From my experience building a 22.8k member group from scratch
A thriving Facebook Group has some of your best supporters who can become clients or paying customers.
This doesn't happen overnight, of course. Like anything built from zero, it takes time and effort.
Five must-dos from my experience
My Facebook Group Cool Serial is now 22.8k members strong. If I were to start another, these five actions and practices would be critical to how I'd start.
1. Start public, go private
Facebook Groups can be public, private, or hidden.
Hidden isn't really viable because it is invitation only. You'll need some visibility to grow organically.
A public visibility allows anyone on or off Facebook to see who posts what. This helps the discoverability of your group.
Once you have a critical mass of members, then it may make sense to make the group private, which allows only members to see what's posted. I made my group private when it was around 1,000 members strong.
This change cannot be undone, so do it carefully and with purpose.
2. Write a good description
Like anything, a good description explains what your group is about, and what it isn't about.
It talks to who would feel at home, and general topics of conversation.
It also sends signals to algorithms for certain search queries.
3. Turn on member and post approval
It's tempting to allow people to join automatically, and have people's posts show up without a manual action. It certainly is less work for each of these individual tasks.
The main downside is that there are a lot of bad actors that will take advantage of this. They have no intention of participating in your group. They just want to post whatever serves their interests, and it has nothing to do with your group's topic.
Undoing the damage wrought from an aggressive bad actor is not fun.
Turning on membership approval gives you the chance to check out a profile and the answers to their membership questions (more below) before approving them.
Turning on post approval allows you to check posts for content and for compliance with the group rules (more below) before they go live.
4. Use all three of your membership questions
When people request membership in your group, you have the opportunity to ask them three questions, and view their responses prior to approving them.
This lets you learn about them and their interest in your group.
In addition, you can request that they agree to the group's rules.
If the prospective member puts in garbage responses, or nothing, and doesn't agree to the group's rules, that's usually a good sign that they will abuse the group and the members' time.
5. Use all ten of your rules
Facebook gives space for ten rules. Each is allowed a title and 250 characters in the description of the rule.
The advantage of putting the rules into this structure is that it makes post and comment moderation cleaner. When disapproving a post, or removing a comment, admins and moderators can offer a reason as well as check off which rules were violated. This information can then be sent back to the member.
Well-expressed rules also make expectations clear. Coupling this with requiring members to accept the group rules makes decisions easy when people repeatedly break the rules. They agreed to them and they can suffer the consequences
of not following them.
Thanks for reading!
Hi, I'm John and I encourage entrepreneurship in people, including myself.
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