What Direct Sellers Ought to Know About Linking a Facebook Group to a Page

Did you notice that Facebook Groups and Pages are slowly merging to become one Community? As announced at Facebook’s Developer Conference (known as F8) earlier this year, Facebook’s focus for the future is community building, and they are making that happen pretty quickly.

For the past decade, Facebook has focused on friends and family,” Zuckerberg said. “Our next focus is building community.” ~ via Mashable

Take a look at the Facebook updates over the last few months:

• The new Group format looks more like a Page
• You can link your Group(s) to your Page so anyone can request to join your Group right from your Page
• Linked Group(s) display in two places: on your Page feed and as a tab in the left sidebar
• You can comment in your Group as yourself and as your Page
• Group members can LIKE your page by hovering over your Page name (displayed in the bottom left corner of your cover photo)
• Pages recently added a new “Community” tab where you can see posts and photos from page visitors all in one feed, which looks a lot like posts in your Group
• And just in…Facebook Groups are becoming more like Pages. Admins will have the ability to see Insights, schedule posts, and more.

Learn about new Group admin tools in this article from TechCrunch: Facebook Equips Admins To Protect And Analyze Their Groups

Why link your Group to your Page? Because linking gives your Group more exposure and makes it easy for Fans to become Members. As in build your Community. And when you link your Group to your Page, members can see a “featured” post in your Page feed (example below).

What does this mean for Direct Sellers and Network Marketers?

My advice is to start thinking about your Page and your Group as one big happy community where all your fans, followers and Customers come to connect about a shared interest in you and your products. While your Page might be all about business, your Group is where the love happens. Give your members value so they feel like a VIP and they’ll love you back by becoming raving fans who tell their friends about you.

For example, Fans can become Customers by falling in love with your products or services – and then have conversations or ask questions in your Group about the products they purchased. I’ve even had Group members in my Candle Club go live (using Facebook Live) to do an unboxing and share how much they loved the product they had just received. You can’t buy that kind of customer loyalty. And, that would have never happened if I didn’t create a safe place in my Facebook Group where Customers felt free to share their excitement because they knew other members would ‘get it’. That’s community building at its best.

Jenny goes LIVE to share her Candle Love

But beware…if you’re using Groups to party, you can end up in Facebook Jail for linking too many Groups in rapid fire. This happened to one of our Visionista VIP Members, Melissa Dettmer.

Melissa says,

“I was beyond excited that Facebook finally rolled out the ability to LINK my Business Page to any of my Groups. Since it’s against my company’s media policies to run a party in a public setting, I am not able to run my Facebook parties from my Business Page, because those events are public. So, instead, I’ve chosen (for many reasons) to run most of my Facebook parties in Closed Groups. This new announcement may just be the solution I’ve been looking for. That said… I got really excited and began linking several past Groups that I still have open. And of course… I linked too many, too fast! My excitement landed me in Facebook jail. As I always tell my team… if you act like a robot, you’ll get treated like a robot. So, when you first start out… definitely link your VIP group first, then link any current parties that you are running. If you want to link older groups, just space out the timing of linking them and you should be just fine. It’s a GREAT TOOL and I’m super excited about the possibilities for my business!”

~ Melissa Dettmer, Norwex Independent Consultant and Facebook trailblazer

In the screenshot below you’ll see how Melissa’s Groups appear in two places on her Page.

Have you linked your Group to your Page yet? Tell us in the comments and share your Page name so we can check it out!

Ready to really rock your direct sales biz?