You’ve built a facebook group but you’ve only got a few members. How do you get the thousands of members you’d like and how do you keep them? Here’s some tips to help you grow your facebook group:

1. Build the Right Foundation – Set it up right. Make sure you choose a title, category and description that is most relevant to your brand or target demographic. Offer as much info as possible about your group including contact info, location, purpose. If you want to build real community, allow people to post comments, photos and/or videos in the group. You’ll likely want to make your group public so anyone can join.

2. Friends Build Friends – The best way to get people to join your group is through personal invitation – so get busy inviting your friends who are already in Facebook. Your friends’ friends will then notice that they joined a new group and may be interested in checking out the group.

3. Use Email to send Invitations – Facebook allows you to send group invitations to all of the contacts in your Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo accounts, so don’t forget to invite everyone who’s not already a Facebook friend.

4. Update Regularly – Don’t build your Facebook group then leave it to stagnate for 6 months. Update your news and photos and videos and comments regularly. Update your group bi-weekly or more if possible, depending on the nature of your group.

5. Promote Your Group Outside of Facebook – Promote your Facebook group on your website, in press releases, in your blog. Wherever you have a presence online is an opportunity to feature your Facebook group and invite people to join.

6. Be Human, Be Friendly – Welcome new members, send out periodic emails to your group, encourage them to invite their friends. Don’t abuse your members by spamming them with irrelevant information, but keep it focussed on the topic of your group. You’ll notice that many people who join your group will not already be your “facebook friend” — so send them an invitation to become your friend.

Need assistance building or growing a facebook group? Click here to contact the Facebook marketing experts at Eleven today. 

What issues are you facing with your Facebook group(s)? Are there other strategies or tactics you’d add to this list of tips for others to consider as they build and promote their Facebook or other social network groups?

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facebook marketing

What is Bacn?

You’ve not only heard of, but have personally experience thousands of spam email messages — but what about Bacn? Is it a new kind of spam? Well sort of. While spam is unsolicited email that you don’t want, Bacn has been described as email you want, just not right now. Bacn is unsolicited yet somewhat wanted, automated messages or alerts that are sent out through social network tools (ie facebook group messages, twitter updates etc). It isn’t spam, it’s the middle class of email. It’s the notifications of a new post on your facebook page, or a new follower of your Twitter updates, or the email newsletter you get from your favorite company.

In the context of social networks like facebook, be sure that as black hat social network marketers get a grasp of the social media space, and as we all add endless numbers of modules to our facebook accounts, there will be more and more solicited yet not-really-wanted-or-needed messages in all of our facebook and other social network inboxes.

What are you doing about limiting your bacn intake? Getting sick of all of the notifications you receive in Facebook now that the novelty is starting to wear off?

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