There’s a couple of options for building a presence on Facebook for your business and it can be confusing as to which type of entity you should make.
Today I wanted to share the story and reasoning of why I decided to create a private Facebook group community called Store Owner Tips.
Facebook Business Page vs. Facebook Group
There’s a couple of options for creating an entity for people you want to talk to you like on Facebook.
First up you have a Facebook Business Page. This is essentially a representation or listing of your business. It often bears the name of your company (eg. Wholesale Suite has a business page).
Pages are great as a listing and its a good thing to have one of these pages, especially if you’re running Facebook ads (in fact you’ll need one).
The other option is a Facebook Group. A group is another entity similar to a page where things can be posted but it’s not specifically a listing for your company.
You can, of course, create a Facebook Group for your company that bears the same name and many people do that.
At our company, Rymera Web Co, we make multiple products specifically Wholesale Suite and Advanced Coupons, that are targeted towards the same people “Store owners”.
I wanted to create a meeting place or “digital watercooler” or just “a cool place to hang out and talk shop” so that we could bring a group of those like-minded people together.
Private Customer Community vs. Group Of People That Aren’t Necessarily Your Customers
You might be thinking at the moment “Oh that’s like so and so company who have a private customer community”… well not quite. Let me explain.
While there’s a lot of Wholesale Suite and Advanced Coupons customers in our Store Owner Tips group, it’s not exclusively for those people.
I wanted to bring together store owners from all walks of life including people that aren’t even using WooCommerce (our products are targeted toward WooCommerce store owners specifically) so we can all cross-pollinate ideas and bring interesting conversations to the surface.
I also think private customer communities are useful, but not as a tool for unrelated discussions to their product.
Private Group vs. Public Group
Public versus private – which should you choose for your group?
There are reasons for and against both, but for me, I wanted more control over who I let into the group to ensure that I was actually building a community consisting of nearly 100% store owners, not just people who were hunting down store owners to try and sell to them.
For me Private was the answer because:
- I can ask questions of people who are incoming to filter the people we don’t want
- It’s a tiny barrier for people to jump over and the people that really want in will jump over it.
- A private community feels more like a “club” I think and our members are quite proud to be involved. I want to keep that feeling alive for as long as possible.
- I’d much rather a small group of highly active people than a large group of disinterested non-engaged people.
Could I have grown quicker with a public group? Pretty likely. Would it be as engaging as it is? I doubt it.
What I’m hoping to grow Store Owner Tips into
At the time of writing, Store Owners Tips is only just starting out still. We’re growing well and coming up to 600 members.
I don’t want to spoil it with ads or let random people in. It’s a tight community and the quality of the stuff we have in there is really high.
I’d like to keep that feeling and that ethos alive as long as possible.
To me personally, this is like a reminder that sometimes in order to market yourself you need to shut up and stop talking about yourself. Instead, start talking about other people and get back to building cool things that people are genuinely interested in.
So can I encourage you to think about creating a Facebook group community for the people you want to talk to?
Sure it might take a little bit of spare time on your part (I spend probably a couple hours on it a week) but you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
