Joining & Creating Facebook Groups
Increasing friends list and building relationships
We all want our friends list to grow – but make it more strategic or focused and don’t just accept any random friend requests. Better still, why not initiate your own friend requests to people who are likely to be the target audience in your niche.
Step-1: Joining Facebook Groups
For example, if you love dogs and own a blog or online store specialising in pet products, then you should start joining groups in that niche. Likewise, if you are in internet or affiliate marketing, then join the groups in that niche.
Step-2: Sending Friends Requests
Go to the Group’s members list and you can start sending friend requests to people in that group. But please TAKE NOTE : You can only add up to 100 friends per day otherwise, you may get banned. And you also cannot send all that friend requests all at once. Do this in smaller portions, say 25 invites early morning, next 25 midday, next 25 mid afternoon and final 25 in the evening or night.
Step-3: The snowball effect
If you do this on alternate days for a few days, Facebook will start generating new friend requests from people of similar interests. This will result in a snowball effect and before you know it, your friends list will start to grow.
Step-4: Creating Your Own Facebook Group
[Refer further below on how to set up your Facebook Group]
When creating a group, it’s important to bear the following in mind:
- Give more than you take
- Build trust and relationships
- Create a space for learning and sharing
- Not everyone will be your customers, but they can be your referrers
Advantages:
- Birds of a feather flock together – you will have friend/members who are interested in same thing under one group
- Easier to direct targeted message to a group of like-minded people
- Being a Group owner/admin means you will decide who gets in, what get posted in the group space and more importantly, you have the freedom to promote relevant products or services to the group
Step-5: Start growing your Facebook Group
Start adding relevant, useful and helpful content in your FB Group. You can also create ‘Units’ – which is basically, Social Learning Units.
Setting Up Your Facebook Group
Click “Create New Group”
You can create a New Group using your Personal Profile or a Fan Page and the process is generally similar.
- On Facebook top bar, click on the Group icon
- Click on ‘Create New Group’
- Fill in Group Name (you can change it later at any time)
Make the group name relevant, memorable and searchable (best to include a couple of keywords that are relevant to your niche/topic). Here are some tips for naming your new Group:
- Use your name, brand name, product name, or other recognized name that is easily discoverable in search.
- Use keywords that relate to the topic being discussed or the people you are trying to gather. For example, you could have a Facebook Group for Social Media Managers or a Facebook Group discussing Social Media Management.
- Choose Privacy: Here you have two options, whether Public (anyone can join without request/approval) or Private (requests require approval by you/admin).
- Public: anyone on Facebook can see who’s in the Group and what they post
- Private: only Group members can see who’s in the Group and their posts
Other things to take note of when choosing the Privacy setting for your Group – it can be modified later, but only under certain conditions.
- Admins can only change the privacy setting for a group once every 28 days, although they have 24 hours to revert a change made to a Group’s privacy settings.
- Admins can change the privacy settings for Groups under 5,000 members from Public to Private or Private to Public.
- Admins can only change the privacy settings for Groups with over 5,000 members from Public to Private, but not Private to Public.
- Choose your Visibility setting
After choosing your privacy setting, the next step is to choose your visibility setting for your new Group. If you choose “Visible” then anyone on Facebook can find the Group.
If you choose “Hidden” then only members can find the Group. And they need to be invited to join by the Group admin. As for public Groups, they cannot be hidden. They have to be visible by default.
Only private Groups can be hidden.
- Now you can start adding your first Group members. Select Friend (for Personal Profile) or Fans (For Page) to add to your new Group
- Last and simplest step, click ‘Create’ and you’re done!
