Your omnichannel marketing campaign should be driving traffic from everywhere.
It doesn’t matter what platform or platform features you’re using.
FB groups are an excellent example of this.
All marketers agree that you can use regular Facebook features on your profile to bring in traffic, but leveraging groups on the platform can take that lead generation to the next level.
In this guide, we take a look at how to use Facebook groups to drive traffic to your landing pages, social profiles, websites, and funnels.
Why are focusing on traffic instead of leads?
Well sometimes you don’t always have to go after leads from Facebook and two-step processes are always a great way to make sure leads are eased then converted on your site itself.
Get Your Viral FB Post Ready
Before you dive in, create a couple of posts that you would want to post on Facebook.
These should be about topics that are transformative, subjects that you know your prospects will really be interested in.
We’re not talking about your standard infographics or white papers, but transformative posts that are not just full of information, but also filled with emotional elements.
Talk about a client you helped that experienced a 180-degree change in the way that they did business, a rags-to-riches story, or even some hard truths about a certain topic.
That’s the organic way of doing it because people are emotional creatures.
Plus, when you use emotion the messaging gets to stick to their minds.
Add media, especially pictures.
When you paint a good word picture, it helps if you put an actual picture in there.
For example, if you’re a fitness coach, put a before and after photo, if you’re a business coach show the bedroom where the business was created and the actual office today, it’s these little things that make viral posts and they are unavoidable.
Keep the text itself short.
This doesn’t have to be like one of our LinkedIn posts, you can keep it to 100-200 words if you wish, but it has to make a difference.
Also, don’t fall in love with the text.
You’ll probably have to personalize a lot of it for every group you’re posting it on.
Now, do you want to add links to your posts?
Well, that really depends on how your post is structured.
Adding a link is a good idea to push links to your website, but make sure that they just organically come into the post.
Don’t force them in.
While you’re at it, always shorten your links and add a UTM whenever necessary.
This allows you to track everything that’s going on.
It’s Research Time
Just because you have a couple of viral transformation posts or highly relevant material ready, doesn’t mean it’s time to post.
Here’s what.
A post might go viral in one group, but then fail to get almost no traction in another FB group.
That’s normal.
It all depends on the type of people that are within a certain group, the topics that they talk about, and what the overall vibe is.
Before you post anything, make sure you get a handle on the group that you want to post in.
You want to know what the group “culture” is and what has recently been getting traction.
That’s critical to figuring out if you should tweak your supposed viral posts before you publish them.
Go to each high-profile group that you’re in and start sorting posts by new activity and filter through the posts that have 50+ engagements – this means adding reactions and comments together. (For niche groups, getting more than 50 engagements is already considered going viral.)
Try saving the posts and do your analysis.
Take a look at the similarities in:
- The type of post
- The first line
- Media that was used
- When it was published
- Who the post was made for
- Formatting
Make sure you log everything down for each group so that you know what to post in advance.
I recommend sticking your findings into a spreadsheet so that you can record your analyses.
Tweak Your Main Viral Posts
Now that you’ve done your research, you can take your ready viral or transformation posts and start tweaking them for each group that you have.
Use the analysis that you have on each group and personalize each post for each unique group.
This means even changing and tweaking out photos and media that are attached to the posts – this is why we asked you to get a lot of photos.
Personalization is essential to ensuring that your posts resonate with your audience and that they receive the same attention that other “viral” posts are getting.
Think of this as repurposing.
Engage First Before You Post
Even if you’ve done your research and you’ve tweaked your ready posts, you still can’t post right away.
You still need to build rapport and social capital with each group so that fellow members will know that you’re genuine with your intentions.
Here’s the thing.
Imagine if you were a member of a group that you care about and someone suddenly posted a great post that you’re really interested in. However, this is the first time that the person posted and isn’t really active in the group.
Wouldn’t you be a little skeptical about the underlying reasons for the post?
It would come off as indirect selling, spammy, and sometimes, even scammy.
You need to structure your outreach on Facebook groups as organic as possible.
So that means being active in each of the groups you’re in.
Make sure that you regularly comment or engage with people in the groups that you’ve targeted even before you put out your first post. This will really help you build social capital with them, and when the time comes for you to post, they’ll trust what you’re saying.
Post
Now that you’ve personalized your post and were able to create social capital in the Facebook groups you’ve chosen, it’s time to post.
If you’ve got friends in the group, make sure you get them to talk about it. This will help you get some traction with the post.
Every time someone comments or engages with your post, make sure you talk to them.
This keeps the conversation going and it increases the likelihood of driving their interest in your profile and your landing pages.
If you find that you can’t comment, simply react to their posts with an emoji. This doesn’t just show people you’re friendly, but it’s also a show of activity in the group.
By the way, make sure that you follow best practices when posting on Facebook. There are still certain times of the day and week where you should be posting for maximum exposure
Find out when is the best time to post on Facebook in our guide!
Caveat
If you’re posting on highly similar groups, it doesn’t just help to personalize it. You should also consider the timing of your posts.
Some groups have similar members so you have to watch out that they don’t flag you for spamming different groups. Being flagged like that can do a number on your reputation on Facebook.
Get the Data
You can’t just forget about the post and wait for traffic to start pouring in. It’s time for you to take a look at how good the post was performing and converting.
You’re looking for two things here:
- How much engagement the post is getting – this signifies how efficient your personalization is.
- How much traffic is being converted – this tells you the effective the post was in general.
We always say, “you can’t growth hack if you don’t track”
And, the same reason applies even to group posts.
Engagement
To track engagement, you want to have a look at how many reactions and comments your post got in the past 24 hours and what times were people engaged with your post.
This tells you if you got your personalization done right.
The more personalized the post is to the needs of the group, the more you should see engagement go up.
However, a lack of engagement doesn’t mean they lack personalization, sometimes it could be the wrong posting time or your post being buried underneath other posts in the group.
Actual Traffic
If you followed our guide and added a link using UTM code, you’ll be able to attribute traffic going into your website using UTM.
You can take this a step further by adding the Facebook Pixel to your external landing page and remarketing to people who visited with Facebook Ads.
Checking All the Groups
You want to repeat this process again with the other groups that you’ve posted in.
Crunch the numbers and also cross-reference which ones were effective in getting your message out.
Make these groups a priority.
Wait and Post Again
By this time, you should have enough data to keep you going.
However, you shouldn’t just keep posting.
You can post small things to keep your activity going. However, bide your time and wait for a week until your next big viral post. You don’t want to come off as someone who’s trying to “wow” them at every step of the way.
This also doesn’t mean that you should post anything mediocre.
Keep things going.
Once a week is done, you can post again.
Repeat the previous steps and try to gather data again, by this time you should be more effective in what you’re doing.
Keep Up Your Normal FB Activities
If you’ve been posting quality content on different groups, you’ll be able to start building up traffic not only to your external website resources but also to your Facebook profile.
Think about it, what’s your first reaction when you see something interesting being posted by someone you don’t know on Facebook. if it’s not to check out the external links, it’s to check out who they are.
Curiosity is just a human instinct and you want to satisfy that curiousness.
You need to make sure that your profile is optimized to become a landing page on the site and convert people who haven’t been converted by your post already.
Make sure that your profile has external links and enough social proof to convince people to want to work with you.
Here’s how to optimize your Facebook profile for lead generation.
Always keep posting on Facebook, if you can’t find anything to post then repurpose other posts that you have on your other social networks.
People will not engage with you if you’re not an engaging person.
From time to time, make sure you add the link to your website on one of your posts.
Takeaways on How to Use Facebook Groups to Drive Traffic
Driving traffic on Facebook is easy.
But, it all depends on the connections you make with the people in the group itself.
How do you do that?
By being relational.
For some people, it’s easy if they were already influential in the group to begin with. However, you need to understand having sway in a group starts with working with the people.
You need to be someone who provides value so that others can give you value at the same time.
That’s how you hack traffic from Facebook.
