Turning Community into Profit: 9 Vital Facebook Lessons

Obviously, you can’t build community, let alone energize that community to benefit your brand, unless you understand the individual users making up that community. Building a massive community doesn’t offer any benefit unless you build trust and engagement with that community that translates into enhanced reach, support for your brand, and willingness to purchase from your company.

Facebook groups are one way to build an online community with your target market. Building a group around shared interests is easy; managing the group with a light touch is a little harder, especially if you’re still married to the old notion that marketing involves talking about your brand. Instead, share your values, showcase community involvement, offer behind-the-scenes human moments, and share news that might interest your target market.

Facebook Live is another way to build a strong community. Publicize that you’re planning to go live at a particular time, allowing members to ask questions, make comments and suggestions, or demonstrate new products.

Facebook Ads (accessed through the Meta Ad Manager) allow you to target messages at likely community members by using a combination of demographics, geographics, and lifestyle (interest) data associated with users, or choose LookAlike audiences that look like your community members.

In the early days of social media, you heard that nirvana was achieving virality with your posts, trying to get the most likes possible. Today, we understand that, while reach is important, it’s more important to attract and engage a community than to build a lot of likes.

Thus, you should join in conversations rather than simply post content. Join groups related to your business, such as local groups or those related to your niche and participate in conversations on those groups. Focus on providing meaningful support and information rather than spewing out promotion.

Not only does this focus on community build a stronger community that will support your marketing goals, but it means you match the Facebook algorithm so you show up more frequently on users newsfeeds.

Turning community into profit means understanding how users use Facebook as a search engine rather than turn directly to Google. Your content should match the keywords they use when searching Facebook, use location tags if targeting a local market, use natural language rather than letting an AI tool craft your content, and use images that look like your target market.

Aiming for polished, commercial quality content, especially cinema-ready video, isn’t what works on social media platforms. The polished look looks too much like a commercial, which users learned to distrust as self-serving and disingenuous. Unstead, aim for unedited, direct-to-camera videos that seem more honest. Featuring employees or community members, rather than paid celebrities further enhances the honesty of these videos.

For instance, you might create a weekly series that features a neighborhood or specific user persona. A behind-the-scenes video published weekly gives users the feeling that they’re part of your brand. Or, film a weekly segment with users to highlight how they’re using your products. The options are endless. By publishing a weekly segment, even if you mix up the topics, helps users build the habit of tuning in every week to view the episode.

Facebook allows you to hyperfocus on a local market, offering the option to reach local users, those traveling in the local community, or those connected to local users. This is beneficial to businesses that primarily serve a local market, such as restaurants, service providers, and retail outlets.

That’s especially true when it comes to ad targeting, which translates into lower CPC (cost per click) and less waste as folks unlikely to buy your products aren’t shown your advertising. This type of targeting is only possible when using the Meta Ad Manager, not when “boosting” a post. Although the ad manager is a little more complicated to use, it yields better results. The addition of AI-enhancements removes a lot of the complexity from building and scheduling ads.

In addition, adding local tags and landmarks representing your physical location boost your search rankings and attract local users.

Facebook now offers multiple tools to turn community into profits without forcing users to leave the app. Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Shops allow for easy conversion right on the app. Alternatively, lead forms allow brands to capture email subscriptions or offer a direct “Buy Now” option to sell local inventory.

These shops often result in higher conversion rates than ads or content posted to newsfeeds. The key to success is responding quickly to interactions, posting high-quality images, and targeting.

Don’t overlook Facebook Messenger as a marketing tool to convert community into profits. Ads delivered as direct messages to targeted user have a high conversion rate. Messenger is also a great tool to build higher engagement with your community, by facilitating the interaction between the brand and your community.

A lead magnet is a great way to build your subscriber list or develop a lead nurturing program to help convert users who need a little more effort to close, such as those facing higher risk associated with making purchase. This occurs for higher priced products or those associated social or safety risks.

If you sell to a local market or markets, you might create a local lead magnet focused on the local market. For instance, you might offer a guide to local hiking trails for each of the communities where you sell items related to hiking, such as boots.

While your Facebook community is valuable, you’re still subject to the whims of Meta. I have a number of small business colleagues who found themselves banned from Facebook for perceived rule violations, even when they didn’t commit any of them. Overnight, they saw their access to the community they worked tirelessly to build. By encouraging your community to also engage with you by subscribing to your mailing list through the use of a lead magnet, discount, or other tool, you never lose access to the community members.

If you’re like most small business owners, you find yourself constantly facing too many tasks with too little time. It’s tempting to use AI to create perfect content, especially given the demands of publishing content consistently on Facebook (at least once a day).

However, this AI slop, as it’s called, actually works against your efforts to turn community into profit. Users quickly learn to ignore this content, easily identifying it by the perfect posts shared without any effort to humanize it or recognize the individual needs of users.

Instead of trusting AI tools with your critical social media posts, use these tools to help find optimal posting schedules and use data to help you build a strategy that help turn your community into profits. Focus on storytelling and recognize the unique characteristics of community members.