3 reasons why Facebook groups are a new opportunity for brands to consider

Earlier this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new mission statement as the company went on to cross the 2 billion user mark. Following this, it is noticeable that Facebook has been putting larger emphasis on Groups. Zuckerberg and team see Facebook groups as a good opportunity to boost engagement and interaction.

In making Facebook groups an integral part of the interactive process, there is consequently the opportunity for brands to be a part of this evolution. There are ways to utilise Facebook’s renewed focus on groups to increase your reach and gain momentum on the social network platform.

Post in groups from pages

In the past, you were only allowed to post in groups as an individual member, however, now you can do all of that as a ‘page’. The ability to be logged on as a page and comment or interact within a group is one of the biggest updates.

You can use this to share advice, assistance and maybe technical support from your brand account. This lends a sense of legitimacy as well as a brand building practice. You could create your own branded Facebook groups and interact as your page on these.

Analytics for groups

Facebook launched group analytics to optimise the capacity to use Facebook groups. It provides a range of data points to help group admins to understand their audience better and maximise their response.

You could use the new features to form partnerships with other established groups so as to gain additional insights into your target market. For example, if a majority of your group consists of travel enthusiasts you can use that to your advantage through partnerships.

Boost to Facebook groups

It is common knowledge that Facebook updates and tweaks their newsfeed algorithm constantly. Since videos get high engagement, Facebook was giving better reach for such posts and now the same same could be applied for groups.

When you join Facebook groups, you may notice that your feed gets filled more and more with updates from these groups and increasingly less from friends and news pages that you follow. This could be taken as a hint of Facebook giving more privilege to group-based content. While this is not ‘official’, it makes sense, thus, groups are another great way to generate more reach and engagement for your brand. So try joining and participating in groups or create relevant Facebook groups for your business.

There are a range of ways you could consider using Facebook groups as part of your marketing process. Given that the platform has registered two billion monthly users, groups are a great way of reaching a ‘group’ of them. It will require investments of time initially but given that Facebook themselves are emphasising it, it could pay off.