“River of marketing gold”: How social media groups can bolster engagement

In just the past fortnight, I’ve been lucky enough to mine two wonderful success stories out of the marketing treasure trove that is social media groups.

If you’ve just joined us, these groups are essentially communities of people enjoying ‘conversations on demand’ on their favourite personal or business topic.

Sometimes these groups contain tens of thousands of members, or even more.  In some cases, a significant number of members are in the market for your product or service.

Case study one: The successful callout response

As I’ve mentioned in many blogs before, I regularly monitor relevant Facebook groups for any conversations that might apply to me.

By regularly, I mean no less than three times a day — usually as I’m taking a break from my scheduled work.  This means my time or opportunity cost is very minimal indeed.

But in many ways, it’s almost marketing on autopilot because posts from the various Facebook groups appear prominently in my feed. Every now and then though, I’ll drop in on the more active groups to see what’s going on after hours.

While some don’t particularly want to ‘work’ after hours, I find it’s easy to make a quick comment on a relevant post or even promise to make contact with the poster during work hours.

But it was during my morning tea break that a ‘callout’ for small business branding specialists was posted in a popular national SME Facebook group.

Naturally, I responded immediately, as you would to any new and ‘hot’ lead.  The poster asked to be contacted by personal message (PM), which I did, but I also backed up my message by commenting on the post as this has the dual effect of alerting them to the PM and promoting yourself to anyone following the conversation.

What followed was a brief exchange of messages, a phone call and then an indicative quote. A couple of clarifying emails later and the business was mine. The following day I received a deposit component and started work. All, of course, without actually meeting the client in person due to them being two states away.

This series of events goes on ad infinitum in both business and consumer social media groups, as members freely seek the advice of the group about their particular product or service need.

Really its word of mouth on steroids as you not only get to access invaluable free leads but can promote yourself to group members at the same time.

Case study two: Huge growth in content views and branding

I’m assisting another small business with ramping up their content marketing efforts following a less than impressive attempt by another provider.

While it’s still early days for the strategy, the client is already receiving five times more views of their content on average and seven-eight times the engagement. And this is simply from sharing posts and information into relevant Facebook groups.

So the slightly greater time searching for and joining relevant groups and then sharing posts into them has already yielded a significant result, and is already starting to convert to follows and leads.

What’s more, the client is now receiving callouts for recommendations from prospects he previously had no access to. Which, in turn, is putting him in touch with thousands of sales prospects.

As easy as these case studies appear, however, these opportunities didn’t happen by accident. In both cases, careful planning was required to identify relevant groups, ensure admission into them and to maintain a regular presence within them – often by way of high-quality content creation and sharing.

But as you can see from these two very recent case studies, it’s critical you don’t ignore this new and thriving river of marketing gold.

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