There is still a lot of chatter about where Facebook is going for business, and as mentioned in our previous post, groups are coming out top. This has been massively confirmed following the announcements from Facebook with changes to groups at their European Summit last week.
So, what does this mean for you if you run a business page? You now need to think seriously about setting up a group community around your page, and linking it to your page. Don’t jump head first into this, have a good strong plan of action for what the purpose of your group should be and what you want it to achieve.
This morning, we have had a marketing meeting with Redfern Property – following which we’ve set up a group and linked it to their Facebook page. The purpose of the group is to offer unbiased and helpful information to tenants, non tenants and those searching for rented properties. The advice covers not only properties available with Redfern, but also about renting in general, to help the community around the page and provide useful, wanted information.
Redfern Property felt that creating a group simply to advertise their own properties wouldn’t work very well, and certainly wouldn’t work alongside what Facebook is now trying to promote – community, interactions, relationships. It’s for this reason they chose to opt for an information providing group.
We’ve set up a similar group, for Social Media and Online Support (feel free to join) – we want the group to encourage interaction between members, sharing of advice, news and information to do with online marketing. It isn’t a hard sell of the business or services that we do, but creating a community around our services so that we can help as much and as many as possible.
So, have a good think about what sort of group will work for you – there are some fab updates coming to the groups in the near future:
- Chatter about groups being colour customisable, so you can add your own stamp onto a group!
- Pin more than one post to the top of the page
- Creating a dedicated rules section so members can see easier how to communicate within the expectations of your group & community
We’re pretty sure there’ll be more to come too!