Are Facebook Groups Still A Thing?

Are you a complete snob when it comes to Facebook for business? I was too, until I stumbled upon a strategy that changed everything for me this year.

In this episode, I discuss Facebook, and how it has evolved into a powerhouse for generating leads and building a thriving community for Flow State Business.

I’m actually celebrating my Facebook group hitting 5,000 members this week  and I’m spilling all the tea on what’s driving incredible success in with this really specific strategy.

I'll walk you through my entire Facebook journey—from the early days of Wednesday Wine Downs  (IYKYK) to navigating my love-hate-love relationship with the platform.

Curious? Listen to the episode and maybe just maybe you could be inspired to rethink your Facebook leads strategy.

P.S. Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your thoughts on FB and if you’re keen to try this out for yourself

• Check out my Flow Frequency Quiz here
• Join my Facebook Group here 
• Send me a DM on INSTAGRAM 📸 here
• Subscribe to my YOUTUBE channel here 
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  00:00:00 Intro
  00:00:23 Using Facebook for Business
  00:02:09 Creating a Private Facebook Group
  00:04:20 Losing Passion for Facebook
  00:04:47 The evolution of Facebook.
  00:07:48 Shameless promotion on Facebook.
  00:09:57 Networking in Facebook Groups
  00:16:24 Paid Facebook groups for marketing.

Transcript

In this episode, I am going to talk about something that I know personally, I've had a lot of resistance around and I think you may be somewhat in the same boat as me. And this is good old fashioned Facebook and how I'm using Facebook for business. Specifically, the main strategies that are really working in terms of generating leads, getting my brand, my business, my message known to the Facebook community. and how I'm utilizing my Facebook group. I do have a Facebook group and I'm celebrating 5,000 members in the Facebook group as of this week, which is just absolutely incredible. If you're on the inside of this free Facebook group, then you will know that there is a certain strategy I'm running on the inside, which is very unlike me in one sense, which I'll talk about in this episode and also utilizing other Facebook groups, whether it be free or paid to get some interest around the business, get more people signing up to my freebies and generally what has been really such a big success in the company in 2024. So let's chat all about Facebook, but I think it would be a miss if I didn't first introduce you to my entire a Facebook journey. Like a lot of you, I started using Facebook in the very early 2000s and it was really awesome. It was a friend's platform. I would be sharing a lot of my personal life on there with just my personal page and gosh, the algorithm was so good, wasn't it? Like, do you remember how amazing it was? when you could literally put something out there and it was like, bam, just everyone saw your stuff. So that's kind of the Facebook I'm talking about. When I started my side hustle, I began as a career coach and I had this very intuitive sense, which probably is more common sense more than anything else, that people on LinkedIn, which was my main social media platform and still is, I knew that my ideal clients wouldn't really want to be connecting with me, commenting on my stuff, engaging with me on somewhere like LinkedIn because, I mean, do they really want their managers and their peers seeing that they want career advice or they may want to start a side hustle? No. So I had this ingenious idea that I would begin a Facebook group, a private Facebook group. And this group had so many different names to it. It started off as the Korea Superstars and it ended up being the Own Your Hustle Facebook group. And this is cool. I actually really formed a beautiful space and community there. And I had Lots of discussion in the week. I also held the very famous Wednesday wine downs from my very early days. Every Wednesday I would sit down in front of the Facebook live camera with a glass of red wine of some kind, honestly, just because I needed to take the nerves out of the game. And I would just sit there and sip on my glass of red and share what was going on in my week, connect with the audience and. People were really sitting down and looking forward to the chats. And this was awesome for so many reasons. One, because it helped me build such a soul connected community. So many people on the inside also became friends with one another. They met each other in real life. When I held events, they knew each other's faces and names because of Wednesday Wine Downs. And it also really helped me grow my own personal game. camera confidence and getting me really connected on Zoom and speaking to a webcam basically, because it is such a different experience. If you are only just starting out in your online journey and delivering trainings online and virtually, it's okay. It does take a little while to get used to staring at yourself. If you're pre-recording or staring at a group of people behind the screen and a little green dot on the webcam, but that's really where my beginning ground grounds happened. What am I trying to say? My training grounds. There we go. And it was just amazing, but it got to this point where I just got really over it. I got over Facebook because it was changing so dramatically. And I noticed a lot of my clients and, you know, a lot of my peers and friends were saying the same, just how over they were. And this was just as Instagram was becoming bigger than Facebook. And so a lot of people were moving over to Instagram. They were doing, you know, Instagram lives was the thing and Facebook was sort of dying this very sad, slow death. And even to this day, I'll still get a lot of people saying, Oh my God, is Facebook still alive? Do people still use Facebook for business? And who exactly is on there? You guys, it is huge. Huge. Like there are full blown Facebook business people only, like as in they only use Facebook groups to grow their companies and their business and they never have to create content. They don't have to, you know, do the whole big thing that I feel a lot of Instagram business owners. kind of have to do to create leads or to create interest in whatever it is that they're selling. The Facebook group people have a totally, totally different business model altogether. And you know what? I'm so happy for them because they stuck around and it's that whole thing where you stick around long enough, it'll come back around. And now a lot of my clients who are using Facebook to grow only, they are really starting to just harvest the fruits of their patience more than anything else and staying focused on the game. So that's my history with Facebook and I did end up winding down the Own Your Hustle Facebook group, which got to a couple of thousand people, but I just lost a lot of passion for it. I lost being in there as a joy and I knew that, you know, whenever that happens, and I know that this is very much a manifesting generator thing in human design, where if I no longer feel connected and plugged into something, I don't have to keep going and I've given myself permission to pull the plug and change my mind and switch and pivot. I closed down the Facebook group and I fully concentrated on LinkedIn, podcasting, and Instagram as my main ways to grow connection with my audience and my clients. And so be it. And it was so, for a couple of years, I honestly totally ignored Facebook. I would only be on it if I needed to answer somebody on their random or I totally forgot to log in to Facebook one time that I had to reset my password because it had been so long. It was just one of those situations. Anyway, enter my amazing friend and she runs an entire company literally without needing to be on social media. And I remember one of my other friends who introduced us saying, yeah, you should meet Allie. She's never actually had to really have a big presence online or on social media. And I was like, what? Who is this unicorn? What do you mean? Because, you know, we're so in that content hustle, you know, content wheel type of energy that when someone comes along saying that they don't have social media profile, it's just crazy. Right. And also, you know, she was making a ton of money and growing her company in a really big way. And so I started to really delve back into the world of Facebook, particularly Facebook groups, and I noticed something so, so different about the space. And I can't quite explain why it works this way, but just go with me. So one of the observations I've really made about Facebook groups, it's extremely tacky. It's tacky to the point where people are promoting all kinds of things. There's network marketers in my group, there's travel agents who are talking about the latest travel tips. There's people who are promoting themselves to go live. People who's nutritionists, beauty therapists. I'm just looking at one of my latest posts where I've asked everybody to promote themselves. So I'm just going off what I'm seeing real quick. You know, high vibe, co-parenting, positive birth group, wellness warriors, be seen, be heard on video, video conferencing for women, authors, speakers, all kinds of things. But the way that it's done on Facebook, it is very much about shameless promotion. And I actually kind of love it because I don't really know of any other platforms that you can just blatantly, shamelessly promote your business in this way. And it is actually quite well received in Facebook land. People support one another this way. They're like, way to go. Awesome. So happy for you. Congratulations. If you blatantly promoted yourself like this on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, I reckon you would be marked as spam. But on Facebook, they're just like, we're so here for it. Let's spam each other all of our stuff. And, you know, somehow it's still relatively very well received. And obviously there's great ways of doing it. There's not so good ways of doing it, but you get the sentiment. Hi guys. I just want to quickly pop in and I'm hoping you are loving this episode so far. If you have heard me talk about flow and you are wanting and interested and intrigued to learn more about your own flow frequency and the health of your flow state, then you might be very interested in taking the flow frequency quiz. I'm going to leave that in the show notes. If you're interested to do that, it's absolutely free. It takes about seven minutes or less to complete, and it's going to give you so much insight into potentially where you can work on so that you can activate more flow in your life and business. OK, let's head back to the episode. So my Facebook group is very much a place where people promote their stuff quite shamelessly. And I'll even go as far to say as it's definitely not a community in my Facebook group. It's a place to network with other business owners. It's a place to get exposure. and to be seen, but it's really not there for anything else in terms of great value that I'm adding. And I have also experimented with my own personal Facebook group where I'm promoting my freebies. I'm even running some of my freebies in my Facebook group. Some of you have been in the experience itself and you've been in there. By the way, if you want to check it out, we'll leave it linked in the show notes below, or you can just go to Facebook and type in Flow State Business. And it's the one that says entrepreneurs building authentic personal brands. So really interesting, just go and have a look at it, even just as a social observation of what you're noticing and look at the posts that are doing really well. So there are some posts in here that get like 1000 reach and others that will get about 300 to 500 reach and noticing which ones don't get as high reach. You will notice almost straight away looking in my group that the ones that get really high reach are the ones where I'm asking. Questions like, why did you start your own business or promote your business and get noticed, for example. And then the ones where I'm literally talking of something really high value, like personal branding on LinkedIn and giving them tips on how to do that, really low engagement, actually quite hilarious because it usually would be the opposite in any other platform. But the reason why I have this, because from the outside, you might be asking, and I know a lot of my clients do. Why the hell do you have this group? Because it's really not really like you, Rubes, to not have a really connected community space. But this is just really where I do a lot of lead generation and I'm very much of the frame of mind of knowing, even posting on any other platform, There's tens of thousands of people, like even on Instagram, if I go and have a look at how many people my profile is reaching, you know, they have that stat on your professional dashboard and how many people my profile has reached in the last 30 days. I'm reaching 150,000 people on Instagram, but I have 18K followers. And, you know, even less than that, however many like, engage, comment, it's like 0.001%. And same with my own personal Facebook group. People know that it's being run by me, but I don't expect every single person in there to be a solar line match to my work. But it is a really, really great place where I can run a network rather than a deep community coaching group. And in that network, people find it valuable. Also, I promote my stuff, I let them promote their stuff, and it just works in this way. I have bigger plans for this group in the future when we hit 10K, 20K Facebook people in there. I may monetize in some form, but for now it's just a free group where people can go and network. So that's all I'll say about my group. How I use other people's groups. is very interesting and really this is where I find a lot of lead gen is really working so well for me right now. So I'm in a couple of free groups where I promote my work and obviously I only promote, please note this, please, please note this, I only ever promote any of my freebies. So if I have a free live event or a free series that they can go ahead and download and watch only when the host or the group allows for it. So when I see a post that's saying something along the lines of Promote your work. That is when I really see that as, yep. Okay, cool. I can go ahead and post some stuff in there. And when I post in there, I am really posting my own creation posts. So you know how on Facebook you can create your posts and then you've got either like a block color or a template that you can use, and then you can put your words over top of it. That's what I mean about a creation post. So I might say something along the lines of, hi guys, who's really interested to find out more about this, the and this, and if you are, leave me a comment and I will send you a link. So similar to what we'd be doing on Instagram, where the DM strategy is probably the most important and popular way to go ahead and receive leads and get people on your email list right now, you'd be doing the same strategy inside of the Facebook group. Now, there are a lot of people in certain groups, like there's one group I'm in has like a 100,000 people. I have another group that has 70,000 members. I have another group that has 20,000 members. So there is a ton of people, random out of nowhere leads, people, human beings who are commenting and wanting your stuff if you say it in the right way. Now, the majority of the work that goes behind this is in the comment back strategy. So it's not like you can put a mini chat behind a Facebook commenting, at least as far as I know, strategy. You really do need to answer each person. I don't personally do that. Thank goodness. I have a team member, Mia, who does all the comment backs and she's great. She sends the link and she'll literally say, Hi, I'm Mia. I'm Ruby's VA. Here is the link that was referred to. Enjoy. And it's still very much in my tone of voice, but I'm definitely not, you know, commenting back on every single person. I would literally be there forever, but I'll give you an example of a post that I've just done. And what it says on the post is LinkedIn is a gold mine. I made a hundred K in a hundred days. Who wants my step-by-step training before I make it paid? So this is a very simple post that I would also, you know, try out on LinkedIn and on Instagram, but look at the comment section. I know you can't. So let me just tell you, I posted this three days ago inside of a Facebook group with 78,000 members and there are literally 277 comments that saying, yes, please. I do. I'd love that. And then my team will go in once or twice a week and catch all those leads and basically. comment back to each and every single one saying, here is the link to sign up. And then they will get a notification directly, you know, inside of their Facebook bell notification section saying that Ruby Lee's responded. And then they can go and click on that and then they'll have the link. Then they can go and sign up and then they're on my email list. Ta-da! So I will do this both in paid and free groups. I do pay to be in a couple of communities that specifically allow you to grow your brand and allow you to make sales, allow you to lead gen inside of their groups. And paid Facebook groups can be anywhere between like I'm in one that's literally $3 a month. I'm in one that's $300 a month. I'm in another one that's a hundred dollars a month. So the way I think about it is that if I'm paying $500 a month US to be inside of these groups, I am essentially going to make that back with one course sale. And that's very worthwhile to me as well as adding anywhere between 500 to 800 new leads into my world and on my email list every four to six weeks. That's absolutely massive. And I will take that investment any day. I mean, this might be controversial, but any day overrunning meta ads right now. Because meta ads are just not performing. And I don't know if that's just a me thing. So please, if it's performing for you, just keep doing you, honestly, honestly. But I'm just someone who's really, really felt like meta ads has been a huge letdown. And it's not without trying with a ton of professionals and not without doing my own courses around it and running it myself. And I'll always give it a go. Like I will come back and try out some new meta ad professionals who just, you know, kind of vibe with me and I'll give it three months or six months, but I've never seen something work like this, like I do with paid Facebook groups. And yes, so a couple of things to note, it's a very, very, very cold lead pool, just like you would with meta ads, to be honest. Like I'm not expecting the people that are coming onto my list, the 700 or so every six weeks to even buy anything from me for at least 12 to 18 months. And this is from coming from me where I've had the business for six years. I know what a typical life cycle looks like. So even as they're coming in, I really see it as I'm planting the seeds, I'm sowing the seeds, but I won't see the real growth and connection and results maybe for a couple of years. Like they still need to get to know me in some form and that might be through Joining my Facebook group, being on my email list, reading my emails, checking out the podcast episodes I have, watching a vlog or two, joining a couple of freebies. And there'll be some in the top 5% who literally move from a Facebook group profile. promotion-y thingy that I've done, and they're literally signed up into a $5,000 mastermind within a four-week period. Absolutely that happens, but I'm talking about for the most part, I know that a lot of the harvest, so to speak, happens maybe 18 months on. So anyway, lots that I wanted to share here today, and I hope it's given you a little bit of insight. Maybe you just might want to try it out. I'm definitely not here sponsored by Facebook or any Facebook groups whatsoever. I just wanted to share with you what's working, what feels really in flow. I know it's really interesting. I think that's the right word for a lot of my personal clients, private clients who I speak to one-to-one and my groups that I chat to on Zoom. And I see all of them, their just eyeballs are so big, like what? Facebook groups? I know, like about two years ago, I was the same as you going, there's no freaking way I'm going to be back on Facebook. But it's just worked you guys. And if something's working, you know, I'm going to share it with you. And I would absolutely not gatekeep whatsoever around what is helping me out at the moment in terms of growth, because I'm telling you, it's definitely not hella working on Instagram. It's just not. So anyway, I shared this with one of my clients and she's like, Oh my God, I have been having so much resistance around joining Facebook again, but it's been coming to me from so many different angles that I just can't ignore it anymore as much as I want to. And then she went on to ask me a whole bunch of questions, which has led to this episode actually, like, what do you mean when you say that you're utilizing Facebook groups, when you're creating new ones and getting people in, how are you doing that? Or how are you contributing to other more established Facebook groups? So massive shout out to you babe for Marquetta, by the way, for asking that question, because I know that so many more of my other clients are also asking me everything in the same theme of that too. So I hope you enjoyed, come on over and message me. If you're on Facebook, don't message me on there. I'm dying to look at Facebook Messenger. Oh my God. I'm sorry. Is that just like the most ironic thing ever? Hi, this is the whole podcast about Facebook, but don't message me on Facebook. You can message me anywhere else. I promise. Instagram is going to be your best bet. So please just DM me over on Instagram after listening to a podcast that's about Facebook. Not confusing at all. And I know maybe some people are kind of laughing or rolling their eyes about that, but you get me. Okay. You get me. Okay. I'm going to leave it there before things get too silly. Enjoy Facebook group world. Message me with any questions. If you love this, share it with somebody, you know, this might spark a really interesting discussion with some of your other entrepreneurial business besties as well. If you haven't already and you loved this episode and the vibe of it, please do leave a review, especially if you're on Apple and listening to that. Every single review counts in such a massive way. I hope to see you in and around somewhere, the flow state business land, and I will catch you in the next episode. Okay. Bye my loves.