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December 9, 2024
What is Community Marketing?
It’s hard to think of a more significant asset for any business than an active community formed around it. There’s no denying the power of brands that succeed in creating a special bond with a group of individuals. No paid advertising in the world can match the influence of these brand ambassadors. Therefore, it makes sense for businesses to invest in building and developing communities made up of past, recuring, and potential clients. The good news is that it has never been easier for a business to start growing its community.
Beyond an inherent sense of brand loyalty, communities offer many advantages for businesses:
-A community you create for your business is a platform that can be used to show your expertise and build your authority
-Communities are a place where your potential customers can connect with existing customers, and recurring customers can engage with each other
-Communities can be used to gather information about your client personas and their needs. They also provide an opportunity to get feedback and learn from your customers.
Community Marketing is not an invention of the Social Media age. There are many ways to grow a community around your business, both online and in real life. Multiple digital platforms have been used to host communities, from chat rooms that were popular in the ’00s to specialized community areas many companies have created on their websites. However, since the rise of social networks, digital communities of all kinds have gained an immense presence. Facebook Groups have been leading this trend, becoming an endless choice of social and communal hubs for everyone.
As social media managers, we have witnessed Facebook deliberately shift towards communities over the past years. In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg published an open letter in which he described Facebook’s vision to become a place where people build safe and supportive communities. The trend continued in 2018 when a change in Facebook’s algorithms resulted in a drastic drop in the reach of posts from business pages. Posts from groups, on the other hand, continued to reach a significant portion of the group members. Nowadays, most Facebook apps have a dedicated “group feed” that gives even more prominence to content posted in groups, which can appear in the “Newsfeed” as well.
As we explained, Facebook has consistently shown an interest in developing groups and created several singular features that marketers can use to their advantage:
You can link a business page to a group and easily share posts between the two.
In a group, unlike a page, communication is a two-way street. That means admins can tag and message group members — a valuable tool for brands that want to reach out to their audience.
Automated tools make group monitoring easier, thus allowing marketers to spend less time managing group content. You can, for example, flag a keyword and ask to be alerted every time someone uses it.
You can also schedule posts in advance and make sure new content is published regularly.
A feature called “Learning Units” allows you to collect and save valuable information for group members.
If you’ve read so far, you may be wondering if you should ditch your Facebook page with its dwindling post reach and work on setting up a group instead. The reality is, of course, that it’s not either one or the other. Brands still need Facebook pages to serve as their store-fronts and showcase what they have to offer. Pages are also an essential part of Facebook’s advertising platform, which is an incredibly powerful tool for every business. But, the conversation that once happened on your page has re-located. If you want to create a dialogue with your followers – groups are the place to do it.
Facebook groups are an excellent way for brands to connect with their audience. They combine the advantages of community marketing with the positive attention communities have been getting from Facebook in terms of reach and engagement rates. If you want to build a community around your business or tap into an open conversation with your target audience, Facebook Groups provide a convenient and easily accessible platform to do so.
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