It isn’t a new concept when people sell through Facebook. The very first approach that has been applied by many social marketers is they would begin with joining many Facebook groups, hoping they would meet the right people to sell their products.
The second approach is to actually start a Facebook group i.e. you become the host of a Facebook group. Facebook groups are just like another communities whether they exist online or offline. It’s easy to start a group or community. It’s never easy to grow it. It’s even harder to keep it going for many years. That’s exactly what this second approach is about with managing and growing a Facebook group.
There is more to having your own hosted group. Your Facebook group could be a community for you or your team to provide customer support to your existing customers.
An example is when you create a Facebook group and let people who have purchased your products to join. In the group, you would also provide “value” to your existing customers.
With this “customer support” group, it allows you a platform to sell upcoming new products, or upsell other products.
Not only about products. When your business is to host any webinar or seminar, your community members should be one of the groups of people to be notified. They would usually be the people who feel very passionate about your events.
The success of the online community growth and management would depend on how good you can execute your inbound marketing strategies. You’ll have to consistently and regularly feed “value” to your community members. For example, if you’re hosting a community to help each other on do-it-yourself home improvement, the value can be presented a series of content from fixing a pre-hung door to building a decorated tea table.
When you’re the host of your community i.e. Your Facebook group (in this case), always remember and apply the following best practices:
- Lead with your passion.
- Make it super easy for others to follow you or join your community.
- Tell others about your story and help them relating to it.
- Help others connecting to the dots and solving their problems.
- Influence others to make them as passionate as possible.
- Keep the communication lines and topics open.
- Learn from and admit your mistakes.
- Be persistent to put in the hard work when managing your community.