A great example of a digital campfire is a highly engaged Facebook Group. This blog will explain how your brand can leverage a group for digital marketing purposes to help you build a better brand.

Facebook groups can act as focus groups with the proper digital marketing strategy. A group with high user engagement can help you make important decisions by directly engaging with your customer base or target demographic. However, you don’t want to come on too strong and too sales-y. Instead, focus on following three rules when creating a solid strategy to engage your Facebook Group:

1. Provide Value

Your customer base should feel that your Facebook Group is a safe space to discuss and share opinions about your brand openly. It doesn’t matter whether these opinions are good or bad as long as people feel comfortable having genuine discussions.

If you’re not immediately deleting negative comments and only encouraging positive feedback, you’re providing value to group members who will feel at ease when offering critiques. This openness is endlessly valuable to your brand, as you will have access to what your customers feel you’re doing well and what you need to change going forward.

2. Pay Attention

It’s important that the members of your Facebook Group feel that their voices matter and their opinions are being heard. They will feel more empowered to offer beneficial feedback when you pay attention. You should be heavily monitoring your brand’s Facebook Group and replying when necessary.

If someone has a negative comment, thank them for sharing their opinion and let them know how you’re working on fixing this issue. Keep track of all the comments to figure out what problems need to be solved. For example, if someone posts about shipping costs being too high and multiple people like or comment on the post, come up with a solution to lower costs.

3. Be Consistent

Like other social media content, consistency is key. So here are some content ideas to stay consistent and boost your Facebook Group’s engagement:

• Run a contest or challenge.
• Post relevant blog posts, current events or industry news to ensure content isn’t always brand-specific but more specific to the group’s purpose.
• Provide exclusive news, product announcements and behind-the-scenes looks.
• Welcome new members by private messaging them or asking them to introduce themselves with a fun group-related question. For example, if the group is about vegan recipes, ask them their must-have pantry item.
• Run a poll or quiz to get insight into what they want to get from the group and offer a prize (like a free product) as an incentive.
• Schedule Facebook Live sessions to talk to group members in real-time.
• Do a theme day once a week like #ThrowbackThursday, #MotivationMonday or #WellnessWednesday and encourage group members to participate.
• Ask a lot of conversation-starting questions or prompts that encourage discussion like the following:
• This is really important, and we’d love your feedback. Please leave a quick comment and tell me your thoughts.
• If you know anything about this topic, please let us know what you think.
• We’ve been curious about this for a long time. What do you think?
• Please share your experience.
• Share your tips and tricks with the group.
• What’s your opinion?

How to Grow Your Facebook Group

If you’re just starting a group or noticing stagnation, use these tips to boost engagement and attract new members:

• Add clickable links to the Group to your other platforms like your website and other social media pages.
• Make the group private to signify exclusivity.
• Offer free content like tutorials and e-books when members join the group
• Invite the followers of your Facebook page to the group
• Add a link to the group to your team’s email signatures
• Run Facebook awareness ads

Facebook Groups are a great way to encourage people to gather around your brand’s “digital campfire.” With the right digital marketing strategy, you will have a direct link to candid conversations with your customers.

Ensure you’re stimulating and engaging your group members to ensure they know it is a safe space to openly discuss the brand and related topics without consequence. Use it as a resource to address customer concerns, answer questions and provide brand-specific insight only you can provide.

A version of this article was first published on the DAN