Once upon a time, a long time ago when Facebook was young, we used Facebook Groups to market our businesses. This was because at that time, although Facebook Pages existed, they were only for movie stars–actually genuinely famous people.

The rest of us all built a group on FB, and then invited our “fans” to join it. We’d post about what was going on with the business, keep them updated, etc.

But then Facebook Pages came along, and pretty much everyone abandoned their group for a more formal Facebook Business or Fan Page. And then came the algorithm.

The sad thing about pretty much any FB page these days is how small your reach is. If you want something to be seen, you pretty much have to pay for it. Having said that, FB’s advertising is cheap and effective.

But I have been having some success with going back to old-school methods, including posting my blog in Facebook groups.

There’s two ways to do this.

Grow your own. You can create your own FB group around a specific topic. You can’t create one specifically for your blog–that likely wouldn’t work. But you can broaden the topic and create a group on that. For example if you are a YouTuber who lives in Vancouver and likes to do makeup tutorials, you could create a group either for Vancouver YouTubers or for makeup Vloggers. The idea is, that you’re creating a community.

First decide if you want your group to be public (meaning anyone can join–less work, but more of a chance for spam) or closed (meaning you have to be approved and added by an admin).

You’ll need to create some guidelines for your new group. What people can post when, etc. Ideally, you’ll want to do things like weekly shout-outs for example, and ask questions to spark discussions.

Join a Group.  I belong to quite a few FB groups, and some of them are specifically for bloggers, and others are not. Many of the blogger groups I belong to have daily, weekly or monthly sharing threads, that allow you to share your blog post. Some of these groups have tens of thousands of members, and they can be quite the powerful marketing tool.

The key to benefiting from these groups is to abide by the rules. Note which days they allow for sharing, and join in on those days.

Additionally, you need to be part of the group. This means interacting with other group members, liking and sharing their content.

I belong to a group that has nearly 100,000 members, and is a group for vegan food. Basically, people post photos of their vegan food. It’s not a group for bloggers per se, but they also don’t mind if I post the recipe to my food in the comments. I always get a nice spike in traffic on those days.

Finding groups on Facebook is easy. Just type in a few keywords to the search box and then select “groups” in the tabs. Look for groups with higher amounts of numbers if possible.

After you join, sit back for a while and observe the group. When you feel confident that you understand how it works, you can start to join in.

Finally, if you are a blogger in Vancouver, feel free to join our YVR Bloggers group. We do a daily sharing thread.

Further reading:

How [and Why] to Build a Booming Facebook Group

How to Use Facebook Groups to Generate Free Traffic