There are so many people making a living on Facebook and each usually specializes on only 1 thing but Facebook as a platform is huge and it has hundreds of features thus creating hundreds of opportunities for marketers to take advantage of.
I will not talk about these methods in depth because I will probably need a 200 page book to do that, I just want to list all the methods there are so you know them all. You never know how you can connect the dots and get a new bright idea that will increase your business tenfold.
#How You Can Use Facebook Groups To Your Advantage:
1. Facebook Group Posting - one of the most used tactic as it’s easy to set up and start spamming. It attracts a lot of people due to the huge reach these posts can get. If you post to 100 groups each with 10.000 members only that’s a potential of 1.000.000 people viewing your post, that is a lot.
Lately Facebook started to lower the amount of group posts you can do and they’re a lot more strict to what you can post so this became harder to do, not impossible though.
2. Group Posts Bumping - this relates to the method above. Bumping is commenting on your post in a group thus bringing it back on the first position in that group so more people see it. Bumping can be done by commenting something and then deleting that comment ( the post is still sent to the top) or by commenting with other accounts or with more information about the first post/offer.
If you don’t over-do it, this is a decent method to get more eyes on your posts without going though the trouble of posting more so Fb won’t see that much posting activity.
3. Using “Add me fast” groups - these are groups where people get together to get a lot of friends fast. You can join 5-10 of these groups, post a little in them and get to 5000 friends within a couple of weeks. Granted they are definitely not targeted so won’t do much for you, but still having 10 accounts with 5000 friends that amounts to 50.000 people that you can use in different ways.
A few ideas for those friends : growing groups, growing pages, promoting general/funny stuff, using them to build engagement for your page/site/group.
4. Growing your Group by adding your friends - this relates to the method above. You can simply add all your friends to your group, they won’t be asked if they want to join or not. So combining this and the above method you can grow a group very fast. Some of them might get upset and leave, but most won’t even notice, especially if they are in many groups themselves.
This is a tactic used by many people that sell “I will add 10.000 people to your group” services on Fiverr and the likes.
5. Copying groups to other accounts - the invite/add to group feature from Facebook can also be used in another way. You can have a main account that joined all let’s say 2500 groups in your niche. You can then create 5 new Facebook accounts, make them friends with your main account and use the main account to add these new accounts in 500 groups each. This way the new accounts are safe because they haven’t actually asked to join any group, they were added to them. You still need to take it slow with posting but it will cut a lot of time from joining all those groups.
I’ve seen people selling this as a service as well, though I am not sure how popular it is lately
6. Messaging people in a group - you can join a group in your niche, make sure it has a lot of activity. After that extract all the members and send them a message pitching/promoting your service. Being in the same group as them you have a common starting point like “Hey, I also saw you’re a member of YYY group would you like to…” Being in the same group as them will also give you some slack from Facebook, some of the messages will get to their inbox, some will get to the “other inbox” . If before you do the extraction and message sending you take a couple of days to comment in the group and interact with posts and other people this will work even better.
7. Befriending people in a group - the idea is pretty much the same as above and all the same instructions apply with one small difference, instead of messaging them you add them as friends. You will need to do this slow though, start with 10-15 friend requests per day, grow it to up to 50 over time. Make sure to delete pending friend requests that don’t answer in 1-2 days. This way you can create an account with really targeted friends that you can use to promote your stuff to.
This is pretty much all you can do with groups. If I missed any let me know and I will add it to have a complete list.
#The main differences between Facebook Pages and Groups
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In a group you can only post as yourself - the main Facebook account. All actions that you can do on groups will be done as the main account. This is a limitation from Facebook. I see many people asking how I can post/comment/share as a page. You CANNOT do that, take it up with Fb
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On a page you can post as a page. All actions related to a page can be done as coming from another page, for example commenting on or liking other pages.
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A page is more of a business tool, a business card if you’d like, if you don’t want to give it away page visitors won’t even know who owns that page.
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Groups can be secret( you won’t be able to find them unless you know the exact URL ) or closed( you won’t be able to read anything that’s posted there unless you’re a member) so they can be for only certain people, not for the whole world to see. Pages are always visible to everybody, you cannot make hidden or secret pages.
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On groups you have no tools to see engagement, growth, stuff like that. Pages have those, called insights and they are quite useful.
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Everything you do on groups will be visible on your wall as activity and will be seen by your friends( there’s no way of stopping that, courtesy of Facebook). On pages all you do is private and your friend will see it only if they followed your page and only the posts, not all activity you do like, comment/post on other pages, like stuff.
There are a lot more, but these are the main ones that will help you understand each of them better.
#How You Can Use Facebook Pages To Your Advantage:
1. Using a Page instead of a website - this is really common lately, many small business and people that want to start something go this route. As most don’t know how to build a website, instead of paying for one they prefer to create a Facebook Page as their presentation page. It has pros and cons, if you’re tight on budget you can do this easily as you can create a page in 5 minutes and add your details, website, phone number and other ways of people to contact you.
2. Growing a page with group share - this is a tactic to grow your Page. You join as many good groups as you can find in your niche, and every time you post something good on your page you also share it on those groups. This will help you get more like and engagement to your page especially if you’ve been a little active in those groups first and if you’re posting really good stuff and not spamming.
3. Inviting friends to like your page. Unlike on groups, people actually have to click “like page” now. So if you do no #3 from the group ideas and get many accounts with many friends, you can ask them to like your page. Some won’t but some will and your page will get more likes. Try doing it with a general niche page if your friends are not targeted and it will work a lot better.
4. Posting on other pages to get more likes and engagement. You can search other pages in your niche, some of them accept guest posting, some don’t (it’s a setting and each page owner chooses what he wants to do). Get the pages that allow guest posting and you can post there as coming from your own page. Those posts won’t be shown in the main are of the page where the page owner’s posts are shown, but in another area dedicated for guest posts. Still, if your posts are good and that page has a lot of engagement some will also come your way.
5. Commenting and liking on other pages to get more likes and engagement. You do as with the previous one but instead of posting you comment on that page’s post, like them, comment on comment posted on that page and engage with them as well. This coming from your Page (and if you have an enticing name) will attract people to take a look and see what’s there and who is commenting.
6. Messaging other pages for exchanges - A page has its own inbox, different from the inbox of your main account. If you send a message to a page the owner will probably see it as the pages don’t have that hard of a spam filter. People use this to ask related pages for post exchanged, ex: I promote you with a post, you promote me with a post, everybody wins. You don’t necessarily have to go for exchanges, think outside of the box and see how you can pitch other pages to help you 
7. You can use many pages to increase the activity on one other Page. Given that actions done on pages can be done as a page there’s a tactic to create many pages with a couple of accounts and increase the activity of your main Page. Haven’t tested this one so can’t say for sure how well or whether it still works or not.
#How To Leverage Your Facebook Wall To Your Advantage:
Many people generally disregard the wall as a marketing tool. This may be because they are using their main/private account. In this case I’d advise you to create a secondary one, for business purposes only, it can really help.
1. Promoting to your friends - An account can have max 5000 friends after that if people still want to befriend that account they won’t be able to, they will only be able to follow it like you do for a page. Some people prefer to promote their business like this on their wall instead of creating a page. This is because the reach of your posts to your friends is supposedly a lot higher than the reach of a page to its followers. Be that as it may, you can also cross promote and share stuff from your page to your friends so they engage with the post on the page and increase its stats.
2. Turning your wall into a page - many people don’t know this, but when you reach a certain level, say you have 5000 friends, Facebook gives you the option of turning your account into a page. Your account will become a page, those 5000 friends will become likes and you will basically have a page with 5000 likes. You will loose that account thought as it will not exist anymore, when you login you will only have the page, you won’t be able to do anything on groups anymore as you only have the page, so make sure you want to do this before you proceed.
3. Turning your walls into pages and combining. Getting back to no #3 from the groups section. Let’s say you have 10 accounts with 5000 friends. You can turn all those into pages like I explained above. There’s a technique to combine all these newly created pages into one big page if their names are similar. So you could end up with one page that has 50.000 followers instead of 10 accounts. I’ve seen people doing this, haven’t done it so I can’t give you more info on it, but if you like the idea you have an idea to research.
4.Post on your friend’s walls - why leverage only your wall when you can also post on all of your friend’s walls and reach all their friends as well? You can do that, just make sure you post neutral, general, funny or interesting stuff that wouldn’t make your friends mad
Other things you can do on Facebook to help with your marketing :
- use hashtags in your posts
- use mentions in your posts
- using events
There are a couple more things to add, I will add them here at the end. Also feel free to let me know if I missed any as I really do what this to be the complete methods list
Hope you’ve enjoyed, the read, I know it was long but if you’re going into Facebook Marketing you should know everything there is to know about the subject and all the opportunities it provides.
feel free to comment after this.