How To Add Members To A Facebook Group That Aren't Friends

How to Add 1,000 Members to Your Facebook Group Fast!

It used to be that having a fan page or a business page was a great way to get organic reach on Facebook. Unfortunately, that doesn't work anymore. Pages are having a harder and harder time with solid organic reach and seeing increasingly diminished returns on their efforts.

Now businesses use Facebook groups instead. But growing your Facebook group can be a challenge. Especially if you've never done it before.

That's why, I'm going to show you why you need a Facebook group and the EXACT methods I've used to grow my group to over 20,000 members.

The Benefits of Facebook Groups for Business

There are many benefits to using Facebook groups if you own a business.

The biggest benefit is that it's one of the few places you can still get real organic reach on social media. That means that you can engage with and sell to your target audience for free once they've joined your group.

Groups can be incredibly active places and bring huge revenue into your business without having to spend money on ads, but they are an optin environment. That means that people have to elect to become part of your Facebook group and that takes a bit of strategy to accomplish.

The Strategy Most People Use to Grow Their Facebook Group (Don't Do This)

When most people try to add people to their Facebook groups, they do it by directly advertising their group on Facebook.

This SEEMS like it would be effective, but in my experience joining a group is too big a leap for most people to take right off the bat. This is especially true if they've never heard of you before.

It's kind of like asking someone to marry you on the first date. There needs to be some steps in between that get people comfortable with you before they make a commitment to your group.

Do This Instead: The Best Way to Grow a Facebook Group

I've tested this extensively and the best way that I've found to get people to join my Facebook group – so that I can interact and market to them for free – is to invite all the people that like my Facebook page to join my group.

NOTE: It's OK if you don't have any likes to your Facebook page yet. I'll show you how to do that next.

But before I get into how to get likes on your page, it's important to have your Facebook group linked to your Facebook page. You can see how I do that by linking my Facebook Ads Mastermind Group to my Ben Heath Facebook page.

Now that you have those two linked we can move onto the next step – growing your Facebook page likes.

How to Grow a Facebook Group with Ads

If you are starting from scratch or don't have many likes on your page yet, the easiest way to grow your group is to use Facebook Ads.

This is a two step process.

You want to get people to make small commitments to you – liking your page – BEFORE you ask them to make larger commitments – joining your group.

The first step is to get people to like your Facebook page through a like ad campaign. A Facebook "like" campaign is still one of the least expensive campaigns to run on Facebook and can be quite effective at growing your page likes and getting people primed to join your group.

How To Set Up a Facebook Like Campaign

Name your campaign
Select buying type – auction
Select campaign objective – page likes
Name your adset
Name your ad

The campaign level you can leave alone. It's all set to go.

Then you go into the adset level and set your targeting. For a page like campaign you want a LARGE target audience. Here are a few basic guidelines.

If you operate locally, then target your geographic area and leave the rest of the targeting alone.
If you operate nationally or internationally, also select a broad audience. For instance I would select business page admins since we primarily offer a Facebook advertising service. This gives me an audience of almost 1 million people. This gives me a nice balance between a targeted audience and broad reach.

At the adset level you will also want to:

Exclude people who already like your page
Leave placements and delivery the same
The option for "lowest cost" should be already selected. That is what you want.

Next you will go to the ad level.

Important: Ads for like campaigns should be very, very simple.

For your image, unless you already subscribe to a paid image service, use the stock image option in Facebook. That way you don't have to pay for images. It's a good cost saver and Facebook has a surprising amount of nice images.

Your image should:

Grab people's attention and be interesting
Be related to your industry
It doesn't need to to be super specific for a like campaign

Next you will add your copy. Your copy shouldn't be about you. It should be about why someone should like your page and what they will get out of it.

Your copy should be:

Simple
A single sentence
WHY someone should like your page

Even the best marketers don't always get it perfect the first time. It's best to try several combinations of copy and photos to see what works best for your like campaign.

WARNING: You used to be able to ask people to like your page in your copy. You can't do this anymore. It's against the Facebook terms of service. Instead, use a simple sentence and rely on the like button in this campaign.

Building Your Facebook Group

Once you have people "like" your Facebook page then you go through those likes and invite people to your join group. All you have to do is click the "invite" button next to their name.

invite Facebook page likes to join facebook group

IMPORTANT: There is a limit to how many people you can invite to your group per day. It seems to be around 50 or so. I go through and invite people until Facebook won't let me do it anymore. Make this part of your daily workflow, or have a virtual assistant do it, and your group will grow day after day.

Sometimes there are people on this list that you may not want to invite. They might leave a bunch of negative comments on your page or you just may not like them. You can choose to hide those suggestions and just skip over them. There is an x that comes up when you hover near an invite that lets you hide someone. That's what I do and it works well.

How to Grow a Facebook Group Organically

If you already have a bunch of page likes on Facebook, then it's easy to grow your Facebook group organically. You simply follow the steps above to link your Facebook page and group together and then invite people to your group. I normally see close to a 50% "take" rate when I invite people this way.

You can also earn page likes organically by posting regular content, but this is not a fast process anymore. If you are running ad campaigns from your page on a regular basis you will also automatically get likes to your page. You can then invite those people to your Facebook group.

Grow a Facebook Group – Video

Here's an explainer video where I walk you through this process step-by-step and show examples of how it works.

If you want to learn more techniques like this to grow your Facebook ads knowledge and ability, go ahead and join my Facebook group here. I give out a ton of training in the group that you won't see anywhere else.

The Bottom Line on Adding 1000 Members to Your Facebook Group Fast

I have found that this two step approach of page likes and inviting to the group works extremely well and has a lower cost per group member than advertising directly for people join a Facebook group.

In order to grow this method, once you get a like campaign that is working at a cost you like, you can add about 20% spend a day to your like campaigns in order to increase the amount of people liking your page.

Remember, you can only invite about 50 people a day to your group manually, so once you reach 50 to 60 likes a day that is a good place to cap your spend.

The great news is that if you are consistent with your like campaign and the invites then your group will grow quickly and be at 1,000 plus members before you know it and you will have an audience where you get great reach and can market to them at no cost going forward.