Hello, and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about do I really need a Facebook group for my business? What do you think? You have a Facebook group, don't you?
I do.
For the Stompies.
I do. And I've had a Facebook group for about four years now. I suppose close to crack. It's 2022. Five years.
Wow. Time flows when you're having fun.
It really does. But it takes an awful lot of time and effort to make a Facebook group work. And I'm afraid I had to let mine go. Yeah.
Okay. But for those like, I've never started a Facebook group for IPA group. I have helped generate ones for other businesses, but especially I think they work especially well if you have a community of people that are there to help each other out. So if you have, for example, one that we're both involved in or a couple that we're both involved in, let's not leave anybody out is Women's Inspire Network, run by Samantha Kelly and Digital Women, run by Lucy Hall. Now, these are groups that have hundreds, if not thousands of people in them, and they are a wonderful place for people to go and ask questions. And it's not just the community leader that has to answer the questions, which I think just proves how good of a community it has become.
Yeah. You start becoming part of a tribe, don't you? And everybody's there to help each other out.
Yeah. And you can have moderators and you, as the person in charge of the group, can assign other people responsibility of the group to help you. And it doesn't have to be a one man band. It doesn't have to be all you that's adding the content to the group.
It really depends on the type of group you're going for, though, doesn't it? I mean, social media stumpies was for people who trained with me. So obviously, I'm advocating for myself there. But I'm a part of other groups as well, as you described. But there's also local groups. I've got a local group called Westmead Small Business Group Unsurprisingly. It's for businesses based in Westmead.
Go figure. Does what it says in the tent.
It will. Yes. But although it's a group I've set up, it's not about me. And so in there, and you kind of described it with the other guys and with the other two groups. I now don't just have moderators. I also have experts that recognize with their own little badge, group experts who people can go to as well. It really depends on how you're going to use the group.
I think you've brought up a really good topic there with the badges that people can earn, which I think is a great addition to Facebook and what they're doing in the groups so that you can add in top fans. You can have experts. Each person can have their little badge as a moderator. And how long they've been in the group so other people can see when they're new and joined just how much influence others in the group can have. So I think to answer our question at the start, it depends. So you have to set out really what it is that you want your group to achieve. Do you want it to be just talking about you and all about you and promoting yourself, or do you want it to be a place where other businesses can feel that they can chip in and answer questions and share their expertise and knowledge? What is it that you hope to achieve? I'm in another one that's all about redecorating your house and using different types of almost using one type of paint to paint in different places. So obviously, if anybody comes in and goes, oh, I think this paint is rubbish, and try this other one instead, they're going to get kicked out because that's not what the group has been set up to achieve. It's been set up to promote this one particular type of Pint. But if you're not a large business able to promote your one type of paint, then by all means collaborate and have other people come in and join with your group and set up your community, whether it be local to your area, whether it be national or international. I mean, there's no reason to say that a group wouldn't work. It is a lot of hard work at the start.
And it's not just that either. There has to be a level of consistency as well. There's other groups that you and I are part of as well, isn't there, Esther, that you only arrive in them because you've either subscribed to something or paid for something? So they're fundamentally private, paid for groups, but they're still on Facebook. But Facebook isn't the only place where you can have groups because you can have LinkedIn groups.
And there's mighty Networks. There are other places. I mean, a lot of people, based on what Zuckerberg and Facebook have been doing recently, have decided to leave the platform. And they're starting up another platform called Mighty Networks, which is a totally separate app, totally different. And you can have lots of different circles, I think they're called I think they could still let that phrase from Google, Google from years ago. We're going back the reminiscing that we do in this podcast. But it's taking people away from social media in a way. There are so many different things that you can do with the group. As Melanie says, if you have started a paid for course or paid for membership, then by all means have a private group, whether it be on Facebook or LinkedIn or one of the other many platforms. And we spoke with a guy a couple of weeks ago and Disciples Media cool who also run the same idea. There are lots of them out there. You don't just have to stick to Facebook groups, but having a group of people, your peers, people who look up to you, people who can collaborate with you, your tribe only says it is important so that you can grow in your business.
But there needs to be a strategy for all of these things. We're so busy talking about strategy for our businesses. But strategy doesn't just go for how you do things. When you do things, the strategy has to be an element of your communication. And when you're trying to build up awareness of your business, building a tribe is great, but you need to build up that rapport in the first place to get people to join the tribe. There needs to be values that you all share and places that they all enjoy meeting up in the first place. So I think having a group or groups in different places takes an awful lot of time and planning. And for me, I struggled to do that. I got so busy at the time, and this is before I got any virtual assistance that I ended up having to drop the group because I just couldn't commit to it.
Yeah. And sometimes it's hard whenever you start a group to see people coming in consistently because there are so many groups that people are involved in that they get lost in the chatter and they get lost in the newsfeed and they get lost just scrolling. You need to be coming out on top of people's news feeds or sending them email reminders of jump into the group and see what's happening. Here's the top trending post from this week, or here's a decent conversation or an interesting thread. Add your $0.10 to it. How else can you remind people that you have this group?
But then people feel barrage, don't they? They get hundreds of notifications on their social media, then they get emails on top of that as well. Well, you can turn off how you're going to do it.
You can turn off the notification. If you are somebody who is involved in lots and lots of groups and they're feeling overwhelmed with the number of notifications, you can turn them off and just get notifications from when the admin posts or from when your friends post. Because you're also probably not going to be connected to every single person in the group.
Well, unless you're in women's bar and we know everybody in that one, to be honest.
Yes, but it's a very friendly group, so you can't blame us.
There's a lot to think about, isn't there? When it is setting up a group, what are you going to deliver them every single week? How are you going to keep people interested? How are you going to maintain or even create relationships between the people in the group? Because it's not about you. When you set up a group, although it could just be about you. What you're trying to do is build a tribe and you can't do that by just constantly banging on about yourself.
Yes, agreed. And it is something that needs to be long and hard thought out and not something that oh, well, you know, I've done this. So now the next logical step is to do this. Let's just open the group and invite all my friends. You have to have, as Melanie said, a strategy and you have to think long and hard. How much time do you have to commit to the group? How much time do you have to think up content and interesting information? And what do you want the group to achieve? What do you want the whole body of the community to gain?
Yes. It almost needs the same mission statement, doesn't it?
Does completely. So it's not something that you should jump into lightly. It's maybe even something that you don't actually need as a business. Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to use it.
And although I've had one and not done well on it, that hasn't destroyed my business. It's not necessary to have but if you have one and you want to maintain it properly, it could be a very good sort of stream for you, for brand awareness, letting people know not just what you do but how you help people and maybe getting in partners that can work with you as well. I don't think you absolutely need one. It's nice to have
I do think too, that it could be a nice place if you're going to be live streaming that you can live stream into the group so that you give them sort of that added value of all this is exclusive content. You sort of need to have that what's in it for them. Why should people join your group? Think about all of that before. I mean, we've all got stuff that we could share in a group that we could add value to a group. But do we need to or can we just sort of have an open on our Facebook page? So it's something for you guys to think about. Do you need to have a Facebook group or any other group? Linkedin, mighty networks, disciple media. I mean, there's so many options out there, but how much time do you have to dedicate to it? How much value can you give people joining it? Who's it going to be for? What's your mission statement? What's your strategy? All things to think about before you even hit the button to create a group.
Yeah. So we'll leave you with that conundrum. We've been really helpful this weekend, haven't we?
We didn't even answer our own questions. If you can help us answer it, then let us know. That's it for now, guys. We'll be back next week with more money marketing. Until then. Bye bye.
Bye, guys.