It can allow you to market products, increase customer lifetime value, be seen as authority figures in your industry, control discourse and benefit from effectively free advertising, and much more, with an investment of zero dollars and only a few hours of easy, albeit mind-numbing work.

By now, it’s well known that the old cliche “If you build it, they will come” is awful business advice. However, if you have a large community of people, you can almost always build something to sell them. Community building has always been a viable way to start or grow a business. Years ago, communities took the form of forums, but for a few reasons, Facebook groups have largely replaced forums.

Why Facebook Groups?

Members of a standalone forum generally have to revisit the forum in order to receive notifications. Members of a Facebook group, on the other hand, receive notifications of new activity straight to their phone or email.

To join a standalone forum, a new member has to register. Joining a Facebook group, on the other hand, is a process with much less friction for an existing Facebook user.

The Age-old Chicken and Egg problem

The hard part of community building has always been the chicken and egg problem: no one wants to join a community which doesn’t yet have any members. Luckily, this article will enable you to solve the chicken-and-egg problem by instantly building a community with several hundred engaged and interested members.

The Method

Step 1: Join relevant groups

The first step is to join Facebook groups that are highly related to the group you are making. Quality is more important than quantity here; you want to join groups that are full of engaged users, rather than large groups that are neglected.

Step 2: Make some new friends

Once you’ve joined a few groups, simply right-click on the names of every poster you see, open their Facebook profile page in a new tab, and add them as a friend. Alternatively, you could simply find members on the group’s Members page, but adding recently active users allows us to ensure that all of our new friends are active and interested in our topic.

Facebook has rate-limiting and friend-adding limitations depending on how much they trust your account. I had no trouble adding 50-100 friends per day for several days. You’ll want to repeat this process every day for several days, until you’ve added several hundred friends in total.

Step 3: Wait…

Now wait a few days. Because people are friendly, forgetful, impulsive, or apathetic, around half of the people you’ve added as a friend will accept your friend request. Probably much more if you’re an attractive female. We only need to wait a few days to give most people a chance to respond to our friend request.

Step 4: Add our new friends to our Facebook group

In one browser window, on the left side of the screen, re-visit a group you used in steps one and two. In another browser window on the right side of your screen, open your Facebook group. Now in the first tab, go to the Members page. You’ll notice that your friends appear at the top of the Members list. Now select the Add Members input box in your rightmost browser window, and type names of friends that you see listed in your leftmost browser window.

Before you do this, you’ll probably want to set your group to Private. More people will join a group which lacks discussions if they think maybe it’s bustling with activity.

Once they’ve accepted the group invitation, threads from your group will show up in their regular Facebook feed. Most people join several different groups for each of their interests, and they will indiscriminately engage with the threads from your group when they show up in their feed.

How to prosper and not die

Good moderation is essential for facebook groups. Spammy posts will be flagged and will lack engagement, which will kill your group’s engagement score in Facebook’s edgerank (stopping your group from showing up in users’ feeds) and drive users away.

Scheduled posting can be a way to boost engagement and keep people interested and active without interrupting yourself several times a day to post in your group.

For more ideas on some ways to build engagement, check out our post on 7 Tricks to Hack Your Facebook Group Engagement

In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

You will start from a grand total of zero followers.

You will have to promote your profile to build a following. To make matters worse, it’s going to be a slow progress in the beginning.

Don’t lose hope, and remember getting your first 500 followers is going to be the toughest. As soon as you start to get some followers, Matthew effect will come to the fore, and you will start to see a steady growth in follower, given that you are consistently producing great content.

Here’s how to promote your social media profiles.

Paid Advertising:

The organic reach might be down at Social media websites, but their paid advertising solutions have improved a lot.

You can reach out to your target audience with great precision.

Simply choose your target audience and run some ads to get your first 100 or 1000 followers. Normally a Page like will cost you less than a dollar on Facebook, and the cost is equally low on other platforms.

Cross Promotions:

One of the easiest and the cheapest methods to get your first few followers is to invite all of your friends or contacts to like/follow your page.

Add your social media profiles in your newsletters or email signatures.

Your website must link to all of your profiles at a prominent place.

Click to Tweet deserves its own mention since it’s an extremely effective method of using your blog posts to get some Tweets.

Also, promote your profile at one network through the profile at another network, especially if one of them seems to be doing better than the others.

Train and encourage your team members to act as brand ambassadors. You can announce some perks or incentives for team members who will bring a lead through social media.

Offline Advertising:

Add your social media handles to your business cards, brochures, or flyers.

If you’re using traditional advertising mediums like TV ads, billboards, or print ads, make sure that your social media profiles are mentioned along with your website.

Many customers will prefer getting in touch through Facebook Page as compared to your website.

Conclusion:

It all adds up to this.

Social media marketing is not easy, but a little bit of planning, consistently producing good content, focusing on engagement rate, and using a social media management tool will make it as simple as possible.

We hope that this guide has given you a good idea of ways to make the most of Social Media.
Follow these tips and you will live happily ever after.

The right time and the right days to publish your best post?

Want to see if your posts are getting the red flags like Hide or Report as spam reactions? Not sure if you are getting the likes from the age group, location, or gender that you’d like to target?

You can get the answers to all these questions and a lot more through Facebook Insights.

These insights are there by default and you can access them anytime by clicking on Insights link in the menu.

It gets even better with the introduction of Local insights.

If you are a local business, you can see the peak hours when most people are in nearby locations to choose your opening hours. You can also see the age group, gender, and even home location of these people.

This is invaluable information for small businesses that don’t have the budgets to spend on market research or surveys.

Let’s discuss different sections of Facebook Insights and how to use this information as a small business.

Overview:

The overview will give you a quick summary of the likes, reach, engagement, and the actions on the page. You can set it to show statistics from Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, or Last 28 days.

Scroll down and you will find a quick summary of your paid promotions including the cost and the number of people reached.

Next, you will find your 5 most viewed posts in that specific time period so you can quickly see the kind of content or posts that will work.

As you can see, link posts have reached the most people but it was pushed by a paid boost. Photo and video posts seem to have the best organic reach.

Then you have a comparison with similar business pages and you can see if your page is doing equally well or lagging far behind.

Clearly, the other page has a much better engagement rate. Going through their content and post timings might give you an idea or two?

Facebook will suggest some similar pages or you can also add the Facebook page of your competitors to have the comparison.

Promotions:

Promotions section gives a quick summary of your paid boosts. Complete detail of your paid advertising campaigns can be found in Ads Manager but that’s for another post.

Likes:

Likes section will give you the details about your Page likes.

First, you need to choose the “Start” and “End” dates to get the reports for a certain period of time.

This section shows how your page has performed over a period of time and if you are going into the right direction.

Steady growth shows that you are well on your track and if it’s going down then there’s something wrong and you need to figure out the reason.

Next, you have the “Net likes” graph. It shows the number of likes obtained through organic means, paid promotions, and the unlikes.

It’s common to have a small number of people to unlike your page but an abnormally high outflow means two things.

First, you are not targeting the right audience and second, you are not posting the right content and you need to make changes in your social media calendar.

You will also find a graph that shows the source of your page likes. You can see if the likes are coming from Ads, from your page, or uncategorized sources.

Reach:

Reach section shows the number of people that you’ve reached on Facebook and how they are reacting to your content.

The first graph shows the number of people your posts reached.

Needless to say that you should be aiming for a stable or slightly upward trend in your post reach. The massive hike (like the one in the screenshot above) or drops can come from starting or ending paid promotions, trying different post types, or posting more regularly.

The next graph shows the response of your target audience. It shows the reactions, comments, or shares that your posts are getting.

If you’ve read our Facebook Algorithm guide, you will know that your organic reach is parallel to the response your posts get.

If you are getting a lot of reactions, comments, or shares, your organic reach will improve.

Scroll down if you want to see the kind of reactions your post get.

Almost all of these reactions are equally good, at least as far as reach and algorithm are concerned. However, you might want to get more (or less) of a certain reaction, depending on your goals and objectives.

This chart will show if you are achieving your goal.

Just like the Likes or comments improve your organic reach, reactions like “Hide” or “Report as Spam” will do the opposite.

It’s something you need to keep an eye on a regular basis. Make sure that your posts are getting no such reactions.

The section ends with a graph showing your total reach.

Page Views:

Page views are like Google Analytics for your website. You can see how many people have visited your page, sections that they’ve viewed, and the source of traffic.

Click on “by Section” to see if visitors are viewing the sections that you want them to see.

You can see the age and gender of people who have visited your website, their location, and the device that they are using.

You can also see the source of traffic on your page.

Actions on the Page:

This section will give you the following insights:

• Total Actions on the Page
• People who clicked Action button (by age and gender, country, city, and device)
• People who clicked Get Directions (by age and gender, country, city, and device)
• People who clicked Phone Number (by age and gender, country, city, and device)
• People who clicked Website (by age and gender, country, city, and device)

You can use this information while choosing Target Audience in your paid promotions. For example, if you are creating a campaign to get website clicks, you can target the country or age group that clicked website. If you are looking to get the leads, you can target the ones who have clicked the phone number.

Posts:

Post section gives you all the information that you need to improve your engagement rate and reach.

For example, it tells you the day and time when the majority of your page fans are online.

Going by this information a time between 9:30 PM to 10:30 PM will be the best time to post while there’s no big difference between the number of people online on a specific day.

You can also check the average reach and engagement rate for different types of posts.

Here’s the most interesting part. You can also see the best performing posts from your competitors or pages that you are keeping an eye on.

If you are running short of ideas and can’t decide what type of content or topics will click with your audience, this section can give you some food for thought.

Then there’s a list of all posts with the reach and engagement rate. You can sort them according to reach or engagement rate.

You can sort this list according to reach engagement rate.