Howw To Start A Facebook Group That Can Reach Millions of Leisure & Business Facebook Users Is Something I’m Frequently Asked. Here’s How.
With billions of regular users worldwide Facebook is the social media platform that a huge percentage of the global populations visit every day.
And Facebook is no longer the place where grandparents contact and keep up with their grandchildren. Facebook is now a serious business channel. Virtually every major brand has a Facebook presence and I personally know hundreds of people that use Facebook for Business.
Whether you want to set up a group for leisure or business use there are a few “rules” you should be aware of. In many cases if you get it wrong first time around there’s an opportunity later to change things. But a handful of settings can’t be changed once set. For example, for privacy reasons, you cannot change a private group to a public group. But you can change it the other way, from public to private.
Facebook does change the group settings from time to time but the basic principles tend to be followed for a quite a while. You need to be aware of the changes as they happen and the way a Group is set up may change in the future. Certainly, the page layout changes from time to time. But for now, here’s How To Start A Facebook Group using the screengrabs I saved on the day I did it.
AS a demo I’m going to start a group from scratch.
- Go to search and type in Create Group
- > Return will give you the following screen.
How To Start A Facebook Group Step 1
2. After clicking on Create Group you’ll get a screen similar to the next one. Somewhere on the page, it’ll say Create New Group. Click it.
How To Start A Facebook Group Step 2
3. Now start to create your group starting with the group title. Make it simple to remember but descriptive of what the group is about.
You can also add/change the group cover photo (sometimes Facebook has already added a photo).
Under the Privacy Setting, you have two options. My default is to always go for a Public group. The reason is that in most cases you want people to find it and want to join it. And secondly, you can always make it private later .. but for privacy reasons, you can’t make a Private group public later.
You also need to consider group visibility. If you want people to find and join your group ensure it is a visible group. The Hide function is for private groups to ensure o one finds it via search. Paid Membership groups would normally choose Hide.
How To Start A Facebook Group Step 3
4. You can now Click on Create Group .. and your group now exists! This is where the fun starts.
How To Start A Facebook Group Step 4
5. Invite Members.
You can do this by searching for people you know, copy a link to an existing group or share a link in Messenger.
How To Start A Facebook Group — Continued Below
6. Search for your group in the Search bar and see what it looks like. (You might decide to do this before inviting members).
As you can see a good bright cover image grabs attention. Make it relevant to the group, something they will recognize and that will grab their attention.
7. Once you are up and running you need to be able to control the group. Facebook provides a reasonably good Admon function.
to find Admin Click on the little shield on the top right of your screen.
You should see a suite of Admn Tools such as below. You can use them in any order you like but, to me, it makes sense to start with Your Settings.
8. Start by adding a Group description if you didn’t get chance earlier. Then work your way through them all.
9. Below is the screen for Group Type. It’s fairly self explanatory
10. With a few exceptions such as the Privacy setting you can edit everything as many times as you like. For example, here I have amended the group name.
11. Adding a location is important. Some groups have a narrow geographic focus .. and others are global. From the options in the image you can see that this section is flexible.
How To Start A Facebook Group — Continued
12. Membership Section.
To stop spurious membership applications you might decide to add some membership questions. For example, if it is a local group ask the applicants for their postcode to confirm they are locals. The answers can only be seen by Admin so you might want to make that clear.
Questions aren’t mandatory. And you can ignore the answers if you wish at any time. But this setting does let you monitor who’s joining and enable you to filter them.
Membership Rules are a good idea.
13. You can write your own rules if you wish. But Facebook has some default ones you can click onto as they are .. or modify.
Rules can be changed later if need be.
14. There’s a button that makes agreeing to the rules mandatory if you want to add it.
15. To make life easier Facebook allows you to pre-approve some members. E.g. members of other groups you run.
16. It’s not just people that can join groups. Pages can as well. Pages are usually organisations or businesses so worth considering. Just click whichever suits you.
17. Membership Approval takes time.. not a lot in my experience, but you get the option to make approval automatic or not. Personally I like to see who’s joining.
18. There are many Group Features to consider. Posting jobs is turned off in all my groups.
19. Notifications. I want to see every post in the group. So I set the notification to on. Ditto Member Requests .. though I’ve never had one in any group yet!
20. You can archive Groups if you wish.
21. My last tip is to add an extra admin, if only to let you back in if you get locked out of your own group .. it happens. I usually have two admins as well as myself (though one backup is myself under another email address).
Enjoy your groups and post any questions if you need help.
Below is an example of one of my groups. I add this preformatted copy to every relevant page o my website and can send it to other groups both inside and external to Facebook.
Join the How to Dig for Victory Facebook Group
This website offers in-depth articles on a variety of fruit and veg gardening topics and is associated with the How to Dig for Victory group on Facebook.
The Group posts include additional quick tips and are where members can post, ask questions and comment.
To join the group follow this link https://www.facebook.com/groups/1097434250611034/?ref=share
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