Why world’s biggest brands are building their communities on Facebook groups in 2022

What’s the one common thing between Starbucks and Peloton other than the fact that people love their products?

Both these brands have a super active community rallying their loyal customers and helping them build meaningful connections with each other.

Members of the Starbucks owned Facebook group, Leaf Rakers Society (with 45,000 members and 60+ member posts per day), talk to each other about anything and everything related to autumn and of course, their favourite Starbucks drinks.

On the other hand, the Official Peloton Member Page (with 445,000 members and 3372 member posts per month), connects both dedicated Peloton users and those who want one but haven’t yet committed to purchasing one. Members share their success stories, about their transformation journeys, inspiration, milestone achievements, and so much more.

These Facebook communities allow both Peloton and Starbucks to understand the needs of their users and what makes them tick. It’s easier for them to get feedback on their products and services, and work on improving them.

Most importantly, they are committed to building deep-rooted connections with their users. So much so that their casual customers quickly become their biggest brand advocates at no extra cost which is every marketing team’s dream!

More and more businesses are seeing such success stories, and many have started to add building a brand community into their marketing strategy and budget.

This article covers: 

- Why building a community is crucial for brands

- Why Facebook is the best platform for building a community

- What a community growth roadmap looks like for Facebook groups

- How to get started and how Convosight can help

Why should community building be non-negotiable for brand strategy?

From Facebook, Instagram, Youtube to Twitter, LinkedIn, or maybe even Snapchat, brands can easily communicate their message to their customers and pay to reach potential customers.

However, a major drawback with these channels is that it is just one-way communication, i.e. from the brands to their customers. There’s no synergy or direct communication between the followers. It’s the brands who are creating content all the time with no user generated content, and the only way to gauge success is via engagement (reactions and comments) on brand posts.

In direct contrast to this traditional ‘balcony’ approach, we have communities which are more like ‘halls’ where customer to customer and customer to brand interaction takes place. People are talking to each other, discussing their pain points and seeking advice and recommendations. They are actually talking about brands, their products and services, and sharing their genuine thoughts, feelings, knowledge and experiences.

For instance, one of the members of the Leaf Rakers Society did a poll in the community asking members to vote for their favourite Pumpkin Spice Latte variation.

Seeing this, Starbucks officials know that their users are obsessed with the original Pumpkin Spice Latte and love to have the Pumpkin Chai.

This is such a simple way to tap into the likes/dislikes of an audience and understand which products are their favourite.

At the same time, it’s an amazing opportunity to acquire new customers as those who’ve not yet tried out a product would be more likely to do so after seeing so many people talking about it.

The image below describes the traditional balcony vs hall’s approach. Community wins, obviously!

The benefits of building a strong brand community:

1. 90% - 100% organic content with exponential and unlimited peer to peer reach
    

2. Social proof around product experience

3. Reduced market research costs as it easier to listen to users who are talking about their needs and pain points 
   
   

4. There’s no need to invest in a separate customer support channel as the community takes over this function and the community manager can report customer feedback

5. Power users share all their knowledge and educate other members

6. Get genuine feedback from users on the product and save time going elsewhere for product research and development

7. The community retains users and makes loyal customers happy

8. Satisfied loyal customers go on to become brand ambassadors

9. When new members see others talking about the brand, they get curious which drives them to try the product or service themselves

10. Understand the top things the members are talking about and creating engaging content becomes easy

11. In addition to being the first brand touch point for new potential customers, a community helps retain the prospects that may have dropped out early in a funnel, those that were not converted and would have been lost at cost. The community is a space that nurtures the prospect, giving additional points to potential conversion over the longer term, at no additional cost.

12. The brand can easily create different user profiles, segment them, and use it for retargeting. For example, successful brands create different cohorts of users such as loyal users, those who recently joined or who did not take the next action after joining and then retarget that cohort.

The benefits of building a brand community are many. Next question is, where to build a community?

Answer? On Facebook.

Why is Facebook the ideal platform to build a brand community?

For starters, more than 1.8 billion people today are active in Facebook groups every day. Over 70 million admins and moderators run active Facebook groups. And over 50% posts on Facebook are community posts. Groups are the place to be because everyone else is here!

In Facebook groups, members interact around a certain pain point or area of interest, and seek authentic connection, recommendations, and support from one another. Conversations within groups therefore become extremely meaningful and valuable.

The best part?  Ever since Facebook changed its algorithm after they announced they’d focus primarily on communities, the reach of Facebook groups has skyrocketed, especially in public Facebook groups.

Here are a few other reasons why brands you should be building a community on Facebook groups:

- You’ll find conversations already happening around your brand, product category and competitors

- You’ll be able to listen to your audience’s needs, pain points, and drive insights from conversations on the platform of their choice

- The highest form of engagement on social platforms happens in communities. Over 60% engagement in Facebook groups is organic, in the form of UGC (user generated content).

- Surveys and lead generation tend to attract the higher engagement in Facebook groups than in any other place because the members are more likely to follow an instruction from a Facebook admin or moderator they are familiar with

As a brand, you can either partner with existing community admins or build your own community to win exposure, gain insights, and build powerful new marketing funnels.

Canva, one of the most popular graphic design platforms, has a 181,600 member strong Facebook group named Canva Design Circle. The group connects users of the platform and lets them share insights, get notified of product updates, and talk anything and everything related to design.

Elementor, the visual Wordpress website builder, has a private Facebook group that hosts 121,100 members and helps them to grow as web creators. The group members collaborate, educate each other as to how they can use the plugin, and resolve the challenges they might be experiencing.

While these are just a few names, there are tons of other brands out there that are running their communities on Facebook and gaining valuable insights from their users.

Brands can start their own Facebook group or work with Convosight to build, manage and scale a thriving brand community, and work with Convosight to partner with existing community admins. 

Convosight works with 55+ enterprise brands in beauty, health & wellness, food, nutrition and many more. We help brands connect with market segment customers in 20+ community categories including parenting, lifestyle, health, food & cooking and more.

Read some powerful testimonials!

Convosight has written the playbook on brand community building.

If you’re looking to create your brand community, you can learn and implement these strategies or leave it to us to create a highly engaged and meaningful community for you.

What does a community growth roadmap look like for Facebook communities?

The first question that brands ask is - How can we build a brand community?

The first step is to understand the steps of community building along the community life cycle and that this is a long term strategy. There are different phases in the first year of the community building process.

In the beginning, we hyper focus on the group’s purpose, creating engaging content to be posted by the community team and finding the founder members which closely fit the brand’s target demographic and getting them to connect with one another in ways they value.

As we progress, we focus on member growth and encouraging members to post and lead the community. Our KPI for a healthy community in Stage 2 is an admin to user generated ratio (UGC) of 70%. This number should continue to drop with time as more members post and generate a majority of the quality content.

Thereafter, we begin to scale the community which by this point, is highly engaged and growing steadily and helping the brand reach its goals.

Here’s an example of what a community growth model looks like.

How do we build thriving communities?

At Convosight we help brands create an engaged, meaningful community that has high social impact and drives business value by combining:

1. Experts - Our team of experts (that has 20 years of combined community building experience) creates the community blueprint, content and executes a powerful custom strategy.
2. Technology - Our powerful tech aka the Convosight tool helps automate and effectively manage community tasks and operations such as moderation, spam control and content scheduling.
3. Measurement - Lastly, we provide deep insights and measurements that align with the brand’s vision and mission.

Measuring community success

It is important for a brand to build a community that delivers on the vision, mission and goals while also saving on costs over time.

Metrics for measuring Community Success  

1. Organic member growth, is it on track?
2. Total conversations per month vs target
3. Admin posts vs Member post ratio
4. Reach 10:90 by Year 1 (which shows members are talking and a real community has been created!)
5. Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users
6. Brand Website Clicks and SignUps

Sometimes, numbers are not enough to really understand if a brand community is performing and has a high ROI. So, the brand should pay attention to members and conversations.

It is very important to have the right members in your group. The community must be filled with high quality members in the target demographic and they must be behaving and participating in the way that will meet the brand’s business objectives. Growth may be slower the more niche the community and that is fine. The key is engagement. It is better to have 1000 members deeply engaged with one another than 10,000 members who are inactive in the group.

In a meaningful brand community, it is important to listen to conversations and ensure that there is a high volume of relevant conversations happening.

Finally, brands can check the health of their community, social impact and positive impact on the brand via member surveys, polls or calls to gain feedback.

The result of building a meaningful community and hitting KPIs is for the brand to be top of mind, acquiring the correct demographics, member growth, relevant conversation topics, feedback surveys and sampling.

Want to create a thriving community for your brand too?

Visit Convosight and drop a message. We look forward to speaking with you!

Anne Scott

VP Communities, Convosight.

anne@convosight.com