Episode 6: Facebook Groups – Mark Zuckerberg’s Gift to You

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Alex Branning – Your Marketing Coach podcast. Yes, it is true. Facebook has made a huge change to their algorithm that really punishes Facebook pages, but they made a huge change to boost something else up.

All right. What did Facebook do here? Facebook made a drastic difference in what they call public content, public organic content. Let me give you the layman’s terms for what they’re talking about. They are really crimping Facebook pages and that’s a huge bummer. However, there are ways around it. In my last episode, episode five of the podcast, I talked about different ways for you to organically grow your Facebook page while following the Facebook rules. In the press release that Facebook put out, they mentioned why they’re doing what they’re doing and they told you exactly what to do so that your Facebook page can keep growing. I talked about that a lot in episode five.

Today, I’m going to talk about where they want users to focus their time and that is in Facebook groups. How do you as a business owner take that information and use it to your benefit? I’m going to dive into that in this episode here. I myself have three Facebook groups that I run. I have my Stay Humble Hustle Hard Facebook group. In that group, it’s really about just encouraging and motivating entrepreneurs from all around the world. My second Facebook group is Funnel Fridays. In that group, I talk all about click funnels, sales funnels, lead funnels, and really how to profit from your online presence. The third group that I run is specifically for my Level 10 Marketing Coaching Program. I share all that to say this. I have really embraced Facebook groups and I’m seeing a big growth in my business from following what Facebook is telling me to do.

Let’s dive in to what you can do to really take advantage of this. Now when you create an active Facebook group, when you’re the admin, the leader of this group, that puts you right away in a position of authority within the group. That’s always a good place to be. When you’re the one who’s in charge of the conversation, you have more control over what happens in that space. It’s a good place for you. I was talking with a client the other day, not the other day actually, it’s about six months ago now and it was a real estate agent. She was having a difficult time. She said, “You know, Alex, I have just a huge network of people and I want to be able to really focus my attention on the people that I have in my network.” I advised her to do this and I’m going to walk you through the same advice I gave her because you should be doing this exact same thing.

I talked to Debbie and I said, “Debbie, here’s what I recommend that you do. Create a Facebook group and in that group, I want you to put everyone that’s in your network, I want you to put all of your clients, your prospects, the ones that you’ve already started to work with,” because in real estate, timing is unique. Even if they’ve said, “Yes, I want to work with you,” there’s still some time. There’s a delay that goes into it sometimes just because of the market. “In this same group, put everyone that’s on your team. I want your assistant in there. I want your escrow officers, your title. Anybody that works on the deal with you, I want them all in this Facebook group. Then post at least every other day in the Facebook group with the main goal not to be talking about what Debbie does for business. People already know that. They’re already connected with you. What I want is I want you to engage your audience. Do fun things. Do things that get people talking. Share about local news. I want your Facebook group, Debbie, to be one of the things that people feel like they have to check on a regular basis to see what’s going on and what funny things are being posted.”

She followed my advice and now her Facebook group has literally hundreds of people in it. What did she do? She created a meeting space for everyone that knows her, likes her, and trusts her so that she can build her relationship with all of these people and within that Facebook group, she posts twice a month on how people can refer their friends to her. Did you know she just built a referral army of over 200 people that are consistently getting educated on how to send her clients? She has turned that Facebook group into so many real estate deals, it boggles my mind. I gave her that advice, she followed it. It’s the same thing I do. I bring my prospect, my clients, and everyone on my team into these Facebook groups and then I just engage, engage, engage. I make those Facebook groups something where I want people to go to on a regular basis.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Okay. Well, my team, my network isn’t as big as what you described Debbie’s as. I don’t have hundreds of people.” That’s okay. You only have 15 people, 20 people. I want you to create a Facebook group where you are talking to them, engaging them, really helping them understand what it is that you do. It’s important in a group setting to make it so that the people in that group are getting consistent value from you and you’re not selling them because look, if they wanted to work with you, they would already be doing it. Your job is not to convince them why they should work with you, your job is to engage them with fun content and educate them on what it is that you do so that they’re able to bring you referrals. A group will help you grow because with the right mindset like Debbie, you will be creating an army of referral partners.

If you’re listening to this right now and you say, “Okay, Alex, you’ve inspired me. I’m going to do it. I’m going to start a Facebook group,” I have a secret weapon for you that helps you turn your group, your brand new group into an active and thriving Facebook group and it’s called The Five Day Challenge. The Five Day Challenge is something that I learned from a good friend of mine named Elena VIncent. She is awesome and amazing.  She came up with this idea that is just absolutely brilliant. What is it? The Five Day Challenge is a competition with a designated timeline, a specific goal, and incentives. Your goal is to fill a group with ideal prospects by enticing them with a fun game where they can win prizes if they participate.

Here’s some examples of challenges that I’ve seen run. One of them was cut out sugar for a week. It was the Cut Out Sugar For a Week Challenge and every day, there were prizes that you could win as you participated in it. You could post in that contest, that specific challenge. You would post what you ate that day. You would just list it out and everyone that went without sugar that day was entered into a drawing to win a gift card or other product. That specific challenge was run by somebody in a health and wellness network marketing space. Here’s the thing. Yes, in that challenge, she was talking about cutting out sugar. That was the main goal. During the process, suddenly, she was introducing the people in her group to the different things that her company provided for her with the healthy living. It was a very genius way of not really hammering down her friends’ throats of what she did, it was a way for her to introduce what she is using the products for, how she is incorporating it into her diet, et cetera.

Another example of a challenge. Minimize Your Life, Five Days to a Decluttered House. This was a way for people, every day they had a specific task to do to help to declutter their house. It was brilliant. It was a great way for this client’s ideal customers to all join together. Another one that I saw, Spoil Your Wife This Week. This was run by a real estate agent who wanted to gather married men in his region all into a Facebook group so that he could be introduced to them as a local real estate agent. He ran this fun contest. It was wildly successful and I highly recommend running some things similar to that.

I gave you different examples. Notice that none of the examples of a five day challenge talked about the product or service that the contest holder actually provided. The reason for that is simple. We want to bring people into our group so that we can then educate them on what we do, have fun with them. We want to create that relationship and then based on that, then we have an opportunity to do business, but we’re not using the challenge to sell. We’re using it to engage and create a relationship.

Now why run one of these challenges? I mean there’s so many positive things that come of it. I’m going to list some of them. It grows your email list. The process of executing the challenge is grooming your leads. It’s becoming friendly with you. It establishes you as an expert, an authority in your industry or geographic area. Provides proof of what you’re selling. Then with the incentives, you get a lot of participation in your group and it creates a lot of momentum for you.

Now when you’re preparing to run this five day challenge, there’s a worksheet that I have and you fill it out. It’s got six questions for you to fill this thing out. Number one, what is the purpose of the challenge? What will you offer your participants at the end of the challenge? Who is your ideal audience? Now what’s the topic? The purpose of the challenge, that’s for you. For me, when I run a challenge, the purpose is lead generation. The topic, well the topic could change. I’m doing one soon for email list building. It’s going to be a fun five day challenge for email list building. Now what’s the promise of the challenge? Well, that just depends on what it is that you’re doing. For the one who cut out sugar, the promise was you’ll feel better, you’ll have fun, and you’ll meet friends in the area that are also cutting out sugar. It’s just way for people to create relationships. With the spoil your wife challenge that I used as an example, the promise of that challenge was that the people who participated in that challenge were going to have a happier wife and a happier life. Brilliant.

The prizes that you’ll be giving away. Again, as you prepare to run your challenge, you want to ask yourself what’s the purpose of the challenge for yourself? What will you offer your participants at the end? In other words, what’s the sales pitch? Who is your ideal audience? Who are you bringing in? What is the topic of your challenge? In other words, what is the thing that you’re challenging them to do? What is the promise of what they will get out of the challenge? Then what are the prizes you’ll be giving away? I encourage you to give away a prize a day. Examples of some prizes to give away. You could do cash, gift cards, maybe some product, time with you if you’re an expert in the industry and people want to sit down and chat with you. You could also give them exposure or awards within the group.

I knew one gal, she was tight on funds, but really wanted to run a challenge. Every day, she would make someone the MVP of the group for that day. She only gave away one prize at the end. She still got a lot of good engagement though because people were having fun during her challenge. When you run the challenge, post daily. Again, incentivize engagement, really connect with your audience. I highly recommend sending daily emails to all the participants and then wrap up the challenge with action steps that they could take to continue the progress that they’ve made. Always announce the winners, that way people know who won.

I highly recommend running that five day challenge. That’s my secret weapon. You can learn more about it and download my worksheet on my website, AlexBranning.com/episode6. If you’re interested in running this challenge, I’m going to include my challenge workshop. It’s a part of my Facebook Bootcamp. I’m going to include the Facebook Bootcamp when you buy Power Engagement Marketing. You could do that by going to AlexBranning.com/episode6. There is the free worksheet there for the five day challenge, but if you really want to dive in deep with this and work with me on this, I’m making Power Engagement Marketing available to you. I would love to work with you on this.

Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I hope you got a ton of value out of it. If you did, please do me a huge favor and leave a comment for me on whatever platform you’re listening, whether that’s Google Play, I got a lot of people on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud. Wherever you’re listening right now, if you could leave a comment, that would be awesome. Thank you guys so much for joining me. I hope you loved my jingle. I will talk with you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

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