Fostering Healthy Facebook Group Engagement

Facebook evolved from a simple social media networking site to a platform that proves beneficial to businesses, such as the Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Ads, Facebook Pages, and Facebook Groups. This article is mainly about how you can use a Facebook Group to create healthy engagement with your followers.

What Kind of Facebook Group do You Want?

Much like in a place where people hang out, people who join Facebook Groups post, comment, and act in a certain way. There has to be something common between your members that binds them together, creating that atmosphere that you want to have. Consider the kinds of topics you want members to have, along with the types of people you’d like to join when you create your Facebook Group.

Establish a Connection

A successful Facebook Group has active members who return daily. To keep your members coming back, make them have a sense of belonging. You want to tell them that you understand them while others outside of the group may not, so stick around with us. Keeping that sense of connection to the group ensures that your members stay active and loyal.

Create a Clear Set of Rules

Facebook has a set of default rules, but you have the better option to create some of your own. These rules help guide your members, making sure that they talk about what you want them to talk about. The rules you set for the group must help keep members from posting surface-level content that doesn’t lead to good engagement. Engagement is good, but making sure that it’s meaningful makes it better. There are three kinds of posts that you should consider disallowing in your Facebook Group:

• Motivational Posts - Members don’t usually comment on these posts. You might get lots of reactions, but they could mostly be likes. When they do comment, they don’t say much, either.
• Prompts - While you could use these to your advantage, it’s a different matter when your members use these. Prompts are quite broad, which presents the problem of having your members talk about something unrelated to the group.
• Teaching Posts - Unless your group is about tutorials on doing certain things, keep posts like these at bay. People want conversations, not instructions.

Simple Questions

Unlike prompts, simple questions can generate the kind of Facebook Group engagement that you want. They aren’t that time-consuming, preferably answerable in ten seconds or less. After all, most people generally interact on their phones. Your questions must be meant to help you understand your audience. They want to know that their opinions matter to you, and asking them engaging questions helps make that known. There are four types of questions that you should ask your members:

Decision Support

Questions like these are quite engaging and would help you with your decisions. Nothing says ‘your preference matters’ better than letting your members have a hand in the decisions you make in your business or your content. For instance, you could ask your members’ opinions about the design of the group’s header, the content of the next blog post on your website, or when you’d launch a particular product.

Opinion Questions

These questions are more open-ended and enable your members to elaborate on what they currently seek out as well as their favorites and recommendations. These could be situational questions, like what footwear they use when it’s rainy. Their favorite movies and TV shows could also be one thing you could ask for. These questions can be about anything you want to know about them; just remember to keep it short.

Prompt Questions

You decide the content, and therefore the direction of prompt questions. The broadness of these questions helps you reach out to more of your members. A good question to ask your members would be what they plan to do in the future. How many kids they’d like to have, what kind of business they would like to start, or even their future travel plans. Alternatively, you can use prompts to call out to specific segments of your members by age, profession, hometown, etc.

Share Questions

Allow your members to share their other social media profiles, pages, websites, and YouTube channels. Share questions invite people to talk about their website, for example, and this gives them visibility and increases their reach. Your group helps in doing so, and they will remember that. While you wouldn’t want to flood your group’s feed with static promotions, these questions would help your members promote aspects of their brands or businesses in an adequately facilitated, focused manner.

Lead and manage your Facebook Group

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d have to keep tabs on the group all day, every day. Instead, you’d want to lead your members into taking up roles in the group and keep everyone engaged. Cycle between posting stories that your members can relate to, tutorials, competitions, and giveaways. Hosting a live broadcast—yet another useful feature on Facebook—using this pattern builds your authority as the group creator, helps your members have a sense of belonging, and gives you and your brand clout, too.

Online communities will help in your brand or business’ success. Knowing how to foster this using all available tools enables you to connect with your audience and them with each other. So, which of these newly-learned methods will you keep in your arsenal?

‍