How to Cultivate Community With Facebook Groups

Want more engagement in your Facebook group? Looking for tips on shaping your group's culture?

To explore how to build a loyal and engaged community inside of Facebook groups, I interview Dana Malstaff.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Dana Malstaff. She's the author of Boss Mom and host of the Boss Mom podcast. Her membership site is called Boss Mom Vault, and she's built a thriving community in a Facebook group.

Dana explains how to lay the groundwork for a new group and attract members.

You'll also learn how to foster group culture and engagement.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Group Engagement
Dana's Story
On New Year's Eve, Dana rang in 2013 celebrating her last day at her full-time job. She started the new year as an entrepreneur and an expecting first-time mom. Although she was scared and had no idea how to do either, she wanted to be amazing at both. At the time, she felt isolated, living in Columbus, Ohio, surrounded by people who had full-time jobs and no kids.

After Dana's son was born, he went to daycare while she worked, and she felt a massive amount of guilt working at home and sending her baby to school, even though that's what she wanted to do. At one point, while she was working on her laptop in a café, the sight of a mom, daughter, and grandma made her cry.

When Dana told her husband that she wanted to move back to San Diego, California, where her parents still live, he said, "I'll quit my job tomorrow, and we'll sell the house." Two months later, when her son was five months old, Dana was living in San Diego, surrounded by people who had kids and businesses. Being among people who were doing something similar to her was empowering.

At Hal Elrod's Best Year Ever Blueprint, Dana met some people who started a mastermind group, and one of them was Azul Terronez, who helped Dana write her book, Boss Mom. The book talks about how she stopped feeling guilty about creating things while raising a child. As the book succeeded, Dana wove the Boss Mom idea into her whole brand.

As part of that effort, Dana created the Boss Mom Facebook group, but Boss Mom is something much bigger than a Facebook group. Dana envisioned it as a movement with a culture.

In the Facebook group, Dana guides the Boss Mom culture and creates a foundation for what people expect from it, a process similar to building culture at a company. This summer, Dana launched Boss Mom meetups, so the community has an online and offline presence.

When you think about your topic as a movement with a culture, you treat it differently than many people treat their Facebook groups. With this approach, Dana's Facebook group has grown to 33,000 members, most of whom discovered the group organically through Facebook recommendations or referrals from friends. The group adds an average of 120 members weekly.

Dana's group isn't only large and growing; it also has high engagement. Each month, on average, about 70% of her group members are active participants. The group has 85,000 to 89,000 interactions and about 5,000 posts each month.

Listen to the show to hear Dana and me discuss possible reasons why she found more entrepreneurs in San Diego than Columbus.
How to Build a Facebook Group
When Dana started her Facebook group, she made a common mistake: posting in the group and telling people they should hang out with her. For a while, she was the only one posting, which is a sad and depressing experience for most group owners. She hoped other people would comment and thought engaging everyone was her job alone. Otherwise, she thought no one would engage.

However,