Facebook Group Engagement | HIT Virtual Assitants
One way to increase engagement in your Facebook group is through a community challenge. They are a proven way to increase interaction and get your group members involved.
Keeping your community engaged with you and with each other is always a challenge which is why being consistent with your interactions is vitally important. People want to know, like, and trust you and they can’t achieve those things (which ultimately lead to new clients) unless you’re available and visible to them.
When you run a challenge as part of an already-established group, you’ll have the super excited bunch who can’t wait to get finished. You’ll also have lurkers who want to know what’s going on but aren’t sure about how this challenge will benefit them. This is normal human behavior but there are ways to increase your numbers of excited challengers.
Explain the Win-Win Benefits of Your Challenge
When your challengers fully understand the benefits of your challenge and how their lives or their businesses will benefit from the challenge, they will become more excited to get started and to share their progress. Place the focus on the challenge participants and make them feel important.
Encourage everyone to join in, even if their accountability ends up being a private email to you at the end. Describe the benefits of the networking opportunity among the group members. Better yet, encourage your challengers to team up with an accountability partner so they can check in on each other privately instead of in front of the whole challenge group.
The frequency of accountability really depends on how frequently you’re publishing a new task. If your challenge is 10 days long with 10 daily exercises, then it’s reasonable to expect daily accountability. If your tasks are weekly, then it makes sense to publish a mid-week cheerleading post and accountability closer to the end of the week, especially if your weekly tasks are very involved.
Use Facebook’s Built-In Units Option for Easy Accountability
One new toy that Facebook has implemented is the use of “units” inside of Facebook Groups. When setting up the type of group you want, select the “Social Learning” option which adds the “units” tab to the group’s home page margin. When you click on that Units tab or button, all of the challenge posts appear in order and you have the option of clicking “I’m Done” when you finish the task. No more scrolling or searching to find the relevant challenge tasks. Inevitably you end up missing one or more which makes the challenge more frustrating. And no worries…after changing to Social Learning, your privacy settings remain the same, which is good news for those with Private or Secret groups.
To spur even more engagement among challengers, consider doing a daily drawing. Choose any prize you want (that won’t break the bank if you’re doing one each day) or choose a winner each day and draw a champion at the end of the challenge who receives a great prize. The choice is yours and you may have to experiment to see what’s best accepted by your audience. Another built-in is Badges which help you recognize admins, moderators, and dedicated group members. This is available in any group with more than 50 members. The badges include Admin and Moderator, New Member, Group Anniversary, Founding Member, Conversation Booster, Visual Storyteller, Greeter, Link Curator, and Rising Star. Learn more about this feature here.
Do you have a Facebook Group and would like to increase engagement with a community challenge?
I have a planner that will walk you through planning and implementing a successful challenge step by step.
Originally published at http://www.hitvirtual.com on June 23, 2019.
