Here are some quick tips to improve your Facebook group and make it more engaging.
First is to choose a name that stands out and is searchable.
We quickly thought about this in The Last Lecture.
But here's an example for each of these tips I'm going to show you a case study of why this is a good
tip but when you search for photography you see all of these different groups.
Hey look at that.
A lot of these are named photography.
Now this is not necessarily a bad idea for just getting as many members just to name your group photography.
But I'm sure there's thousands of other groups just named photography.
Whereas if you searched you have a more specific group for example landscape photography DG I drone
photography San Francisco photography minimalist photography This gives more of an idea what this group
is all about and will ultimately create more engagement from your members.
Yes a lot of people love photography and in general photography might be good but I'll bet you that
most of these more specific groups get more engagement from the people on the group.
And this follows the pattern of growing your audience.
I would much rather have a thousand true fans in my facebook group than 10000 people but no one actually
engages.
Our second tip is to have and enforce group guidelines.
I also mentioned this before but specifically if you want people to to not post spam messages or if
there's specific types of things you don't want people to post have that in your course description.
Here's an example of Nick is side hustle nation.
He has a podcast that I really like and his pin POAs actually is the welcome but it also includes the
rules of the group.
You can see that in the description he just has a very short one sentence description which is nice
and it's perfect right there and I actually like how he uses the pin post to have the rules because
anyone that comes to his page.
This is what appears on the top and this is much more eye catching than the description over here a
lot of people won't even read the description so they won't even find the rules.
Not only that he goes a little bit further and he uses an image to explain the rules and he makes it
a little bit funny with some spam so he's doing a lot of good things right here.
But the thought about enforcing the rules is important too because if you let it get away and people
start spamming people are going to leave that group they're going to stop getting notifications for
the group.
So as soon as you start your group make sure you enforce the rules.
Our next tip is to welcome new members.
I use my pen posts in the online course Masters to welcome members.
I actually posted a video that is a quick welcome which I think is a nice way to engage with people.
I prompt people to post an introduction about themselves.
Also sometimes message people individually who joined the group and asked them to introduce themself.
One other thing I do to welcome members is every couple of weeks or so I'll create a welcome announcement
and I'll welcome everyone.
I'll tag people who are new and I'll put together a a graphic or something and welcome them to the group
so it's not just the same thing that people are welcome from the welcome pin post or something like
that.
But this creates a little bit more engagement with new members and the more you can get new members
excited about the group the longer they will be engaged and the more engaging you.
Your group will be overall.
Of course you should be sharing resources with your group and the point I want to drive home is that
it doesn't necessarily have to be your own content.
Yes it would be great to be able to write enough content every day of the week to be able to share something
with the group but you might not have that amount of content you can use.
Previous content and I loved doing sort of the throwback thursday thing where I share an older resource
that I put out maybe even years ago to kind of refresh that content.
But if someone else has put something out that you think your students or your group members would like
posted to your group Here's an example of me sharing Scott Duffys shout out to another great instructor.
He wrote a great article about online courses and so that's why I shared it with my group so you can
find resources all over the place.
And this again doesn't.
It's not just for online course crater's this could be for any type of group.
With each post we should be prompting people to engage with the posts.
Here's an example of Nick Loper inside Hazle nation.
Every week he puts out the same similar posts.
Time for Friday wins and he asked people what people did this week.
It's one of the posts that gets the most engagement you can see here 43 comments.
The photo or whatever he posts with it is different every week.
It's not always the same and so you can switch it up but whenever you post and it doesn't necessarily
have to be just once a week but with most of your posts you should be prompting people to engage.
Ask them a question.
Ask them to share their own thoughts about whatever you're posting.
Our next tip is to use visual content within your posts.
I would argue that adding a photo or something visual to every post makes it more engaging.
Here's the convert kit family.
This is the email software I use and if you scroll through these posts it's all text and it's kind of
boring but when you get a post that has an image like this one which is a great resource to this is
this obviously stands out and just growing through this group.
You know all the ones that are just text based.
They just blend together.
But when there's a big image that's what stands out.
So I really like that Iggs example of using images to create more engaging posts.
Use the live feature.
I go live every week in my online course Masters group.
This has become sort of one of my most popular posts.
You can see that over 121 views There's about 700 members of my group right now it's been a couple of
months since I got started.
These are all students of mine and typically I get a lot more engagement with the live videos than just
regular posts.
It's important to try to be consistent if you can keep it to a schedule that's even better if you can
do it at the same time every week.
Even better if you can't do it every time and if you can't do it every week just make sure that you
let people know that you are going to go live ahead of time so that they can mark it on the calendar
or at least just have it in their mind and be ready when you do go live.
Lot of people do watch the videos after the fact and that's totally fine too.
And my last tip is to use the pin post wisely.
You saw a couple of examples before of how I do use it for a welcome message.
Nick Loper uses it to welcome people to prompt people to introduce themselves and to explain the group
rules.
Other ideas is if you have a very varied engage group once it starts to get really big and maybe there's
510 posts in the group not just from yourself but also group members per day.
You might want to reserve that pinned post for whatever you actually post and this is something I did
early on in the online course Masters group and when you're starting out you might want to do this too.
Whenever you post something new.
Pin it to the top so that when someone does come to your group if they're a member or there's someone
new they see that new content especially if it's important if you're selling something if you're promoting
a product or if you're just giving away a high quality free piece of content or something put it at
the top so that you know group members are going to see it.
Sometimes things can get pushed down if more and more people are posting in the groups so at the end
of the day I chose to use my pen posts as my welcome message.
But I can always pin something if it's important for that day or that week and then reappear in my walk
a message at a later time.
Awesome I hope you enjoy these tips and I hope they help you have an amazing engaged Facebook group.