- Need to know how to create a Facebook group?
It is one of the best ways to reach people
and engage with them on social media right now
and we'll run through how to set one up the right way.
All right, let's get into it.
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My name is Jerry Potter and today we're gonna talk about
how to create a Facebook group.
Facebook groups are huge and only getting bigger,
especially with Facebook's focus
on increased personal privacy.
Today I'll show you not only how to set up a group,
but also the questions to ask
so that you get the right people in there
and we'll cover the different
privacy levels for Facebook groups.
A few ways you can start the process
and I like to show them all just in case
Facebook changes them over time.
Up here at the top, on my Facebook.com homepage
I can click Create, create a group from there.
I can also click Groups over here on the left,
click the green button here that says Create Group,
or if you want to create a group as your business page,
right underneath your cover photo
you can click these three dots
and choose Create Group from there.
I'm gonna start here, Create Group.
It's gonna ask me to name the group.
Let's call the group Young Retirees.
One of my fantasies is to not have to work until I'm 67,
or whatever it might be.
No I don't, I like my work, so I may not mind working,
but it'd be nice if I didn't have to work.
If you wanna add some people right away,
you can enter names or email addresses
to kind of invite them immediately
and then you need to choose the privacy for your group.
So Public means anyone can find the group,
they can see who's in it and what they post.
So what this means is someone can go
and read all the stuff in your group
without ever having to join.
I suggest avoiding this one unless you're just trying
to create a massive group,
maybe like a local sales group for selling,
buy, sell groups, those kind of things,
but for most groups I think you're gonna want
at least closed and what closed means
is that you can have the group on Facebook.
Anyone can find it through search
which is great for discoverability,
but only members can actually see who's in it
and see the posts that are inside
and then the third option is the secret group
and that means that you can't even find the group in search
so you'd actually have to invite people
or send them the link, maybe via email, or messenger
for them to even know that it exists.
Now think this decision through,
because once you set it
you can only change it once every 28 days
and once your group gets to a certain size,
for example, if your group gets to be over 5,000 people,
you can't change this to be more public.
So if you started closed, you got 5,000 people,
you can't go to public because you already got 5,000 people
who've understood that this is a sort of private group,
if that makes sense.
When I'm ready I hit create
and now my group has been created.
Now let's go through and set up a few things.
First let's add a photo to the top.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click Upload Photo.
Here's my young retirees photo I selected.
Oh yes, drink on the beach.
While you can just put a photo up here like this,
you can also use this as a call to action in your group
or to advertise something.
For example, in my Five Minute social media group,
as in this recording, I'm doing a free five day training,
says click for details.
You can click on it and get the details for what this is.
So maybe you have a lead magnet,
or whatever it might be this is a great place
to promote it in your group.
If you are gonna do a custom cover photo
it's a weird size, it's 1640 pixels by 856 pixels
and that looks good on most devices.
I would check it on both a desktop computer
and on a mobile phone afterword,
just to make sure nothing too close to the edges
gets chopped off.
So once you have a cover photo in place
you can click on it, just like any image on Facebook
and then you can add a description
or a call to action, whatever, a link,
whatever you wanted to be there.
If this is your group,
I strongly suggest you click on notifications
and decide how many posts you want to be notified for.
Now if this is indeed your group
and you're wanting to engage with everybody
then you're gonna wanna choose All Posts there at the top
and then a couple things to show you in the group settings.
Facebook has simplified the group types,
so most groups are gonna be general,
but you can certainly click on that
and see if one of these other ones makes more sense.
Add a description, because if your group isn't public
people won't even know what it's about,
so that can go here.
If it's a local group you can add a location,
go through, click customize address,
and that way you can decide
what you want your groups address to be.
Then the last set of settings
that I want you to make sure to look closely at
are the ones that decide how people get into the group.
So you can say,
basically anyone in the group can approve other people
or only admins and moderators
and finally you can ask question, up to three questions
for people before they join your group.
I strongly recommend this as well.
I know sometimes we'll see people on Facebook
bragging like yeah I've got a group
and it's got 50,000 members,
and sometimes that's a bad thing,
sometimes you lose the intimacy and the community.
So really think about getting people in there
that you want to be there.
So you can click Ask Questions, Add Question,
and then you can go through
and now you can have multiple choice checks boxes,
or a written answer for your questions.
You can do up to three questions.
So for my Five Minute Social Media group
these are the questions that I ask.
The first one is, hey what's your biggest struggle?
I just wanna make sure that they are in the right place.
There are a lot of people
that are just trying to join groups
so they can spam people
and I don't want them in my group.
So that's the first one.
Second one is how did you hear about this group?
This is just one that I like to have on there
because I like to know where people came from
and I actually did a multiple choice option for that one
and the the third one, you'll notice
I have Required and then Optional.
This is just to add people to my email list.
Some groups will say an email list
is required to join this group
and you can take that approach if you would like.
I simply make it optional, but I offer them something
and I say, hey, I've got this five step system
to a profitable social media plan.
If you'd like a copy, give me your best email address
and I would say about 60% to 70% of the people
go ahead and put that in
and it helps me grow my email list
with the right kind of people.
Wanna see a Facebook group in action?
Just search for ours,
search Five Minute Social Media on Facebook.
We'd love to have you join us there
for more social media marketing support.
All right, thank you so much for watching today.
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