How to Use Facebook Groups to Promote Your Business

Facebook groups are a great way to promote your business and find new clients.

They’re also one of the last bastions of ad-free real estate on Facebook (despite some testing by Facebook of ads within group feeds last year).

If you want to find out how to use Facebook groups to promote your business, this blog is for you.

Identify Your Target Market

The first thing you need to do is think about your target market. Without knowing who your ideal customer is, you can’t market them successfully, on any platform.

Creating a customer avatar is a fun exercise that will help you narrow down your ideal client and work out who you need to be targeting.

Search For Relevant Groups & Join

There are already hundreds of thousands of groups on Facebook.

Start searching some key phrases that relate to your business and your ideal customer.

If you’re targeting mums in your local area, find mum and baby groups within a reasonable radius from your business.

If your ideal customer is from a particular nationality or age range, or they have specific interests and hobbies, search for groups related to them.

Participating In Groups

When you send a join request, make sure you’ve read the rules of the group and answered any questions posed by the admins. If you’re joining purely to be promotional, make sure that’s allowed, otherwise, it’s a sure-fire way to get yourself banned pretty quickly.

Stick to the group rules. If there are specific promo days, only post on them.

Contribute to the group – don’t just drop your links and run. Answer questions, be helpful and become known as the go-to person for your industry.

Ask questions and share your experiences and tips where you can. People love it when you’re actually making a difference to them, and not just trying to sell to them.

And whatever you do, don’t spam!

Start Your Own Group

If you want to be in control of what happens, or can’t find the kind of group you think will work for you, you can always start your own group.

Starting a group on Facebook is super simple. Pick a name, choose what kind of group you want to create – public, closed or secret. Secret probably isn’t a great idea if you want to attract new members and customers as no-one will be able to find you (unless you’re creating something mysterious and exclusive about the group and your services or products).

Next invite people to join and start getting your member numbers up.

How To Use Your Own Facebook Group To Promote Your Business

As with other groups, you don’t want to just promote yourself on every post.

If you don’t have the time to create your own posts and content for the group, you can curate content from around the web.

Find news articles and trending topics that relate to your niche. Share a podcast you’ve listened to, or a great article you’ve read about your niche.

Encourage your members to share as well – this will help your group stay active without you constantly having to post content yourself. If you want some sort of structure, a lot of groups have set topics for each day of the week, for example promotional days, special offer days, share a win days, share a tip days, etc.

Don’t forget to write some clear rules for your business if your ultimate aim is to use it as a tool to promote your business. Make it clear if you don’t want anyone else to promote their businesses or promote other businesses in your niche. The last thing you want is your competitors taking over your group and stealing your potential clients!

If you know you won’t have time to run a group but recognise the power of a Facebook group when it comes to attracting new clients, consider hiring someone to moderate the group for you – a virtual assistant may be perfect for this, especially if you have someone doing your social media already.