- In this video, I'm gonna show you
how to create a Facebook group step-by-step,
including best practices, how to screen people
to get the people that you want,
and what the different privacy settings mean, all right?
Let's get into it.
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My name is Jerry Potter.
Yes, it rhymes with the boy wizard.
And today I'm showing you
how to create a Facebook group step-by-step,
including the privacy settings
which can be a little bit confusing,
as well as how to screen people
to get the right people in your group and more, all right?
Starting from facebook.com,
you're gonna click this little plus sign
on the upper right-hand corner,
and then you can create all kinds of things here.
This is the create menu
and you're gonna choose to create a group.
Pops right in, I like this new design,
because you can kind of see
how things are gonna look as you go.
So let's go ahead and choose a name for our group.
Next is gonna be your privacy.
So you have basically two options.
You have public and private,
and this is simpler than it used to be.
So public means that anyone can see
all of your posts at any time.
So this means that somebody can go in and read all the posts
and lurk without actually joining your group.
I rarely recommend public
because that means that they're not in your group,
they actually have to physically come to your group.
They'll never get a notification
about anything in your group,
they will never see posts from your group in their feed.
So private on the other hand
means they have to request to join
in order to see the posts in the group.
Before they join, they can see the cover photo,
the title and the description, but nothing else.
Now, when you choose private,
you have another question to answer, and that is
do you want your group to be visible or hidden?
So depending on the privacy level that you're looking for,
you have two choices here.
Visible means if somebody searches for the group,
then it will come up.
So this one is called social media
for the streamlined entrepreneur.
And if someone were to search for social media,
then it might come up in search.
Hidden means that
you have to privately invite people to the group,
they will not find it in search.
And then this next box
gives you the chance to invite friends,
if you want to have some people there
to start it off right away, you can also do this later.
We're gonna come down to the bottom,
we're gonna hit create, takes a few seconds.
And just like that, the group has been created.
Now, part of the reason that I don't choose to invite people
as I'm setting it up, it's kind of a time-saver,
but I wanna update the cover photo,
set up the privacy questions, things like that
before I invite anyone else to join the group.
Now, most of what you need to do
is in this little checklist over here.
So we'll go through that and then we'll talk about
a couple of other things
that you're gonna definitely wanna do
when setting up your group.
So invite friends, we can skip that for now.
Add a cover photo.
Because the group is brand new,
you're going to upload a photo
or they've got these illustrations that you can choose from
if something makes sense.
If you are gonna create your own photo
or graphic to go up there, I've got a tutorial
about how to get the right size, and do that.
And I'll link to that in the description of this video.
Next, you can add the description,
and people will be able to see this before they join.
So think of this as the way they decide
whether or not they want to join your new group.
And then the last one on this checklist
would be to create a post,
that is something you're gonna wanna do in your group,
but you can wait and do that until you have people in here
or put it up right before you invite people
if you know people are going to join quickly.
But you do wanna kind of set the tone as it says here,
set the tone of your new group
and get the conversation going with a post.
All right, other important settings over here on the left,
automatic member approvals.
So if you don't want to have to admit every member manually,
you can go through and have a few things here.
So for example, if your group is for local people,
then you can automatically admit people
that are within 25 miles of a location that you designate.
If somebody is already friends with someone in your group,
you can check that,
that means that they can automatically get in.
And if you're not gonna screen people,
and we'll talk about why I think it's good to screen people
in just a second, but if you're not gonna screen people,
then you can at least make sure they're not
brand new spam accounts by having this here.
And then you can let anybody in who's had an account
for at least three months or six months or a year.
You can see a year is selected by default.
Now, membership questions,
this is where you're going to prescreen people
to join your group.
And you don't want as many people as possible in your group
unless your only goal is to go other places and say, hey,
I've got a group with 10,000 people or 500 people
or whatever it might be.
But you're gonna do better
having the right people in your group.
The more your posts will get seen,
the more engagement you'll get, all of that.
So you're better off having 50 perfect people than 500
just random people who don't engage or matter anymore.
So, what you wanna do then is ask questions.
So I go to add question and you can ask questions
with check boxes, multiple choice or written answer.
I like to use at least one written answer question,
and I'll show you what my Facebook group has here
in just a second.
But I like to do at least one written answer question
because people who really wanna be in your group
will take the time to write a written answer
even if it's just two words.
Other people are trying to join like 50 groups at once
and they're just gonna join, join, join, join, join.
So I like having at least one written answer,
but obviously it's up to you.
And as I said, you can do up to three questions there.
Another one you might wanna look at is the group rules.
You can write up to 10 rules about your group.
You can see that Facebook has a few suggestions up here.
If you have no idea where to start,
go ahead and look at some other Facebook groups
that you're in and you might be able to
use those as a template.
And then you can also require people to accept the rules
in order to be a member in your group.
And I'm gonna click down here on settings.
This is where you change most of your things.
So your name, description, privacy.
You can come in and change those later.
You can add a location.
You can customize your group.
So by default it's gonna be
facebook.com/groups/a big old number,
but you can go through and give it an actual name.
So for example, my Facebook community is
facebook.com/groups/fiveminutesocialcommunity.
You can change the color if you want,
that kind of changes the look of the group there.
There's a couple of different group types that you can use.
You can look down through and see, for example,
the parenting one has a feature where
members can post anonymously, because sometimes
when you're talking about things that personal,
that might be something that is helpful to you,
jobs, buy and sell, you see all the different types there.
This is a good one to look at
is who do you want to join the group?
So you can have only profiles,
which means that just personal profiles can join,
or you can have profiles and pages.
Now, for me in my communities, it is a place
for people to get together and have conversations.
So I actually don't let pages in my group,
that's just a personal preference.
I just want people to be who they are in the group
and not hide behind the company.
I've talked to a lot of other group owners that say,
yeah, as soon as I let pages in,
they start spamming the group
and it's just too much maintenance.
Who can approve member requests?
So if you click on that, you can actually
let other people approve people to join the group.
So then they can approve requests from their friends,
or you can just have it be admins and moderators
which are the people that are obviously
in charge of your group.
This is another way you can pre-approve people
so you can choose groups.
So if somebody is already in one of your other groups,
then they can automatically join this one
without waiting to be accepted.
And then if you have a list of email addresses
for people that you want in this group,
you can upload it to Facebook.
And assuming that email address is associated
with their Facebook account,
they will not have to wait to join,
they'll be able to join right away.
Manage discussion, you can go through
and choose how you want people to be able to post,
whether you have to approve them or not ahead of time.
And then down here, this is a good one to know,
if you have a Facebook business page
and you wanna link it to your group, you can do that
by clicking this edit button next to linked pages.
Now, before we wrap up,
a couple of really important best practices.
First of all, again, remember your cover photo
is something that people see before they even join.
So they're deciding whether or not they want to join.
So mine specifically spells out what it is.
We are a community of teaching, support and solutions
for businesses looking to grow using social media.
And then over here, actually,
I have my free download, my lead magnet,
six ways to cut your social media workload in half.
Now, I have that there,
because they can actually click on that
without joining the group.
And if they wanna not join the group
but join my email list that way,
I'm certainly okay with that.
But it's also just a great way
to catch people as they come in.
But if it's not clear by your title who the group is for,
your cover photo is a great place to add that in.
And then last thing I wanted to show you
is my questions that I ask under membership questions.
So you can ask up to three.
I only ask two and I make the second one optional
because I don't want there to be too much friction.
But my first question is what is your biggest struggle
in digital marketing right now?
This helps me shape group content for you.
This is a required question.
If somebody doesn't answer this question
then we don't accept them into the group.
So they can write whatever it is here.
And the second one is optional.
And then again
this is just another opportunity to get this free guide,
and possibly join my email list.
And so I just have that there.
They do not have to answer this question
but it's there as an option.
And then this little toggle down here,
you'll see this in your group once you set up questions
as you can acquire people to accept the rules
if you want to.
Was this helpful?
If so, let me know by giving this video a like.
And as promised,
I would love to offer you my social media quick fix guide,
normally $19, but I've decided to offer it for free
to my YouTube community.
And it lists out how to get more engagement,
more sales, reach, kind of those main problems
that people run into on social media.
So we'll help you identify them and then kind of set you
in the right direction to getting them fixed.
You can get it with the link on the screen
or in the description of this video.
Thank you so much for watching.
You're not only supporting me
but also my two tiny superheroes at home.