might be a huge opportunity there for you. Well, until Facebook changes its mind again. This is why you really, really need your own website. 

Since it’s still in Facebook’s interest to promote groups, they’re doing just that so an active group will continually appear on your timeline. Depending on a participant’s settings, you can get a great deal of traffic for your group. 

But just having a group for your business probably won’t work, but you smart guerrillas will think of a way around this. 

For example, I also publish a blog about RV tips. As an extension of that, I started a Facebook Group for specific RVs where we share tips and techniques. That group has grown to over 3,000 members and is a significant source of traffic and sharing of the blog posts. It has cost me nothing but time to keep that Group going so it’s absolutely worth while. 

Let’s say you’ve got a tourism-focused business - you could start a tourism-related group and have your business as the administrator. Or, let’s say you’re in a historic district. How about a group for that historic district where you share ideas and tips for the area? 

You may not even have to start a group - there may be one you can participate in that already has significant membership. Now Facebook is allowing businesses Pages to join Groups so you can use that resource as a component of your promotion. 

Tips, tricks, techniques, insider information and all of that might earn you a lot of favor with customers and prospects so this could be a very powerful weapon toward adding to your bottom line. 

Other ways of using Groups
You can also use Groups to communicate with your team. For example, did you know you can create a private Facebook Group and only allow specific people in there? This could be a group of just your employees or other team members. How about one for your Board of Directors? 

If you’re planning a product launch or a wedding or a social event, you could build a Facebook Group for that and invite all your co-conspirators. 

What if you’re having a surprise party for someone and you want to share info and tidbits or even collect photos of the individual for a slide show? Friends could invite friends and, ultimately, you could let the birthday celebrant in the group after the celebration so they could see all the planning that went into their event. 
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The power of Groups is incredible and you can enroll just the right people to help you in your guerrilla marketing program. I’d love to learn how you’re using groups or any creative and unique ways this article has helped you do more with Groups. What do you have to share?