You can get a lot of valuable information in Facebook groups or pages. For example, find out about interesting brands, meet different participants, and share experience with them, find a job, sell various items, or get professional help. People are only added to groups that are of particular value to them.
Facebook groups and pages are successfully used not only by online stores and business communities but also by companies of all sizes that have something to say to their target audience, which is actively represented in this social network. A company can build a whole community around a brand with the help of a group. And what could be better than gathering all the fans in one place?
Both a group and a page are necessary for brand promotion.
The page serves as a contact point for users who are at one of the stages of the sales funnel. It is necessary to launch advertising campaigns, collect reviews and user content, and publish updates to other content channels. The page is shown in the search results list. It also shows your company's contacts, and customers can send you private messages.
The Facebook group focuses on creating and maintaining a community. When users leave a message on the official page, it is placed in a separate tab. When a user leaves an entry on a group page, it goes to the feed, and all users can see it and comment on it. You can invite participants to ask questions on the group page or share tips.
In general, monetization of the Facebook page and group looks quite similar. You can notice many ads in Facebook groups nowadays and it is all logical. It has recently been estimated by Forbes that the online education industry will be worth over $325 billion by 2025, which makes sense on why Facebook wants a piece of that pie by leveraging these Facebook groups and getting their foot in the door with online education. What is nice about this method of monetization is that most methods you see nowadays are kind of just one-off things but with a Facebook group you are building a real asset that could potentially generate you traffic, leads, and sales for the next 5-10 years because your group is only going to grow.
Here are the steps you should make starting your page monetisation process.
On your newsfeed on the bottom left-hand side, click on “Create New Group”.
After that, you need to fill out all the necessary information.
Set up the "Privacy Settings". It is recommended to choose "Private". A private group is searchable in the search bar, but the posts are private.
If you set it as an “Public Group” it will lead to mayhem and your members will not find it a safe place to engage and ask questions. But if you make it a “Private Group”, nobody will be able to find the group. Unless you manually give them the link. This is why having a “Private Group” is suggested.
Fill out your description, tags, location, and any other missing details. You will set up questions for members to answer that you review before they are accepted into the group.
Set up several questions to keep spammers away.
You have probably been asked to join a group and there were 1-3 questions before you can join the group. These questions are crucial when the administrators need to decide whether this individual is a good match for the group. It can be logical if one of the questions will remind the new member to immediately read the group rules upon acceptance, and the other one can be a market research question.
Keep the name of the group related to the niche, so people will easily find you. It should be keyword-friendly. For example, if your page is about fitness, the name should be relevant: "Fitness & Yaga. Best practices", "Fitness community of NYC". The next thing is the fact that you want to make sure it is inviting and benefit-driven: show the members what they are going to learn, what will be the benefits for them. Basically, when people search for the groups of their interests, they see many different communities and you compete with other groups. You want to stand out.
If your title is interesting enough, people will click on it and the first thing they see on your page is the cover photo. This image needs to look inviting. You can use Canva. The wonderful thing about Canva is you don’t have to be a graphic designer. In Canva, if done correctly, you can produce visuals that look beautiful and professional. And another benefit of this program is the fact that it is free.
Another significant aspect is to make sure there is all the important information about expectations from your group written in the description. Likewise, you should build up some authority — if you are an expert, you can speak from your experience or you can invite some experts and make live Q&A with them, for example.
Creating the page is quite the same.
Click on the link, click the company field, enter your personal profile data, and fill it in.
The audience's trust depends on the most detailed and correct page filling.
You should immediately add as many ways to contact your company as possible: a link to the official website or a convenient method of communication in the "Contact us" section, and specify phone numbers and email in the "Contacts" section.
There are many different ways to attract new group members. If you have an email list, you can email them about your group. If you have a YouTube channel — go let your followers know about your group, put a link to your group in the description of your channel, or promote your content from your personal account, for instance.
You can also join 5-10 other groups in niche and post if allowed (you need to contact an admin and buy a post if needed). Remember that the more engagement the group has the more Facebook will promote your group.
Most of the ways you can promote your group will be done on autopilot — after you’ve set the groundwork.
You need to promote your group everywhere possible For the first month, make it your mission every day. After that, you will already be working on autopilot for some promotion tactics, which will constantly promote your group to you. Then you will just have to do a bit of work to expand your community after the first 30 days of huge promotion.
Here is a very useful checklist to promote your group successfully. Make sure you pay attention to every point.
Checklist of Massive Group Promotion:
Don’t forget to add your "Promo Schedule" or "Weekly Threads".
With these, you can be just as imaginative as you want. Or just start with them, and work your way up to making a thread for every day of the week.
For example, it can be a "promo day" or "promotions day". Where members can post their blog posts in the thread. Don’t forget to post the rules of each thread: what is allowed and what is not. You can write down the rules right above the image you upload.
First, you should enable the Monetization Manager tool. It allows many other business opportunities as well. To activate the Monetization Manager, you first need to accept the terms of cooperation with Facebook in the Monetization section.
Shifting the representatives to become email subscribers is how these future threats can be mitigated. Group Funnels automatically do this. Group Funnels will add all the group members to your email list when they apply to join your group and include their email address in the "answer these questions" section. A welcome email will be sent to the users immediately.
This is a major component of the list monetization. You can't just create an email list, you have to connect with your followers since Facebook changes the policies quite often and there is a possibility to be banned. With group funnels, you will always have a connection with your followers.
Potential advertisement and sponsorship partners will like to see an active group of individuals closely or exactly matching their target audience. This is why the targeting of your audience is so important, so pay attention to it as you continue to develop your group.
A lot of noise or spam in the community is what future ads and sponsorship partners don't want to see. This signals to the marketing managers that their message will drown out in the spam, which makes the Facebook community look like a less appealing venue for ads and marketing.
Crappy spam posting often devalues the community in general. If you're trying to make money out of it, it's very important that you track and control what is posted in your group.
Check for partner programs with enticing offers and play with the marketing of your customers' services/products/courses. For just about every sector, there are massive lists of affiliates, so you can search for "your industry/group interest" + "affiliate" to see what comes up.
For instance, you can cooperate with Amazon. It has a killer affiliate setup that will get you 1-10% of all sales you make, depending on the product category. This allows you to promote different products to your Facebook group and get a cut of every sale you help generate.
Chances are good that a lot of services and tools that you use have some sort of affiliate program – you just have to ask or check their website. Moreover, this is an excellent gig for a virtual assistant.
In addition to the traditional affiliate relationships, you can also look into CPA (cost per action) deals. For example, if a company is searching for survey responses and you promote it to the community, for each survey performed by the group members, the company will pay a fixed sum. In certain cases, these are likely to produce less of a return, unless the group members are highly active.
In compliance with FTC guidelines (or other guidelines applicable in your country), don't forget to add proper disclosure to your posts. It should be evident that an affiliate connection is included in your message. For example , on Facebook, I have seen several posts that use hashtags for disclosure: #Affiliatelink.
The question is whether transparency in Facebook ads or only in daily posts needs to be added as well. Facebook advertisements are already labelled as funded, so it seems unnecessary, but I couldn't find a definite response.
It goes without saying that site for social media has its own guidelines. If you chose not to endorse affiliate ties on Facebook, but let's say on Twitter, as they can vary, be sure to become familiar with their guidelines.
Finally, if the affiliate program itself requires promotion on social media, you should also search.
Here is an example: Liz and Stephany, two stay-at-home mothers from Madison, Connecticut, aren’t influencers per se. They consider themselves casual product recommenders and self-proclaimed "Amazon addicts" who already spend a lot of time on the site.
In July, they discussed creating a Facebook group to suggest products to their network of friends (who are also prolific Amazon shoppers) and earn a bit of side cash from affiliate links.
Affiliate links are typically used by media companies, bloggers, and social media influencers to generate a small commission from e-commerce purchases. These partnerships are becoming more common in the media world, usually through product review sites like Wirecutter, The Strategist, and Buzzfeed Reviews.
Here are some examples of affiliate links used in Facebook group.
It also can be super-beneficial to build out your own products or services to sell. There are plenty of possibilities: online training courses, 1-1 coaching, mastermind groups, ebooks, guides, retreats etc. You can imagine whatever you want.
It takes time to build up your own assets to sell to members of the Facebook community, and it's something you can certainly combine with a good email marketing strategy. It's best to do it all at once (and from the beginning, correctly), so make sure you map the launch in advance.
By setting up your own products/services for sale, it's worth investing in your brand. If you're properly monetizing your Facebook party, you're making it into a brand itself. Make no mistake.
Let’s take a look at most common Facebook ads types. They are used by everyone — from famous brands to local shops.
The video format is most popular for the Facebook audience. To avoid being blocked before creating a video, read the rules. It is better to make it as brief and succinct as possible. It is important that the video must be supplemented with captions.
The Image should catch the attention, describe and complement the advertising text.
Your ads and images must be relevant to the audience viewing them. If your ads don’t resonate with your audience, there’s little chance they’ll take a second look at your ad, let alone engage with it. Irrelevant ads are a complete waste of time and money.
You can click on ad blocks with an image and follow the specific links.
A remarkably powerful feature of Facebook Carousel ads — the potential for several different calls-to-action, beneath several different products, leading to several different landing pages. That’s flexibility you just don’t get in any other ad format. This format is used by almost all clothing stores, perfumes/cosmetics, household appliances, etc.
This format includes advertising messages that you can learn more about and use without leaving the social network. Even though you’ll technically be selling your product at a discount, offer ads are a solid strategy for bringing in new customers.
It is located in the "Offers" section in the left column.
This shortens the customer's path to the product or service. Plus, when you share discounts with existing customers and targeted audiences of prospective new customers on Facebook, you potentially increase social media engagement. A customer who initially sees the value of following your brand account for more deals will be introduced to the rest of your social content as well. It’s a win-win situation.
Offer ads can also help you bring in more traffic from several different points along the marketing funnel.
Worldwide, 700 million people use Facebook events each month to market their events. And that 35 million people view a public event on Facebook each day. This type of ad leads to the event page in FB with a link to tickets.
Or it can lead to a website if you are creating a separate ad campaign.
You can boost your event but firstly maximize the organic distribution so that you can get as many responses as possible for free. If an event gains traction within a local area it can feature within the "events you may like" section and if several friends of the Facebook user like it, it can feature in their "popular with friends" section.
Retargeting advertising finds potential buyers based on their previous actions: search queries, site visits, etc. It can yield higher ad engagement, brand ad lift and awareness, click through rates, and conversions, all at a lower CPC than the majority of campaigns targeting cold audiences.
A paid Facebook post that is actively promoted in the feed. It is accompanied by a more vivid advertising description with a noticeable link in the visual.
It is worth noting that with this type of advertising, you will have limited options for settings of the target audience.
Conclusion
You'll start to see interaction once you learn how to grow a Facebook community and begin to accumulate members. The engagement will place your group on autopilot if you follow these measures to ensure your group is properly set up from day one.
It's just a couple of moves before you can make money from your group or page.