How to Plan Engaging Content for Your Facebook Group

Feb 8, 2023 | Facebook, Online Communities

Wondering whether you’re doing your best to post engaging content for your Facebook Group? Unsure of whether anybody sees or cares to see your posts?

If you want an engaged community or Facebook Group, you have to give members something engaging to respond to — so they can have direct two-way conversations with you and with each other.

But to do that, you need a plan. Not just any plan either. You need one that meets the needs of you and your group. You deserve to feel good about what you are doing and confident you’re doing the right things at the right time.

As the owner of Team Kubo, an online community management agency, I help people design highly engaged groups and train others to do the same. It also means I plan A LOT of content for A LOT of groups. If I seem better at it than you, it’s not because they taught this stuff in college. It’s because I’ve done more of it for a lot longer than you have. With practice, comes progress.

In this article, I’m sharing what I’ve learned over the years about how to plan content for groups to drive engagement and get results.

Read on to learn:

• How to plan content for your group
• How to create content that connects with your members
• Whether you should schedule your community content
• How to tell what’s working and what’s not

How to Plan Engaging Content for Your Facebook Group

If you want to plan content in a way that’s efficient and effective, you need a foolproof system that includes the following steps:

1. Get a mechanism to collect your ideas

Ideas of what to share with your community can strike any place and any time. Figure out how to collect ideas when they come now so you don’t find yourself with a great idea and no way to remember it when it’s time to write. The easiest low-tech solution is to carry a notepad and pen in your purse or pocket to jot down ideas that come up when you’re on the go. If you’re someone who’s never too far from your phone, though, a voice memo or notes app might be more convenient.

2. Pick one method for writing your posts

Routines support consistency, so pick one method for writing your posts and stick with it. I prefer a Google Doc because it’s easy for me to use either from my computer, phone or tablet, and I like the document interface. If Google Docs don’t work for you, you can use Word Online, Dropbox Paper or a note-taking app like Evernote.

What’s important is not losing track of your best ideas.

3. Commit to a scheduling system for your content

Community engagement comes down to value. To make sure you’re delivering the value you’ve promised to your group members, I recommend planning your content schedule in a place where you can evaluate each post in the context of what else you’re publishing that week, month and over the quarter. A social media scheduler sort of does that, but doesn’t make it easy to move posts around as needed.

I prefer to sketch out my content schedule (what I’m posting and when I’m posting it) in a Google doc that makes it easy to copy and paste into the group. You might prefer using a spreadsheet or productivity application, such as Airtable, Notion, Asana or Trello. Whatever tool plays nicely with your brain and is easy for you to use consistently is the tool you should use.

4. Know what you want to say and what your community needs to hear

Once you have mechanisms in place to collect your ideas, write out your posts and plan them out, it’s time to figure out what you actually should say to your community.

To truly grow your group and get results, you need to share content that connects with your members. Even members who only visit the group a few times a month will notice if the content doesn’t align with what they expect from the community. 

If you aren’t sure what to post, here are some ideas:

• Revisit your group’s purpose and promise — everything you post should complement the reason your group exists and what you’ve promised to deliver to your members.
• Review members’ most frequently asked questions — even the simplest questions can be answered in a variety of ways, and it doesn’t hurt to reinforce your key messages.
• Examine all facets of your group focus — brainstorm the “who, what, when, where, how” questions about your topic.

How to Create Content That Connects with Your Members

Every group is different. The secret to planning engaging content for your group isn’t figuring out what works in other groups. You need to only concern yourself with the content that performs best in YOUR group.

To figure that out, experiment. In every group I lead, we are always testing content to figure out what connects and resonates with members. We test, test and test again.

If you’re not sure where to begin, start with content that lends itself to facilitating connection between strangers online:

• Polls — Polls work well to drive engagement in groups because they are easy to answer. Most polls are multiple-choice questions. It’s easy to click the response that fits best.
• Video — Even one-way livestream broadcasts feel engaging to members. If your video offers the solution to a problem members want to solve, they’ll show up for it.
• Questions that encourage connection — Meet-and-greet posts, icebreaker questions, invitations to promote offers or post needs are all examples of questions that encourage members to connect with each other.

Need additional ideas? Check out our 30 Facebook™️ Group Engagement Posts That will Increase Interaction.

Should You Schedule Your Community Content?

Scheduling content in communities or social media can be controversial. Some experts say scheduling reduces your reach, which will negatively impact engagement. Others say scheduling is the only way to ensure consistency.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never experienced negative effects of scheduling content in the communities I lead. I also haven’t seen evidence of decreased reach or engagement when scheduling to any social media platforms.

Rumors aside, scheduling content in your Facebook Group or online community has its pros and cons — like most things in business.

Arguments in favor of scheduling group content

Scheduling content allows you to ensure consistency in providing valuable content to your group. You won’t neglect your group for days, weeks or months if you’re scheduling content regularly. 

Posting on the fly, or when the mood strikes, doesn’t usually lend itself to making sure you’re covering the full scope of what your members need. Groups do best when they have content covering education, networking, entertainment, and available offers (if applicable). But when you’re posting when the mood strikes you, you’ll likely default to the one or two content types you personally prefer.

Practically speaking, the best reason to schedule your community content is so you can work ahead. If you have a few weeks of content scheduled, you can take time off or hyper-focus your attention in a different aspect of your business as needed.

Arguments against scheduling your group content

Depending on the focus of your community, you might need to pay attention to the relevance and timeliness of your content. Make sure to review scheduled posts to decide whether they are still appropriate based on current events and member priorities.

No system is perfect. Every automation fails from time to time. Scheduling content isn’t a perfect “fix it and forget it” system for ensuring the proper care and feeding of your group. You have to monitor the group regularly to make sure the posts are published according to the schedule you’ve set.

The main reason people shy away from scheduling content in groups is concern over how to manage the schedule during conflict or crisis. The only solution is to have a documented process for pausing the schedule or pulling down all scheduled posts when crisis or conflict demands it. 

How to Tell What’s Working with Your Content Plan (and What’s Not)

Group leaders and even professional community managers rely on their instincts too often to gauge whether group members are responding positively to the content they publish.

“The group seems healthy,” they’ll say. Or, “ugh…it’s all crickets. I’m just talking to myself.”

Either could be true in any group at any time but there’s only one way to know for sure: dig into your data.

I’ve long said successful online community management is equal parts art and science. This is true.

The key part of that statement is one that sometimes gets lost: EQUAL.

What do the numbers tell you?

The art or instinctive side of online community management must be informed by data. They are two sides of the same coin when it comes to giving your community what it needs to yield the results you — or your business — needs in return.

Feelings are not facts.

No matter what your feelings tell you about your group or your member engagement, you need to look at your numbers regularly. Don’t be afraid to look at your numbers, and look at them often. Monthly best.

Data is neutral. It’s neither good nor bad. And it empowers you to make evidence-based decisions.

Here are the data points I track in the groups I manage each month:

• Growth — number of members gained and lost
• Engagement rate — number of active members divided by total number of members in the group.
• Most engaged members — The members who react to posts, comment and create their own posts each month.
• Most popular posts — The posts that get the most engagement each month.

I document these data points and look for trends to emerge quarterly. Doing so helps me to see what’s working and what’s not. I also look to see if I can connect any shifts in the data to things we’re doing from the management side.

Putting Together Your Own Engaging Content Plan

A plan for engaging content in your Facebook Group or online community isn’t hard to create, now that you know the steps required. 

Whether you use a notepad and pen or phone app to collect thoughts and ideas while you’re on the go, it doesn’t matter. The best plans start with a dedicated method for getting your ideas in a single place. Having all of your ideas in a single location makes it easier to focus on what you want to say when it comes time to create your content. You can use any writing system that works for you, but don’t underestimate the powerful simplicity of a simple Google or Word document.

Once you know how you’ll get your writing and content creation done consistently, it’s a matter of figuring out what to say, the best way to say it (video, polls, etc.) and when you’ll be posting. 

From there, you’ll want to be sure to gather and evaluate your data monthly and quarterly. Then you can be confident you know what’s working and what’s not.

Need Help with Your Community?

Team Kubo specializes in online community design, development and growth. Whether you need help with strategy, training your admin team or day-to-day management of your group, we can help. The first step is to complete our no-cost community health assessment, so we can identify your needs and customize a plan to get the results you desire.

Scared to Start an Online Community? Try a Pop-Up Facebook Group

Feb 1, 2023 | Facebook, Online Communities

Have you considered starting an online community but aren’t sure if you have the stamina to keep it going? A pop-up Facebook Group is a way to test how it feels to design, develop and manage an online community without the pressure of a long-term commitment.

A pop-up Facebook Group is a temporary group created for a specific purpose or event. The group is usually closed after the event or purpose ends. The group allows people to communicate and share information about the event or topic, and is typically accessible on an invitation-only basis.

Most pop-up groups are open for fewer than 90 days, though some might last longer. You’ve likely participated in pop-up Facebook groups offered in conjunction with an online challenge, product or book launch, or a short-term course or program. If you think for a moment, you’ve probably enjoyed some experiences with pop-up groups more than others.

Wonder why? 

In this article, we will explore the benefits and potential drawbacks of using pop-up Facebook groups in your business, and how to effectively navigate and participate in these dynamic communities.

Benefits and Challenges of Pop-Up Facebook Groups

For any community to capture attention, it needs to immediately make a difference in people’s lives. For most people, that means saving time, money or energy, or by providing a sense of belonging to prove they are not all alone in this big, wide world.

Groups that do best have a specific focus and clearly identify who they are designed to serve. This is where pop-up groups excel. But like a duck calmly floating across a pond, there is a flurry of activity required under the surface to make any community thrive. And in the case of a pop-up Facebook Group, which is temporary by design, that flurry of activity has to happen quickly with little room for error.

Pop-up Facebook groups feel like a double-edged sword. Everything you expect to be great about them usually holds true. You also find that each benefit has a shadow side that can take you by surprise.

Benefits

The benefit of pop-up groups is they are focused and temporary. You can do anything for a short period of time, right? By designing a group to be temporary, you free yourself from the worries of long-term maintenance, engagement and member retention.

You have the freedom of making in-the-moment decisions because you don’t have to worry much about living with the long-term consequences of those decisions or feeling like you’re setting a precedent for the future.

The temporary nature of a pop-up group also allows you to narrowly focus your content and topics discussed. Rather than scratching the surface of general conversations, you can choose to have a group that goes deep into a specific facet of a big topic or issue. 

In addition to using them for challenges and student support, pop-up Facebook groups are great for helping you gauge interest in a topic or offer you think will resonate with your audience. We’ve all made the mistake of building pretty castles nobody else wants to live in (i.e. creating complete offers nobody buys). A pop-up group allows you to validate a concept, so you know whether it makes sense to invest in creating an offer around it.

Challenges 

The benefits of hosting pop-up Facebook groups are also challenges. Because they are focused and temporary, pop-up groups are intense to manage.

These groups usually experience explosive, rapid growth as members invite their friends and family to join before the group closes or is paused.

Onboarding members is an intense experience because you are letting several — sometimes hundreds — of people into the group each day. If you don’t have screening measures in place, you might unknowingly accept requests from fake accounts or individuals with a desire to troll or spam members.

Not cool for the members who are in the group for the right reasons and not fun for you as the person who now has the added responsibility of removing bad actors and repairing the damage they’ve done to the community and its culture.

The temporary nature of pop-up Facebook groups means you don’t have the luxury of a gentle onboarding process to ease members into the community.

If your group is only going to be open for a few weeks, you have about four days to ensure everyone is properly oriented to the group and that the members start to gel with one another toward the shared purpose or goal of the group.

A pop-up group is like speed dating, amplified. 

If you don’t make the time to onboard your members thoughtfully and quickly, you run the risk of members tapping out before the group even gets off the ground. This is the main cause I see of pop-up groups with poor engagement.

Organization of content is another challenge. When you’re building a permanent or evergreen Facebook Group, you have time to figure things out as you go. If the initial way you organize your group content doesn’t work, you can rearrange it according to member needs until you get it right.

With a pop-up group, the content needs to immediately make sense to members and you have to support their orientation experience quickly so you don’t lose them before they have a chance to see the value in the group.

The biggest challenge, though, with pop-up Facebook groups is your own capacity of time and energy. It is your job to actively moderate the group, or ensure it is being actively managed by someone else. You have to set clear guidelines, care for your group members and promote engagement to have a successful pop-up group.

No matter how you choose to fulfill your obligations as the leader of a pop-up Facebook Group, energy management is important. 

How to Manage Your Energy When Hosting a Pop-Up Facebook Group

Whether you’re managing a pop-up Facebook Group for yourself or for someone else, energy will be your most precious limited resource. No matter who you are or how you live, you don’t have more than 24 hours in any given day. And you have to reserve some of those hours for meeting your own basic needs of sleeping, eating and day-to-day living. Th

If you want your pop-up Facebook Group to thrive, here is what you have to do:

1. Embrace the mindset of a sprinter. It takes a lot of time and energy to make a community out of strangers from various time zones, cultures and backgrounds. Evergreen communities eventually sustain themselves after a few months. But pop-up groups require your full attention from the time they open until they close. Plan a one- to two-week period of rest after your group closes to recharge your batteries.
2. Create a solid structure for your group. To feel safe participating, your members need to clearly understand your group’s rules of engagement. Make them clear in your group description, community standards and how you facilitate conversations.
3. Onboard your members with intention. First impressions matter more online than they do in face-to-face situations because you don’t have the context of facial expressions, gestures, or vocal tone to convey your meaning. Show members they matter from the moment they enter your group by warmly welcoming them and inviting their participation. Video is a great way to accomplish this by showing members your personality in real time, but it’s not a requirement
4. Get people talking to each other. Carrying the burden of conversation is exhausting. Lighten the load by tagging folks in comments to meet each other and invite them to share their thoughts and experiences to foster richer discussions.
5. Have a sunset plan. Sudden stops are jarring, even in communities designed to only last for a short period of time. Plan a cooldown period for your pop-up group, where you tie up loose ends and let members know how to stay in touch if they’d like to continue the conversation when the group closes.
6. Get help. If all of this sounds overwhelming to you, consider hiring a professional to manage your pop-up community. You can negotiate a scope of work that allows for the proper care and feeding of your community while giving you the opportunity to focus your own efforts on the aspects of the project that you find most enjoyable.

At the risk of sounding trite, the lasting impression of you and your pop-up Facebook Group won’t be in your dazzling graphics or polished branding. It’ll be in how you made members feel. Take the time to make people feel known and loved, and they’ll return the favor with grace and loyalty.

Resources to Support a Successful Pop-Up Facebook Group

If you want to go a step further in caring for your community members during a temporary or pop-up group, check out these resources:

• Creating a Facebook Group and setting one up that positions you – and your members – for success are two different things. Use this checklist to think through every step required to start and sustain a successful online community, even if it’s only going to be open temporarily.
• Want to inject your personality into your online conversations, no matter where they take place? This video shows you how to create GIFs, so group members can see and feel the intent behind your comments and responses.
• Responding to emails and answering questions in groups involves a lot of typing, much of which feels repetitive. TextExpander saves hours of time by allowing you create templates activated by a few simple keystrokes. This is also a great tool for anyone who struggles with pain associated with repetitive stress injuries
• Feel like your group doesn’t have much engagement? An Australian researcher has spent years studying Facebook groups and found there are six types of healthy group members, not all of whom actively post even when they find the groups to be highly valuable. Learn the types and how they contribute to healthy groups here. Rather than beat yourself up over who isn’t part of the conversation, accept the reality that some of your audience is choosing to be invisible.
• Want to learn the ins and outs of running successful pop-up groups that actually have value and won’t suck you dry? Check out Eli Trier’s Community Magic program. Eli is a heart-centered business owner who understands the art and science behind connecting on a human-to-human level. She’s the antithesis of the dude-bro marketer. Her programs are friendly and accessible to neurodiverse individuals, and she encourages participants to do business in a way that respects their boundaries and capacity limits.

Need Help with Your Community?

Team Kubo specializes in online community design, development and growth. Whether you need help with strategy, training your admin team or day-to-day management of your group, we can help. The first step is to complete our no-cost community health assessment, so we can identify your needs and customize a plan to get the results you desire.