Community Building Through Business Pages & Discussion Groups
I administer 13 Community Groups. They include community discussion groups for a brand, a group of influencers, homeschooling topics for North Carolina Homeschoolers, and health/fitness topics.
I also have found that a great way to connect people to a group for your brand or business, is to link it to your Facebook business page and them promote your group there and through your email newsletter list. People have questions and like to help answer questions. As a community group builder, I post topics that lead to discussion, screen for membership and moderate discussions to be sure they don’t go beyond the group rules or strike too far out of the groups purposes.
Community groups such as discussion forums and email lists, have always been a way that people recommend products, businesses or services to their friends and neighbors. That type of word-of-mouth promotion is priceless. One way to earn it is through hosting a community group. Facebook has made “groups” and even stronger tool for providing value to your potential and existing customers. In addition, group conversations appear in members newsfeeds as they are updated, so you have even more organic reach than if you only have a business page.
A good community manager will be able to help you decide how you want to structure your group and will help you set it up. There are many tools that Facebook gives you to use, and a good manager will know all the “secrets”. All the things I listed below are good ways to help your brand become the “expert” in the field.
I want to highlight some of the benefits and some of the tasks a good community group leader will be doing:
Brand Community Groups
- Answer specific questions about your products or services
- Answer general questions about pertinent topics
- Create microblog content that is of interest to your group members/potential customers
- Share content that nurtures the interest and provides for the needs of the discussion group for information
- Share eye catching graphics or on-topic memes
- Highlight Special Occasions or Days
- Direct members to your website, highlight services or information about your company
- Share links to your products as relevant
- Welcome new members & invite their engagement in the group
- Point out features of your business or product that are beneficial or superior
- Facilitate engagement of the group members
Topical Community Groups
- Community Builders can show how your products or services are relevant based on the topic your group centers around
- Generate interest in the topic
- Highlight Special Occasions or Days
- Welcome new members and invite them to introduce themselves
- Promote engagement on the topic
- Find & share content about the topic and branch out into similar topics or other related material
- Begin discussion
- Screen and approve members to be sure spammers and sellers are not taking over the group
- Control conversations that may become heated
- Create units and tag topics so that members can easily search for information and answers about the topic and your products or services
These are all things that I do regularly as an online community builder and manager as well as group set up and graphics creation for groups.
Community Group Management
Community Building Through Business Pages & Discussion Groups I administer 13 Community Groups. They include community discussion groups for a brand, a group of influencers, homeschooling topics for North Carolina Homeschoolers, and health/fitness topics.