How to Grow Your Facebook Group from 0 to 10K Members Without Spending a Dollar

In the world of social media marketing, Facebook Groups are a powerful tool for building a community and promoting your brand.

After the Facebook algorithm update that de-prioritized brand content several years ago, these groups have become even more important for connecting with your followers.

However, growing a Facebook Group from scratch can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t have a budget for paid advertising. But fear not, because it’s absolutely possible to build a thriving group without spending a dollar!

Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketer or a community manager, these tips will help you increase your group’s visibility, engagement, and member base.

In this post, we’ll show you how to grow your Facebook Group from 0 to 10K members using proven strategies that don’t require any money.

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What Is a Facebook Group and How Is It Different from a Page?

A Facebook Group is a place where a community can come together to engage on a shared interest, whether that’s a cause, an issue or an activity. They’re not the same as Facebook Pages, aka business pages, which were designed to be the official Facebook presence for brands, business or celebrities.

As an example, let’s say you’re a fan of the Netflix show Squid Games. If you want to keep up to date with the latest information about the show, you’d connect with the official Facebook Page:

Squid Games Facebook Page

Alternatively, you could join a Squid Game Facebook Group – such as this one – to chat about what’s happening on the show with fellow fans.

There’s one other key difference. Whereas Pages are automatically public, meaning that anyone can see them, Groups can be set up in one of three ways:

Publicly Available: Anyone can join
Administrator Approval: The Facebook Group admin reviews applications to join and decides whether or not to approve them
Private Group: Group membership is by invitation only

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What’s the Big Deal About Facebook Groups?

You might already be posting regularly across LinkedIn and other social networks, alongside a host of paid and organic search activity. So what’s so special about Facebook Groups? Why should you be paying attention?

Practically speaking, they’ve become a necessity for brands on Facebook since the site tweaked its algorithm at the start of 2018 to promote more posts from family and friends and less commercial content. This move limited the reach of organic posts from businesses, forcing them to choose between investing more money in Facebook Ads or building a vibrant Group to continue reaching their target audience on the platform.

Brands that chose the Facebook Groups approach have seen real success:

Groups generate far better engagement than fan pages and can create an active community centered around your products or services.

It seems that users like them, too. If you’re anything like me, you’ll regularly interact with half a dozen or so Facebook Group for exclusive content or just a feeling of community with the other members of the group. They can be professionally focused, hyper-locational, service-based or related to your hobbies and interests.

And the numbers back up my experiences:

More than 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups every month.
There are more than 70 million admins and moderators running active Facebook Groups.
More than half of all users are in five or more Groups.
The median number for Groups ranges from 25 to 100 people (in this particular survey).

Fun fact: In 2018, Zuckerberg said he wanted to see the number of users in these Groups climb to one billion by 2024. He reached that goal more than one year early!

Dive Deeper: 12 High-Performing Facebook Group Engagement Tactics

Use Your Facebook Group to Quickly Grow Your Email List

Before we get into how to grow your Facebook Group from 0 to 10K members without spending any money, here’s an underused hack you’ll want to know:

Facebook Groups are one of the best ways to build an email list.

That’s because Facebook allows you to set up new membership questions:

Basically, you can ask folks any number of questions when they first join your group. Including this magic question:

If you’d like to join our email newsletter to stay in the loop, what’s your email address? We’ll send you occasional, educational content on [group topic].

You’ll find that a portion of new members will happily give your email list a try.To set this up, you can use software like Group Collector to automatically sync emails from your Facebook Group into your email marketing platform.

Powerful, right?

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Facebook Group Case Studies

Now that you know why Facebook Groups are so powerful, let’s take a look at how two brands leveraged their Groups to drive impressive growth.

Case Study: Condé Nast Traveler

Luxury lifestyle and travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler raised a few eyebrows when it launched a secret Group (aka “closed” Group, which has more privacy options) called Women Who Travel:

Rather than chasing followers with giveaways and competitions, the magazine’s Group encouraged users to apply for membership by explaining why the Group matters to them.

It worked. Within a year, the Group grew to more than 50,000 members, three-quarters of whom actively engaged with it on a monthly basis (at time of writing, it’s grown further still and currently has over 155.8K members).

Since then, Condé Nast has launched Facebook Groups for a further eight of its brands, including The New Yorker, Teen Vogue and Vanity Fair.

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Case Study: Bannersnack

Digital graphics service Bannersnack created a Facebook Group to connect with its clients, build a community for sharing work and receiving feedback, and offer exclusive insider news and early access to new products to its members.

The brand used a diverse range of tactics to grow its Group, including using Facebook Messenger to invite people who had already engaged with the brand, and promoting the Group through email newsletters like this one:

The company’s efforts paid off, resulting in a 400% increase in members and boosting engagement with the group by 350%.

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Considerations Before Starting a Facebook Group

If you’re convinced that a Facebook Group can play a vital part in your brand’s social strategy, there are a few key things to consider before you launch.

What Does Facebook Group “Success” Look Like for You?

It might sound like an obvious question, but it’s often overlooked: Ask yourself why you want to launch and grow a Facebook Group.

Presumably, the real reason isn’t simply to acquire a few thousand followers. More likely, the end goal for all your marketing efforts is to drive sales or generate leads. If that’s the case, it needs to be reflected in your Group’s Facebook posts, whether that’s through exclusive offers, previews of upcoming product releases or video tutorials demonstrating how your product or service works.

Whatever your ultimate goal, you need to have some way of measuring your performance. Do this by setting actionable KPIs using the “SMART” methodology:

A good example of a KPI could be: “Increase clicks to our website from our Facebook Group by 15% over the next quarter.”

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Do You Have the Time and Resources to Manage a Facebook Group?

As with any organic marketing tactic, Facebook Groups don’t just blossom overnight. You need to put the effort in to make your Group a success and give users a reason to sign up (generally because they can’t find this elsewhere).

If you don’t have the time or resources to commit to your Facebook Group, you can’t expect to build a strong, engaged community on the platform.

But don’t ever outsource Facebook Group management, at least until you’ve set a Group tone. Your Group is an intimate setting where you’re facilitating conversation, so it should be run by someone who knows your brand inside and out.

How Do I Set Facebook Group Rules?

The best Groups have clear guidelines in place about how they operate. This sets user expectations from the moment they join and keeps things running smoothly (as long as Group admins enforce them).

Again, this might sound obvious, but I’ve seen plenty of Groups that don’t do this – and they rarely work as well as those that do.

Creating rules for your Group is simple if you follow these steps:

From your News Feed, click Groups in the left menu and select your group. If you don’t see Groups, click See more.
Click Group Rules in the left menu.
Click Get Started then click to add from the example rules or write your own.
Click Create.
To adjust the order in which group rules appear, click the icon with the 6 gray dots and drag and drop the rules into the order you’d like.

So what should your rules look like? The guidelines you’ll want to put in place will obviously depend on your brand and audience, but as a helpful starting point, here are the kinds of things you should include:

Group description: An in-depth explanation of the Group’s background.
Group goals: Your goals for the community, such as promoting group chats about a certain topic.

Group privacy: A clear explanation of what sort of activity is considered “spam” or disrespectful to other members, and the actions you’ll take to police it. This is important to maintain the safety and comfort of all members.
Group resources: A rundown of resources available to Group members, such as videos or guides, and how to find them.
Group names: A list of all current admins, plus details of their authority level.

Once you’ve created your rules, save them in a Facebook document and make this your pinned post, so that they’ll appear at the top of the Group at all times.

You’ll also need to dedicate the time to enforce your rules. If you can’t commit the time yourself, you’re either going to need to bring on moderators (volunteer or paid) or invest in a different marketing tactic.

Facebook Group Do’s and Don’ts

Over the past few years, I’ve been a part of dozens of Facebook Groups, and I’ve picked up plenty of insights along the way about what to do and what to definitely not do when running one:

Do:

Offer your members valuable content and targeted offers
Interact with your members and ask questions
Ask your most dedicated fans for help in growing the Group
Set clear rules (including privacy settings) so your members know what to expect
Send links to the Group to Facebook users you think would be interested
Create a strong theme to the content you post
Upload an engaging cover photo that immediately illustrates what your Group is about

Don’t:

Spam members with constant discount codes
Post dozens of times a day (you’ll risk driving members to switch off their Group notifications)
Overstretch by trying to handle all the admin yourself
Allow regular rule-breakers to spoil the Group for everyone else
Add people to a Group they know nothing about (or encourage others to do so)
Veer off topic and latch onto irrelevant trends

Once you’ve got the basics down, you’re in a great position to shift your focus towards increasing your membership. Follow these tips, and there’s no reason you won’t be able to grow your Group to thousands of members without having to spend a single dollar.

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How to Grow Your Facebook Group

So you’ve put in the hard work. You’ve figured out what you’re trying to achieve, you’ve got the time and resources to make it happen, and you’ve drawn up a clear set of guidelines.

Now for the fun part – launching your Group.

Give People a Compelling Reason to Join

“If you build it, they will come” might work for baseball diamonds, but it definitely doesn’t work for Facebook Groups. You can’t expect people to sign up just because it’s there.

Fortunately, there are a few ways to create a compelling reason for users to join:

Use the “About” section – found at the top left of the Group page – to explain exactly what makes your Group so great. Detail the Group’s purpose, the sort of Group posts they can expect to see, and the kind of experience that users can expect. You’ve only got 3,000 characters to play with, so use them wisely.
Give users an incentive to sign up. I’m not saying you have to give away a discount code or free shipping the second they join, but you should outline your value proposition. Let them know if you run weekly giveaways, competitions and promotions that are exclusive to Group members, for example, or promise to give them the first look at your upcoming product launches. Give them a feel for the variety of content they’ll be able to find in your Group, including resources like lead magnets, scripts and templates.
Pick an engaging theme for your Group – something that people will want to talk about with other like-minded people. Take a leaf out of social media maven Sunny Lenarduzzi’s book; she has more than a dozen Groups, but significantly, not one of them is about her. Instead, they’re based around topics that are relevant and interesting to her audience. Unless you already have a huge, engaged social following – think Nike or Tesla – people probably won’t want to join a Group solely to discuss you or your business.

Inform Your Existing Audience

Unless you’re a completely new brand, you’ll already have some sort of audience, whether that includes visitors to your website, previous and prospective customers, subscribers to your newsletter or readers of your blog.

Let them know that your Facebook Group exists:

Mention it in email blasts, as in the case study I showed you earlier from Bannersnatch
Reference it on your website and personal Facebook account and provide a link to the Group
Drop CTAs into your blog posts (for example, “Like what you read? Be the first to know about our latest guides by joining our Facebook Group.”)
Use exit pop-ups to drive users toward your Group

Get in Front of New Audiences

While there’s certainly value in building a tight-knit community of people who are long-time followers of your brand, chances are you’ll also want to attract users who aren’t so familiar with you.

When it comes to getting in front of new audiences, ads can be effective, but if you don’t want (or lack the budget) to run paid activity, you’ll need to get a bit creative. Here are a couple of my favorite tried-and-trusted ways to amplify Facebook Groups:

Guest blogging: Reach out to a website owner with a relevant audience and offer to write about a topic that would interest them, in return for mentioning (and, ideally, linking to) your Group.
Offer yourself up as an interviewee: Ask people to interview you (or some other figurehead for your business) on their blog or podcast. You don’t need to be a big name. You just have to have something interesting to say. Just be sure to mention your Facebook Group.
Create webinar content for Group members: Offer your members exclusive access to a webinar. Promote it outside the Group – in your newsletters and via your other social profiles – to get the word out. For bonus amplification, get a co-presenter onboard and ask them to promote it to their audience, too.
Reach out to influencers: Identify people with large, engaged followings who operate in the same space as you and ask them to promote your Group. While you’ll almost certainly need to give them a reason to do so, this doesn’t necessarily mean paying them. If your content is high-quality and genuinely unique, there’s a much better chance that influencers will be prepared to recommend you.

Both of these approaches can be really effective, but there are no guarantees that people will say “yes.” If you ask 100 people to guest post or interview for them, maybe only five or ten will agree. Don’t take it personally. Instead, keep going. Eventually, the numbers will pay off for you.

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Take Advantage of Live Streaming to Drive Visibility

Creating video is more likely to get your Page noticed organically, which in turn gives you the opportunity to promote your Group without having to shell out any cash. That said, not all video is created equal: People watch live video 3x longer compared to videos that aren’t live.

In short, you should be using video to get in front of more users, generate more engagement and encourage people to join your Group. People are often intimidated at the thought of creating Facebook video content, but it’s really pretty simple thanks to the site’s Live and Watch Party features.

Facebook Live

As its name suggests (and as you probably already know), Facebook Live allows you to broadcast live video to a Group or Page. Seeing as we’re trying to grow your Group, you’ll want to go live from your Page.

Struggling for a topic for your video? Draw inspiration from the news and trends affecting your audience.

Let’s say you’re running a marketing agency. Create a video to cover your reaction to a big development in the industry, such as an algorithm update by Google or the launch of a new feature by Facebook. If it makes for a good blog topic, chances are it’ll make for a good video.

Write down some talking points, do a couple of rehearsals and give it a go. I’ve found it’s often easier (and less intimidating) if you stage the video as a discussion with a colleague or a fellow expert.

To go live from a phone or tablet, just follow these simple steps:

Whatever topic you choose, remember to mention your Group and encourage viewers to join for exclusive video content (and more). Which brings us to Watch Parties…

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Watch Party

Watch Party was introduced as a means to bring people together and create conversations around video. Interestingly, during the testing phase, the social network found that some Watch Party sessions ran for more than ten hours, with viewers dropping in and out throughout the day:

Since its launch, Watch Party has been rolled out to all Page and profile types on Facebook. So while it was already an invaluable way to keep your Group engaged, it’s also become a go-to tool for growing your membership.

The idea of connecting with large audiences through video on Facebook is nothing new. But a crucial stumbling block has been the struggle to reach enough users and make it simple for them to interact while watching.

Watch Party attempts to solve this problem by introducing scheduling, invites and notifications, making it easier for video hosts to motivate their audience. It seems to be working: Watch Parties generate 8x more comments than non-live videos.

Plenty of brands have been taking advantage. The WWE, for example, uses Watch Parties to engage its international audience by re-airing episodes of its Mixed Match Challenge show. Buzzfeed raised awareness of the latest season of its Worth It series by hosting binge-watching parties of previous seasons:

To create your own Watch Party from your News Feed, follow these steps:

From your News Feed or timeline, click Make Post.
Click the Watch Party option.
From the Add Video menu, search for a video.
You can also browse through For You, Watched, Live, Saved, and My videos.
You also click Add to Queue next to any video to add it to your queue.
Once you pick a video, add a description for your Watch Party post, then click Post.
You’ll see a message that says “Your Watch Party Is About To Begin.”
Once your Watch Party starts, you can add friends to watch with you.

Once the party begins, you’ll be able to add additional videos to the queue, invite more people and interact with your audience. When you want to wind things up, just click “End Watch Party.”

Use SEO to Drive Traffic from Search to Your Facebook Group as a Lead Magnet

SEO is another powerful tool when it comes to growing your Facebook group. By optimizing your website to rank for certain related keywords, you can capture that traffic and redirect it to your Facebook group.

For example, if you run a paleo Facebook group, work on ranking for “paleo diet recipes” on Google. Then use a pop-up on your website landing page to direct those blog visitors to your related Facebook group.

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* Facebook Messenger Chatbots: The Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Massive Results

Turn Your First 500 Members into Group Evangelists

Once your Facebook Group gets to a certain size, growing it further becomes less about your own direct actions, and more about evangelizing your existing audience by making them feel like a key part of your journey.

Remember: the larger your Group, the greater potential it has to grow quickly. Just don’t be afraid to ask your members for a little help.

Use Other Groups for Cross Promotion

Ask your members who else should be in the Group, and incentivize them to bring in new members by offering them a free e-book, a place on an exclusive webinar or even some type of promo code. This can be particularly effective when your members are in other relevant Groups, providing them with an easy platform to promote your own Group.

A word of caution here, though: While some Group admins will be more than happy for you to engage in a bit of cross-promotion, others will frown on it and might even kick you out. They’re well within their rights to do this; it’s their Group and their rules.

Do what I do: reach out to admins before you try to coax their members into your Group. Good manners cost nothing. Ask really nicely and admins might even be willing to pin your promotional post for a day or so, guaranteeing you plenty of visibility.

Spread the Word Through Social

While your potential members obviously have Facebook profiles, chances are they’ll also be active on other social platforms, too. Encourage your existing members to link to your Group on other (relevant) social networks, whether that be Instagram, Quora, Reddit, Tumblr or Twitter.

As with the previous step, you might want to incentivize them for doing this. But if your Group is genuinely useful, funny or interesting (or even all three), it should simply make sense for members to reference it in their conversations on other platforms. Say your Group is dedicated to curating the best Indian food recipes; why wouldn’t your members want to link to it if they come across a similar discussion on a different site?

Dive Deeper: 17 Engaging Video Content Types that People Love to Watch

Last Word on Growing from 0 to 10,000 Members

Growing a Facebook Group with a zero-dollar budget might seem intimidating, but all it takes is time, patience and a little effort (plus some help from your earliest members).

To summarize, here are the five steps you should be following to take your Facebook Group from 0-10,000 members without spending a single cent:

Come up with a compelling theme for your Group – something that people will want to discuss and that you can offer genuine expertise on.
Give people a reason to join. Tell potential members about the fantastic content you create and the exclusive giveaways and offers you run.
Let your existing audience know that the Group exists, and encourage them to join – people who already follow your Facebook Page, read your blogs or watch your videos.
Get in front of new audiences through guest blogging, influencer outreach, interviews and podcasts.
Evangelize “early adopters” of your Group to bring in new members.

Follow these steps, iterate as necessary and watch your Group subscriber count grow!

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