If you’re trying to build a business in network marketing, you really have to think if you’re creating a social space/network for your people.

In this podcast episode, I interviewed Shelley Hoffman, a marketing mentor for moms and host of the Successful Networking Moms podcast on how to Grow your business with Facebook groups.

Shelley is a wife and mom to two girls. She traded in her pumps and pearls as a nationally-recognized corporate advertising executive for a laptop and mom bun as an online entrepreneur and Facebook group guru.  She now teaches women how to start, grow, optimize, and monetize their own online communities.

Let’s see what she has to about growing your Facebook group community!

There’s a difference between growing an audience and growing a community.

One thing’s for sure: you have to build a community. What good does 100k followers do if they’re people who don’t really engage with you anyway? A Facebook group is more than just an audience, it’s a community. You don’t really need to put in much work because your members are engaging with each other. Here are the 4 main points you need to build a successful Facebook group.

How to Start?

Moms usually ask me how to start a Facebook group and how do they find people who wants to join the group? Think about what makes you different. We all know our products and the company, but what will bring the group together is what you believe in. What’s your personal brand? Express what you’re passionate about and interact in other Facebook groups, that will naturally attract people who wanna join your group.

Grow your Group

The first 500 members are super important because that’s the point where Facebook starts recommending your group. You wanna focus on building relationships and engaging with people that are in your target audience. When you have 500 of those people, Facebook is gonna go out and find more of them for you and your groups just grows from there. Interact in other Facebook groups because people are already hanging out there! If your goal is to build a community, find people who are already interacting in communities. It’s very hard to convert them from other platforms and get them into your Facebook group. Look for ones in your niche or similar to your industry.

Optimize

It’s so easy to get on Facebook and say “okay I’m gonna WORK today, I’m gonna GROW my group” and next think you know it’s been 45 mins of you just scrolling! We’ve all been there lol. When people ask to join your group, make sure you ask questions because that’s market research. You wanna know what they do and what they wanna learn from you. This way you can start conversations around the topic and engage with them. And of course, ask for their email! They won’t always give you their email, what I do is I have some sort of freebie that will encourage more people to give it. Remember, an email list is GOLD.

What you can also do so that you don’t get overwhelmed is to pin 5 groups that have your niche and be strategic about interacting in those groups often. Commit into interacting in those groups because that’s where you’ll connect with like-minded people – and those are the ones you want to join your group.

Monetize

SELL. Go in there and talk about how to join your team, answer questions about your products, ask questions, etc! At the end of the day, people are there for YOU and they wanna hear what you can do to help them. The most effective posts are the ones that educate readers at the start, ask a question or a problem and pose your product as the solution. That always gets the most engagement!

Don’t be afraid to niche down

It’s incredibly hard to create content speaking to everybody. It becomes watered down and you sound like everybody else. And you CAN’T sound like everybody else; you wanna stand out. Picking a niche is what will set you apart from everybody else. Trust me, you WILL get better results when you niche down.

 

If you wanna go more in depth with us, listen to the full Episode 43 Using a Facebook Group to Grow Your Network Marketing/Social Selling Business with Shelley Hoffman