My Facebook Group is Setup, Now What?

So you were all excited when you first discovered Facebook Groups and noticed that all the cool kids had their own group so you quickly jumped on the bandwagon to create one for yourself.  You went through the process of creating an enticing title/description, selected the perfect logo and then proceeded to invite all your friends to join...but now what???

First of all, I don't think Facebook Groups work for everyone and if you're creating one from a business perspective it is important to understand the purpose of the group.  They work similar to blogs and forums in that you can use them to communicate with members in the community as well help increase awareness of products, news and services in your organization/industry.  Below are a few items that you should consider addressing to help prolong the life of your Facebook Group:

• Growing the Community: It's important that you can continue to grow the number of members in your community for a couple of reasons. First of all, mentally, it gives other group members the confidence that your group is of interest.  Secondly, more members usually means more eyeballs viewing your content and more perspectives in the discussion.
  
• Fresh and Relevant Content: As with any blog or information portal on the web, users will come back if the content stays fresh and is relevant to their business needs.  I try to post relevant links to PDFs, case studies or posts regularly and this is useful in providing content for my members as well as promoting content from other industry sources.  Besides textual content, consider uploading images for your members to view - if you're in travel post hot destinations or discounts, if you're in entertainment post brochures or advertisement, if you're in search marketing post cool landing pages or conference pictures.
  
• Promote Discussion: It's difficult to get your members to initiate conversation, however since you are quite familiar with your vertical it allows you to get the conversation rolling with questions related to hot topics.  Discussion boards are an excellent way to share ideas and get multiple perspectives on a given topic.
  
• Leverage the Community:  If you have a community that is truly engaged with your group (i.e.: they actively participate in discussions, communicate with you offline, post links/images video) then you can leverage the community by promoting new whitepapers, events and industry news; this can be done with mass messaging to the entire group.  You can also segment the delivery of the content based on the members' geographic location or type of organization.   However, I do recommend you don't abuse this power because an information overload could lead to members leaving the group.

The social media strategy using Facebook Groups is still in its very early stages, therefore it's important to experiment with different tactics and share the results on ones which have and have not been successful.