Finding Facebook Groups to Join: How to Convert + Checklist

We love Facebook groups because they’re integral to your omnichannel marketing.

By devoting a couple of hours a week to FB groups, you can elevate your growth efforts and leverage them as a new funnel for your business

But, let me be clear.

This guide won’t tell you the names of which Facebook groups to join and market in.

These will be unique to your industry and needs.

What this guide will do is teach you is how to choose the right Facebook groups to join using our framework, teach you how to convert, and even include a checklist of the traits of the group that you should be looking for.

You shouldn’t be posting on random FB groups.

It’s really a waste of time.

You’re going to have to personalize posts, conduct research, and spend valuable time, so why spend it on a random group?

It’s all about being intentional with your Facebook group marketing.

You might be posting on a lot of Facebook groups with a lot of members, but if none of these convert then it’s just wasted effort.

What’s important is the quality of the groups you’re joining.

Here’s our checklist of what to consider when finding a Facebook group to join.

Criteria 1: Size

1,000 members minimum – if less, continue reading our notes below.

Why 1K Facebook members?

Well, why not?

Getting 1,000 members added to a group might not be a big deal in this day and age, but it still requires a lot of effort.

You need to join a Facebook group where you know admins have spent the time and effort to market the group to at least a thousand members with the same interests as yours. This indicates that there is still a constant effort to grow the group and increase its surface size.

These many members also indicate interest in the group’s activities and you need that sustained interest moving forward.

A lot of members also mean more sets of eyes to look at whatever it is you want to put out.

Here’s the caveat.

There will be some groups with less than 1,000 members that would be great for you to post in, but there are usually rare. If you want to join these groups, just make sure that they have enough active engagement.

Criteria 2: Previous Engagement Related to Your Niche

The next thing you have to consider isn’t just engagement, but engagement related to your niche.

Everyone might be active in a group and cause a lot of posts to go viral, but if these posts are not related to what you specialize in then there’s no point in posting in that group because it won’t get proper engagement.

The magic number you’re looking for is 100 engagements on a post that is related to your niche. This means comments plus reactions on a post.

Searching for these posts also gives you enough time to do research on what types of posts related to your niche work well in the group that you want to use for your marketing needs. Make notes on this so that you can use this in the future to customize the posts you’re putting out.

This also indicates that at least ten percent of a group of 1,000 are interested in your topic and this should be enough to drive growth.

Criteria 3: Existence of Spam

The moment you see a lot of spam in a group, leave.

It’s not going to be worth it.

The existence of spam is indicative of a lot of things.

The first and most obvious is the existence of group members who just joined to sell products and not actively engage with the group. Posting on the group just makes you seem like one of them and you don’t want that to hurt your reputation since there are still likely members in the group who are there for real reasons and not to sell.

Next, is the stagnation of the group. Unpatrolled groups mean that the admins who are running the group are not currently active and have left the group to die a natural death in the hands of spammers. You want a group with active admins who can help foster engagement and real networking in the group.

Lastly, the existence of spam means – that even though you have an active group – your potential posts won’t be noticed as much since people are more in-tuned to associate things with spam or be overwritten by spammers themselves.

So, the question boils down to: “who do you determine what’s spam in a group?”

Spam includes, but is not limited to:

• Links to outbound sites that look shady
• The overuse of URL shorteners to hide potentially bad links
• Posts that are actively selling a solution
• Invitations to like, comment or share a post that is not related to the purpose of the group

However, don’t dismiss the group entirely if there are less than a thousand members if the group is filled with active members that belong to your niche, continue evaluating the group’s eligibility to be part of your hit list.

Criteria 4: Exclusivity

One of our favorite determining factors of a group’s worthiness is its exclusivity.

What’s the fastest way to do that?

Make it a private group.

As much as possible, you want to join groups that have a screening process because this means that the admins want to taker care of the quality of the group’s interactions.

Another bonus factor is the questions that they have in place when you request to join their group. The more refined and deliberate the questions, the more you’ll know that the admins are in control of who joins.

When you add exclusivity, you give members the feeling that they’re part of something bigger so they strive to be part of the group’s vision.

Criteria 5: Audience Makeup

Who are you selling your products and solutions to?

Is it to prospects primarily on the west coast? Is it to people in Asia? Is it available for everyone as long as they have an internet connection?

That’s your ideal customer profile right there, and this applies to your group joining efforts on Facebook as well.

When looking for a Facebook group to join, you need to assess the makeup of the audience if they fit your bill.

There’s no way of really sifting through everyone in the group to check for demographics or putting in your own qualification frameworks, but what you can do is to do a quick read-through of who’s there.

Check out how people are posting. Are they posting in a particular language? How’s the quality of their posts and writing? What are they trying to sell or discuss?

These are all clues to the makeup of the group and you need this to make sure you’re not wasting your time joining useless groups.

Bonus Criteria: Sample Check

Once you’re done with these five checks don’t start posting just yet.

There is one last thing you have to do and it’s called the sample check.

Now if you’re filtering groups based on how many members are in them, you won’t be able to check out all 1,000 or so members, that’s close to impossible.

What you want to do is check a sample of the members that are on the group.

Now, this process takes a lot of time, but you’ll only have to do it once.

Scroll down and take a look at the posts on the group and check out the profiles of at least 20 of the members.

You want to look for how they’re interacting with people on Facebook and what they are posting about. Make sure that none of them are bots or peddlers of spam, check to see if they are really who they say they are.

Check out where they work and what they specialize in.

If you can do more than 20 even better.

Now, if you notice that most of the active people are high-quality members, then you know you’re in the right group.

How Many Groups Should I Join?

That really depends on who you ask.

Joining at least five should be fine when you’re first starting out, but don’t exceed 10 if the groups are all related.

Here’s the thing.

You’ll be leveraging these groups as platforms for whatever it is you’re releasing so that means you’ll be making new reiterations of the post on each of these groups.

If you have to rewrite and retweak for 10 different outlets you might run out of steam.

Also, if you post the same “themed” post for 10 groups, you run the risk of common members calling you out for being spammy on multiple groups.

That’s why pick the ones that matter.

If you follow the steps to this, you shouldn’t end up with more than 20 groups.

Some fall out of your list based on location alone and the rest will suffer a beating because of quality.

Another critical consideration is how much sustained activity can you do with all of them.

Remember these aren’t just message boards for you to sell, they’re also places where you need to be actively engaging and talking to people. Having more than 10 groups might be a full-time job and you don’t want that

What to Do Next?

You can’t just post yet.

It’s time for you to integrate yourself within these groups and be a part of their vision.

This starts with warming yourself up to the existing members – even the admins.

You need to be engaging and you need to be able to provide value to the people that are there. Comment on the posts that require your opinion, and make sure you share value by providing people with actionable advice or commentary that helps them grow.

Read about how to generate leads using Facebook groups here

Once you’ve established yourself as a bonafide member of the group, only then can you use viral transformation posts or other types of inspiring messaging as a way to build your own funnel in the Facebook group.

If we can leave you with one piece of advice, be genuine.

People will know if you’re just using it to get more customers.

You want to be intentional and build relationships. That’s real growth hacking if you ask us.

This is What You Also Want in Your Own Group

The great thing about these tips is that these are also the characteristics that you want for your own Facebook group if you want to create a space for people to learn and market in.

It has to be an exclusive space where engagement is prioritized and people can truly express their own ideas without fear of being called out.

You want it to have the highest standards of quality that is constantly growing and being a powerhouse on its own.

Make sure that you also perform these quick checks on the regular so that you can maintain the quality of your group.

Check if you’re achieving your size goals, if other new members are posting spam, if your qualification questions are working to filter out people who are unwanted, etc.

That’s the only way to make sure that you build something that’s worth joining.

We’ve had to do the same thing in our own group as well when we were first starting out. It’s all worth it at the end of the day and you want people to have real relationships in the group.

Takeaways on Finding a Facebook Group to Join

There are a lot of Facebook groups out there.

A lot.

But, not all of them are worth it.

The more you spend time with low-quality Facebook groups, there more your campaign falls in quality as well.

You have to understand that your Facebook groups are a channel on their own.

All of the groups that you join are immediately a sub-channel.

Do you want to post your good content on bad channels?

Of course not.

That’s why you have to take care when you’re finding Facebook groups to join.

You got this.