Facebook is Rolling Out SUB-GROUPS? More Changes from Facebook!

Rich:
Hey everyone. Welcome again, and is early in the morning for me today, but I've got a bunch of good stuff on groups and Facebook. And we're going to be talking about Facebook group and a new feature inside of Facebook group, along with some rumors about that feature. But the first thing I wanted to answer is why should you start a group for your business if you have not already.

So groups are not only a great forum for subscription clients to interact with each other and learn from each other and pose questions to you and your team so that you can interact with them on a little bit deeper of a level, but they can also be a place for new releases to come out early. So if you're someone that sells products, or if you have a new service, that's going to come out you kind of want to have your loyalty customers inside of your group, get early access to that. And you might even just be testing something. This would be a great place for that groups would be. And then I'm sure a lot of you have probably seen at some point, if you're not even a part of one already VIP group, Which isn't really anything special apart from a normal group.

Whereas most of the time VIP groups are actually locked and set to private, um, fun fact about that. Actually, if you do set a group to private, you can never go back to public. So just be wary of that. If you're going to create a group you can start public, but if you go private, you can't go back. So just to note there, but, um, VIP groups are a tiny bit better.

And we'll talk about that a little bit more. When I talk about the new feature that's going to be coming out. But there are a tiny bit better just because again like that level of connection is a little bit there. And then when you have the exclusivity factor included, people feel special. And the next question I wanted to kind of go over was, you know, what content should I even post into groups versus my page?

Right? So it's like if I create a group, I've got a whole nother feed that I have to give attention to now, apart from my page feed and. If that is the case, the first thing that most people would want to do is probably just copy paste the content from one to the other. And I think that we should probably try to avoid that if possible.

And here's why pages are more outward facing, meaning it's more about new customer, a new client aquifers. Where groups are for only existing customers that already have know about you have most likely shopped with you. And that means the content inside of the page and the group should reflect that. And you also don't want to shy away from everyone that just follows the page.

That's not in the group. That is a current customer. So your page. Kind of needs to stay the same in terms of organic, you know, a good mix of new customer acquisition, new client acquisition posts, and offerings and about your products and services along with kind of the nurture portion of it all for the people that are already a part of your client list or your customer list.

So that's an important little note I wanted to add. And kind of, like I said, for groups specifically, what content should go in there? I think early releases, exclusive content. I think both of those are awesome for groups. I think anything where you and your team can be a little bit more vulnerable and open to your.

Customer list, especially private groups. I think that's really cool. So, you know, it could literally just be your kid's third birthday or first day of school, like things that are relatable that just show you're human and getting on that level of. Openness and like having that deeper connection with customers will reflect ultimately and more brand awareness and more dollars.

Um, and on top of that, you'll just have more pleasant interactions with your customers and hopefully that'll fuel your  drive for your business as well. And so a big thing I wanted to touch on here. Is, groups have notifications sent out to everyone inside of the group, whereas pages are just subjected to the feed.

Right?  I wrote down here, so content going to the groups typically needs to be more exciting and interesting. Or helpful to the person because when they see that notification pop-up, they've only got about 10 words of the preview of the thing along with who posted whatever it was.

And so if those first kind of 10 words, aren't something that will draw them in to click on that notification, pull them into the group and then see whatever you're trying to get them to see. They may not click it. So that's just something I wanted to note there as well with that. A big question that I get all the time is like for this podcast, our examples for this.

So what groups of I've seen killing it out there? most of the boutiques we work with have a group of, if not two, so they'll have a normal one and a VIP group. You have to do certain things to get into the VIP group. The big way I think that these boutiques have been killing it. Inside of the group they're pushing for their app installs.

So if they, if you do have an app with products in there, or maybe just, you want to push them to like website collections, that would be fine. But a lot of people wants to get the app downloaded there,  the amount of sales that they have come like 80 or 90% through the app. So getting your customers on your social platforms, to the places where they can shop with you, be it, your website or your app or whatever it is very important.

I think that's one big thing to just keep reminding the people in your group. It's like, Hey, if you're not on the app yet,  use this code for the promo. If you've never shopped at this on our website. And you're somehow in this group use, , first time 10 or whatever for temper. And then, um, they also are really big on posting their live.

So like when they're going to be live streaming and all of that, they do the promotion  in the group. And as you can imagine, that's what makes sense because these people are already customers with them. And so they're in the groups that are going to be like, Hey guys, come and join us for this live stream, which I think is great.

small groups, like my business kind of has, you know, we have less than a 20, 25 people in there. We have also been having some, actually a good success there just because it is a more intimate group. And this, again, we'll lean into the new feature that's coming out here later in 2022 with Facebook groups.

And when it's a little bit smaller, more intimate, I think people are less scared to post because it's not subjected to a feed of 7,000 people. It's only like 50 or a hundred. And I think that will kind of provoke and promote them to. Post into there, learn from each other, interact with each other and do all of that.

And then ultimately your group now becomes a safe place for them to come and talk about any issues they may be having or any insight they want to give to the industry or whatever that pertains to in inside of your business. Another big question I wanted to answer is how do I get more people in the group?

Right. So it's like, Hey, you convinced me to start one. How do I get more people in there now? So we're going to cover a couple of the obvious things and then we'll go into, um, just like one tip that I would give you for that. So obviously you'd want to promote this on your page. Email campaigns are huge.

If you have a customer email list, when you start the group, that'd be, I think a smart thing to send out an email to everybody letting them know about the group maybe a month later. And then two months after that, just sending out a couple more followups, trying to close that gap of people that are actually customers and people in the group.

You want to get as many people in there as you can. Um, and then like verbal advocates is possibly the biggest way to do. So if I had somebody on the phone or if I was a customer in my store, I could be there right with them. Hey, have you heard about our groups? Our VIP group? No, what's that? Well,  this top that you love right here.

We actually posted this a week ago in the group and it wasn't even in our store yet, but we had this exclusively set for the people in our VIP group. Do you want to join that? I can send you the invite right now. Boom right there. Very easy. So the, what I just did right there was I showed value up front and that's what you're going to have to do in order to get people into these groups.

So the, the only thing really needed for it's only kind of really needed for groups that are in the growth stage, like doing some sort of promotional join on. You know, some groups that are at 10,000 people or 20,000 people, they want to get to a hundred thousand people. That means you're in growth stage.

So, providing some sort of value, whether it be a joining promotion, or just giving them  early access to whether it be content, products, or maybe just exclusive discounts to the group itself. So letting people know that all of that happens in there and then that's the value for them and the reason for them to do.

So lastly, the thing I'm going to talk about is the new feature I'm skeptical. I don't know where Facebook really thought of all of this stuff, but it's called subgroups. And so they're going to have a feature. This is a coming from a source that is a big time in the marketing and social media world. I'm 80% and belief that this will become a real thing.

And, it is called subgroups. And so they're smaller groups inside of groups that can basically be monetized or become like info collectors or data hubs for you. So when are they coming? We don't know. Um, we also don't know exactly what features are going to happen inside of the subgroups, but something that was rumored again, from something that I read.

Was that you can create the subgroup inside of your group. So say let's just keep using the round number of 10,000. If you have 10,000 people in your group and you know, maybe you have like two or three little kind of sub niches in your industry or in your business, you could kind of create a subgroup for each of those three.

And then you could say, Posting to the group of 10,000 and be like, Hey guys, here's the subgroup. If you want to join it, go ahead and click join in there. And then, you know, you might have two or 3000 funnel into each of those. The cool part about all of it. Again, rumored is that when they go to join the subgroup, you can ask them for information like their phone number, their email address, or I, you know, anything like that.

I don't know what they're going to have on there. But the point being was that the level of engagement goes a little more. It gets a little more vulnerable, kind of like I was talking about earlier with the smaller groups and on top of that, it's going to just become a data collection hub for everybody.

So, um, if you couldn't imagine when you have more customer data and more ways to upsell on them inside of these subgroups, because it's even more niche down to. Uh, general customer, it's generally going to mean a deeper relationship with your customer and more revenue at the end of the year.

So why, why would you want to get into groups? I think even just the potential of subgroups coming out, if you have a larger large ish customer lists like over a thousand or so, I think that you should start right now on the groups thing. Um, you know, do some research if you need to. The things that you would want to include inside of your group, or just DM us and ask us some questions.

I have no problem helping out there. And I think you need to start now so that when the subgroups does roll out, you're already gonna have people inside of your group. You can immediately get into the subgroup game and start collecting. Either a fee to join the subgroup, which again, I don't know if that'll be a thing or not, or a bunch of customer data and info so that you can get email campaigns to be better.

Your marketing campaigns can be better. So we can take our, our client's customer emails and I can use all of those inside of Facebook marketing and all of that. So if you work with an agency it's great to give them emails that's super helpful and useful. Lastly, just one more little thing about groups and why I think you should start is getting people to spend more time with your brand is crucial for growth and groups are a wonderful way to do it.