- Would you like to learn how to grow Facebook group?
More importantly, would you like to get to where
they're engaged and active members?
I'm gonna show you how I was able to get
1,000 active members in about less than a year.
So make sure you stay tuned to this video.
Hey, I'm Dale L. Roberts, a best-selling author
as well as self-publishing advocate
who wants to show you how to publish books that sell
and if you want that, too, make sure of course
that you subscribe to this channel
and also join me on Twitch every Monday at 12:00 p.m.
at twitch.tv/selfpublish.
And also, if you have Amazon Prime,
you could subscribe for free
and get a few freebies in the process.
On June 2018, I actually established
my first Facebook group.
And little did I know that it was going to explode
over past 1,000 active members in about a year.
And it was with some of these strategies I learned
from somebody else and I'll give you a little bit
of a hint who that was at the very end of this video.
Just to kind of catch you up to speed,
in the past video, we talked about how
to create a Facebook group,
but it leaves a lot of people kind of
scratching their heads and wondering,
okay, now that I've got this group set up, what happens?
Are there gonna be a bunch of people coming in?
Maybe some people might come in to your group
and they're not doing anything.
And if your group is not active,
well, what the heck is the point
of doing it in the first place?
So I wanna show you five proven strategies
to growing your Facebook group.
And if you take just at least one point
out of everything, from all of this,
I want you to remember this.
Engagement is key.
You want to make sure that people are talking,
that they're conversing with each other,
that they're growing this community with you
instead of you just speaking on stage
down to a bunch of people.
You want to be amongst the crowd.
So just remember that.
Engagement is key.
Strategy number one, promote your group everywhere.
I know this seems like a foregone conclusion,
promote it everywhere.
You're gonna do it in videos, at events,
in other social media, in your books.
Whatever you can do to get it out there,
always be promoting.
You wanna make sure that everyone knows
that your group is there.
I will tell you that I've had this group
for well over two years now,
and it's about 3,300 members,
and, to be honest, people are still discovering this group.
So always be promoting, never give up.
Strategy number two, every post should include these.
Now, there's a few things when it comes to these.
Now, the very first thing is,
you're gonna wanna make sure each post
has an image, a gif, or a video.
Now don't worry about the members having this.
You should be doing this.
The reason why you wanna have some type of imagery
is so you stop the scroll when people are
going through their Facebook timeline.
The next element you're gonna need
is going to be broken-up text.
Now, you don't wanna have a big wall of texts,
so if you're a writer and you're putting in
full paragraphs, well, that's all well and good,
for books, but it's not something
that's gonna be good for social media
because people want instant gratification,
some way to read the content and scroll on.
If you have this gigantic wall of text,
it's going to turn people off
and they think to themselves,
well, I'll go read it later on.
Or they will go, I'm not gonna read it at all.
The next element you're gonna need
is going to be emojis.
Sounds kind of crazy, but we're in this age now
the emojis are becoming the big thing
and it all kinda ties back to the whole imagery thing.
And if you can kind of attach little emojis here and there
that are relevant to whatever the topic is
that you're covering, it's again,
going to stop that scroll and get it to where
people are paying closer attention to your text
versus another one on their wall where,
say their grandmother was sharing her recent doily
or showing her latest recipe.
And the most important thing when it comes to your post,
it needs to be timely.
So putting it at 3:00 AM is not gonna be a good idea
if any of your group members aren't even awake to see it.
So you wanna try to think about a good, sweet spot.
And as you have your group up a little bit longer,
you will start to see when people are
most active in the group
so you'll start to post at those times.
At first, it's gonna be kind of a crap shoot,
but eventually you'll get it down.
Strategy number three, always engage.
Oh, I already said this, engagement is the key,
but I'm gonna say it again.
You want to always engage.
And even if it's not your post,
at first, as you're growing your group,
it would behoove you to go in and react,
as a minimum, to someone's post.
I would say add in a comment and maybe even
put in some questions so you keep dialog going
'cause you'll want to see this particular post
turn into a full thread and start to take over.
Because here's the nice thing,
is the more engagement that happens within your group,
the more the Facebook algorithm starts to say,
huh, there's something relevant about this group.
Maybe I should start to send in more members.
That's why I say engagement's key.
So make sure you keep the conversation going.
Number four, welcome new members.
Okay, so at first you're probably not gonna get
more than say, one person or two people per day.
So what you'll do is, when you go into your group,
it's gonna recommend that you go ahead
and add these people and at another point
it's gonna also say, "Would you like to welcome them?"
Go ahead and click that
and it'll auto-populate your post
with the names of the people and tag them.
And what you'll do is, welcome them into the group,
and ask a relevant question about them.
Get it to where it's open-ended,
so that way it's not just a yes or no question,
it reveals a little bit more about themselves.
Because people love to talk about themselves,
why not get them to go ahead and share more
and get it to where this post turns into
a full thread that's really hot
and people get to know this new member.
Now, in due time, as you start to get
say, a half-dozen or more people a day,
you may wanna push it a little further out
when you welcome people to maybe a week at a time.
It makes a little bit more sense.
And you're gonna find that the more people
that come into your group in a weekly basis,
that thread is going to really take off.
And number five, the most important one of all.
It's going to be create a daily posting strategy.
Now, what I mean is, you're gonna wanna make sure
that you have some type of post
in your group on a daily basis.
Now, I would recommend that you get some help
with this one so you're not the only one talking
because there's nothing more sad
than the lone administrator of a group, or a moderator,
being the only person posting.
And a lot of people are gonna be like,
oh, it's just this guy saying something again.
So this is where you're going to wanna reach out
to some people that you trust inside your community
or around you and see if you can have them agree
to become a moderator of your group.
Let them know, hey, you don't need to worry
about banning people or anything else like that.
The reason you're going to give them
moderator privileges, not admin, is so that way,
they can actually schedule posts about 60 days out.
Now, when it comes to a daily posting schedule,
I would say, maybe get it to where you have
one person a day over the course of the week.
Maybe you can have Manic Mondays,
and a specific type of funny post
is put up on Manic Mondays.
And then Tuesday Tips, maybe Thursday Thoughts
or Wellness Wednesdays or Friday Fun Time.
It's up to you, just as long as you have
some type of a strategy.
You're gonna find some ideas
take off really, really well.
Thursday Thoughts is really big over in my group.
But, some other ones are gonna flop
and it's not on you, just try to see
if you can create that engagement.
And one of the greatest ways to get it
to where you gain favor of the Facebook algorithm
in getting it to where it's suggesting more members,
is of course engagement.
Again, remember, you're gonna need to make sure
that you get a couple of generals
to kinda help you out so you're not
the only one putting up daily posts.
You wanna maybe say, do one post per week
and have four additional people doing it
on the other weekdays.
Weekends, it just depends on how active
your group is on weekends.
I typically leave weekends alone.
But hey, that was just a brief overview
about how to grow the group.
And I've already showed you how to create a group
in my past video.
I actually have a deeper dive with somebody
who grew his Facebook group
to over 18,000 members in one year
and some of these strategies he shared with me.
And we did it in a full deep dive
in this very next video on how to
grow a Facebook group quickly with Scott J. Marshall.
I'll see you in the next video.