Using Facebook Groups to Connect with Your Community

People have always come to Facebook to connect with friends and family. But over time it's become more than that - it's also a place that allows you to build community, learn, explore and work together. One place where people do this today is Facebook Groups. Creating a Facebook Group gives you the opportunity to build an engaged community, deepen connections among followers and foster authentic conversations centered around a common interest.

The following roadmap will help you create and leverage your Group to bring together your constituents, voters and supporters around common interests, causes, issues and events.

Grow your group

Before learning more about the tools you can use to help manage your community, it’s important to begin with a solid foundation: a strong group structure and culture. Some ideas for setting up an engaging group include:

• Writing a description that shows your intent behind creating the group and tells members how they can contribute.
• Uploading a cover photo to help share your group’s identity and make your group your own.
• Writing a few clear rules that outline behavior that is encouraged or discouraged and your member approval process, to help establish your group’s culture and preemptively avoid any conflict.

Define your goals and target audience

You can use groups to create a meaningful experience with people by educating and engaging your members who are passionate about specific causes or issues. You might want to post something that is not relevant for all of your Page followers. For example, a group might be a great place for checking in with your community on a stop smoking challenge. Once you build this base, you will want to start building group ambassadors that can help you reach out to potential voters and supporters on behalf of the group.

Map out your member journey

Next, you may want to answer the following questions to help you create an experience for your members that is both meaningful and engaging:

• How are you going to attract and onboard new members?
• Will you require screening questions before a member is approved to join the group?
• What type of members do you need to make your group successful?
• What type of content can you provide to excite your audience?

Promote your group

By promoting your group on other social media channels, blog posts, press releases, websites or newsletters, you can increase awareness about your group, diversify your audience and reach more constituents, voters and supporters.

Encourage member participation

The following recommendations provide you with a starting point to encourage members in your group to actively participate.

• Create a Guide. Guides work like content modules—they are a structured and organized way to share information and onboard new followers. You can share your community’s rules, organize curriculum or training for brand ambassadors, explain your services, or post other relevant content you’d like your members to easily access in a structured way.
• Add Topics.Topics are organized via hashtags. Adding hashtags, or topics, to group posts allows your followers to quickly find content they may be interested in. As an admin, you can pin certain topics that you want to feature and hide topics you’d rather be less prominent.
• Ask questions. Questions are a fun, direct way to invite conversation. Simply asking what people are up to or asking for input on a particular issue can help start a conversation and involve members.
• Tag people in posts. If you want to hear from someone, tag them in your post using the ‘@’ symbol. It’s a direct way to ask members what they think about a topic or just to check in and let them know you want to hear from them.
• Designate group experts. Group admins can designate members, admins and moderators as group experts to help people find content by members who are knowledgeable about topics the group cares about.
• Comment on posts by members. Let people know you’re paying attention. Commenting on posts, even just to acknowledge you’re happy they posted or to encourage members to post again, shows your audience that you appreciate their participation.
• Collaborate with Polls, Docs, Events and Chat. Get input from your members with a poll, work together in a shared document, help organize activities with Events or discuss important topics in real-time with Live Audio Rooms.

Keep the group safe

With groups, you can manage your community so that it becomes a safe space that can be uplifting and creating belonging. There are a few ways to consider how you do this:

• Select your privacy option. Consider if your group should be visible or hidden by evaluating privacy and discoverability. In private groups, only members see other group members and posts.
• Create group rules. Rules help establish culture early on. They can help prevent member conflict, and give members a sense of safety and belonging. You can create up to 10 rules using the group rules feature.
• Approve posts and members. You can set up approvals for posts and members. Options for approvals depend on the privacy settings of the group and can be turned off.
• Turn on Admin Assist. Admin Assist can help you automatically manage posts, comments, membership and more in your group based on criteria that you set.
• Add a group moderator.. Moderators can help you manage membership and review posts, and also remind members that they can report objectionable posts and comments for them to take action on.

Measure and learn

Group Insights provide admins with better visibility over their group and the tools to optimize and improve their reach and engagement. By navigating to the groups Insights tab you can find the following:

• Growth: Track membership growth and group membership requests
• Activity: Measure posts, comments and reactions over time. See the most popular days and times for member engagement and review the top posts in the group
• Membership: View your top contributors who often drive group engagement and can be your best ambassadors.

Groups can help you build even stronger ties among your constituents, spark meaningful conversations and encourage people to take action. Learn more about how Groups can help you build community.