When you can get your target audience to feel like they know, like, and trust your brand, it’s monumentally easier to get them to make that purchase.
In the “real world”, that translates to being the one at the cocktail party taking an interest in everyone else, asking questions, and genuinely listening.
And online, it’s no different—you still have to be nice to people, engage with them, and truly hear what they’re saying. But where is the most effective place to dial up that “know, like, and trust” factor for your online business?
Well, if you’ve been building your brand online for more than 5 minutes, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that the best way is to create a free Facebook group*.
But before you commit your time and energy into starting one, we want to be absolutely sure you know what you’re getting yourself into and why this may *not* be the most effective marketing strategy for your business—especially when there are better payoffs from so many other alternatives.
*Just to be clear, we are talking about the concept of a free Facebook group here—the ones people use as a marketing technique to get people to purchase a course or program. We are not talking about the Facebook community that you create after people purchase.
The Attraction of Facebook Groups
I totally understand the thinking behind wanting to create a free Facebook group for your audience. People are already using Facebook as a platform, so you’re going to a place where there’s already a large volume of people, it’s free, you don’t have to create anything from scratch, and you can have a group up and running within seconds (okay…maybe minutes, but either way, it’s fast).
There are all kinds of different methods to get people into your group, from sending out an email to your email list, to incentivizing people to join the group with a freebie. And once people are in there, it feels easy to connect with prospective customers through features like live streaming and sending each other messages. The interaction can be really high.
We often hear about free Facebook groups for people who are on the launch model. If there’s six months in between launches, business owners think “Great! Let’s send them to a Facebook group. Then we can nurture them, interact with them, and when I do have something to offer, they’ll be ready to make a purchase!”
Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that. Aside from the fact we’re not big fans of the launch model anyway because of its inherent flaws, there are still some big, big problems with the concept of these free Facebook groups.
Cons of Facebook Groups
Managing the Group
Sure, you can send people into a Facebook group relatively easily. But getting people into the group is not the hard part—it’s managing the group that’s difficult and quite frankly, getting people out of the group, too. Your end goal is not for people to stay in the free group and take advantage of free things forever. You want people to purchase!
When people start building up a free Facebook group, they forget that the group is not the end. It’s a way to get people to purchase. So a lot of entrepreneurs end up focusing all of their attention on getting people into the free Facebook group, without fully planning what that’s going to entail for their workload.
Initially, you might not have as many people in the group as you ultimately end up having. And so it *can* feel really manageable for you at first. But as soon as it starts exponentially increasing and more people enter the group and contribute to the conversation, it’s going to become a huge time stock for you to manage all of that. You have to moderate it and respond to everyone in a way that is valuable enough, but not so valuable that you’re giving away some of your best information for free (and there’s less incentive for people to purchase).
There’s a very fine line between holding back too much information and customers not seeing the value in your offer and giving them so much, they then don’t need to pay for the rest of it. So you’re kind of in a lose-lose situation while taking lots of valuable time away from what actually matters.
Planning Content
The whole purpose of prospective customers being a group is that they engage and interact with each other, which means that you have to plan out content or prompts. And that’s not just a one time thing—prompts need to be going out regularly.
You’re effectively creating a membership and a new business for yourself that you don’t get paid for. The whole crux of a free Facebook group is that it’s free. So you’re going to be spending all of this time creating, planning, creating content, maybe doing events or lives in the group…and you are not getting paid for any of it.
Policing the Group
Having group rules is a must for any Facebook group. But that also means that as the business owner, you have to enforce them. And as your group gets bigger and bigger, you will have more “policing” elements of this admin job to contend with.
Not only are you having to contribute to the conversation, engage with people, and respond to people, you also have to be in control of vetting who comes into your group. And if people are doing things that are antithetical to the group ethos, it’s up to you to spot it. You might have other people in your community pointing these things out or getting upset about how someone’s interacting in the group and it can become incredibly difficult and time consuming to manage all of that.
If you’re doing it only once a day, trust us when we say a lot can happen in 24 hours! When you’re inviting anybody and everybody to be in this group, you are getting anybody and everybody. People who have different opinions, different ways of communicating, and people who really don’t have a problem coming across as a little bit rude. That means things can go off the rails pretty quickly.
On top of that, there’s also the issue of self-promotion. We have Facebook groups for each of our brands and they’re very carefully moderated, but we *still* get people coming into the Facebook group just for the purpose of trying to pitch our students. You’re always going to get people skirting your rules, and even trying to take people from your group to create their own.
The policing aspect of creating a free group is often even more time consuming than the content creation itself. But it doesn’t just drain your time, it drains your energy. When I think back to before I had help moderating my groups, the feeling of logging in and seeing all kinds of notifications was panic inducing. It is very, very stressful and you have to drop everything to deal with whatever is going on in there.
Chaotic Overload
When prospective customers get into a group, they think they have full access to you now. And believe me when I say they will ask you ALL the questions and tag you in ALL the things. Even with just 50 people tagging you with questions, it can feel chaotic. Not to mention how upset people can get when you don’t reply back to them.
Of course, you could hire a manager to deal with those kinds of things but that also means that you’re paying someone to manage something that is free and not bringing any money in.
Broad Conversations
When you have people in the Facebook group at completely different stages of the buying process, the conversation becomes very broad. And there’s a very different mindset and energy to people who are bought in on something versus people who are still unsure.
For people who are in your free group that maybe do go on to purchase, they’re likely not staying in that free group if they don’t want to be sold to anymore. So then you lose those valuable contributions from people who can essentially help you sell because they’re showing others what is possible with your program.
Answering the Same Questions on Repeat
With new people coming into the group all the time, it’s important to remember that those people are going to have some of the same questions that other people had a month ago, a week ago, or even two days ago. And answering these same questions again and again for free can get very exhausting, very quickly.
For our brands, we tried to tag posts with certain topics so that people could find it, but your users don’t necessarily know how to use that feature. In fact, it’s very, very rare that people take that step to check if someone has asked a question before. Plus, they often think that their question is different from someone else’s anyway because it applies to them. They want to know specifically, “Can this work for *me*?” People don’t necessarily make that connection to apply an answer for someone else, to them.
You might think that as people are in the group a little bit longer, they’ll be able to answer each other’s questions. And yes, it is very cool to see that kind of interaction among people in the group. However, you will also get people in there giving terrible advice and bad feedback. So that is another thing that you have to go in and make sure that you are correcting. Even if it’s bad advice that someone else gave them, because they got it in your group, they’re going to associate it with you.
Lack of Control
If you’re on Facebook, it’s never truly a captive audience. There are still tons of different things to distract them and they may never even get back into your group. They may only see the newsfeed—and remember that it’s Facebook that is deciding what they see. Facebook is showing them the most popular posts from your group, which could be one of those posts where people went completely off the rails.
There are all kinds of things that you can’t control when you have a group on Facebook but the good news is, you don’t have to rely on a Facebook group to interact with your potential customers, to build a relationship with them, or to build that “know, like, and trust” factor with them. There are other, more effective ways to get the same (if not better!) results, which demand less of your time, offer greater control, and don’t drain as much of your energy.
Alternatives to Facebook Groups
Facebook Pages
As far as we’re concerned, if you want to grow your business, Facebook pages are the way to go. A Facebook Page is a great asset to build brand awareness, especially when compared to Facebook groups, because they are more discoverable.
Remember, a Facebook group is closed. So if you’re having a great conversation in that group, no one outside of that can see it and think, “Oh, wow, look at this community, this program, this company, this service, this is amazing!”
Whereas on a page, you have more opportunity for people to see all the value that you’re offering. But remember, it should not be just you posting stuff. You should be encouraging other people to comment and ask questions. And if people are interacting on it, it’s more likely to show in other people’s feeds.
Essentially, you are encouraging the conversations you would have had in a closed group that only a few people see, on a broader platform where anyone can see them.
Interacting with people through your email can also be a really great way to build up a relationship with your audience. Just because it’s pre-scheduled or mass mailed does not mean it’s any less personal or heartfelt. It’s all about the quality of the content. And depending on your bandwidth and how big your team is, in some emails you can encourage people to reply to build up that interaction even more.
You can also build that feeling of getting to know people through sharing your podcast and video content in your emails. People don’t have to be interacting with you live to feel like they’re getting to know you and getting something valuable from you. As long as they can see your expertise, they can start to trust you.
Chatbots
I don’t think I need to remind you that your time is precious as a business owner. And so having a chatbot like ManyChat to respond to people can be extremely beneficial.
I know what you’re thinking…”Seriously Nicki? But chatbots are *so* impersonal.” Well sure, they *can* be impersonal, but if you write great copy and messaging that’s in your tone of voice, they can also be super impactful. In fact, I’ve interacted with some really great chatbots, where it feels like the brand’s connecting with me and they’re DMing me personally.
You are effectively communicating one-to-one with people in a way that they want, on the platform that they’re already on, which makes the process a LOT easier. So for example, on Instagram, if you say “comment XYZ to get this”, you can then start a conversation in the DMs with them, and they don’t even have to leave the platform. They can just message back and forth.
It’s such a seamless, easy experience and they’re still getting the information they want. 25 people can comment on the same thing, looking for the same answer, and if you can have that handled by something seamlessly, it frees you up to engage in so many different ways and work on your business, rather than in your business.
You want to give people the information they need, and you don’t necessarily have to be the person to do that every single time. It’s impossible and it’s not scalable. You can only go so far with your time and the magic is not in you being live or present, the magic is in providing value, in whichever way you do that.
Because we have so little time in our days as business owners, we have to be really judicious with how we use it and make sure it is being used in the most impactful way possible. And not just our time, but our energy, too.
So before you commit yourself to something like a Facebook group, make sure that you understand what it’s going to require of you and make sure that it’s something that’s not just, “Oh, this is a great marketing tactic”, but it’s something that’s going to be valuable for your audience. And with a Facebook group, that can be a massive massive commitment.
There is absolutely a place for community, but from working with many other businesses, I have seen that the best place for that is after they’ve purchased, where you can truly build a community of people who are literally and figuratively invested in learning and growing. And then as the business owner, there’s a huge benefit for you to be in there helping them learn, grow, and be successful.
Read More
In this blog post, we find out why customers who haven’t purchased yet are still just as valuable to us as someone who purchased immediately.
Watch More
In this Energize Your Online Business podcast episode, we find out how the reality of creating and managing a free Facebook group is far from simple. Before you commit your time and energy into a Facebook group, we encourage you to listen in as Nicki and Kate explain why this may *not* be the best marketing strategy for your business. You’ll also learn about the more effective, less draining alternatives that offer greater control and better results!
Your Turn!
Do you have a Facebook page for your business? Let us know in the comments below!