Transcription
Hey, this is Dave from Unipro, and in this video, I'm going to show you how to set up your Facebook group to help build your business. But I want to be really clear: this isn't about the basic settings, on how to push a couple of buttons to start a Facebook group. You can Google search that; it's so easy to start a Facebook group. In this video, we're going to be diving into the advanced admin settings. They're going to help you automate a lot of the stuff that goes on inside your group, so you're not spending all your time taking care of the tiny details in your group that can all be automated. And instead, you can focus on making sales, growing your revenue, and growing your business.
This is really important for me because every online business that I built, leads and sales have come through a Facebook group. Let me show you an example here. This is one of my most recent groups called Audience and Influence. You can see that I created it just over a year ago; it's got almost 10,000 members and gets a ton of activity. And so, anything that I can do to automate this group and monetize it better, I'm going to do it, and that's what we're going to be looking at inside this video. So let's dive in.
You already likely know that Facebook groups are an amazing way to attract leads, nurture those leads, and turn them into paying customers and clients. But maybe you're worried about the amount of time required to run a successful Facebook group. Maybe you already have a group, and you're worried that you're spending more time moderating that group than it's actually worth. Some people will tell you to go out and hire a group moderator, but that can be very expensive. Or maybe you've tried different software solutions to do automatic posting for you, and you notice that you don't get any engagement when you do content that way inside your group. So maybe you're actually thinking about giving up on your group or not starting your group altogether. And I'm going to tell you something: that would be a mistake.
Because Facebook recently released a new set of tools called Admin Assist, right inside your Facebook group. They can take a load of the work off your shoulders and help you focus on what really matters. So what is Admin Assist? Let's take a look. When you go into your Facebook group, in the menu on the left-hand side, you're going to see Admin Assist. And when you click on that, it's going to take you over to this screen. It says, "How does it work?" Let's take a look at this together. It says, "Say hello to Admin Assist. This is a virtual partner for managing your group." What can it do? Well, Admin Assist is an automation tool that helps you efficiently manage posts, comments, people, and more. And we're going to take a look at the specifics. I'm going to show you how, how I have the setup inside my group in just a minute. Here you see that you can add, edit, or undo any of these changes at any time. So when you create these settings through Admin Assist that we're about to look at, it's not permanent. When you find a set of settings that work well for you, those are the ones that you can keep. And then the final screen here says, "Ready to get started." So let's close that down, and I'm going to walk you through the steps inside Admin Assist. So let's take a look.
The first thing that Admin Assist can do is it can create posts for you. So the first is publishing a welcome post that welcomes your new members. And the second type of post is a custom post. We'll take a look at the custom post in a minute. Let's start with a welcome post. Welcome post automatically generates a post something like this. So I'm over in this group, and it says, "Let's welcome our new members," and then it lists all the new members and tags them. And I understand what Facebook's doing here; it's trying to make your new group members feel welcome; it's trying to get them to engage. But here's the problem with this generic welcome post like this. Let's go take a look at the engagement. You can see this is very typical: no likes, no comments. So for me, this isn't actually one of the tools that I use inside Admin Assist. I'll show you the tools that I do use in just a minute. But I do want to look at this other option here under creating posts. You can also use Admin Assist to publish custom posts. Let's click on "Add," and I'll show you some examples here. You can see it says, "Admin Assist can help you publish daily, weekly, or monthly posts," and I'm going to click on "Continue" here. And you can create one from scratch, but I'll show you the nature of these types of posts. So these are intended to be engagement-style posts. So it says, "Time for Friday favorites. Share this week's favorite," and then it could be whatever food, music, whatever it is. Or "Monthly rules reminder," or "Heads up, here's your monthly reminder," or it could be a "Throwback Thursday. Comment with a photo." And again, I understand the intention here. The intention is to take the load off you as an admin of a group and say, "Facebook, just create the content for me, just put it out on a regular basis, and it's going to spark engagement inside my group." And you can definitely test this, but for me, this is the question I ask: If I was inside a Facebook group and I saw these sorts of posts popping up on a regular basis, would I feel like I'm getting value? Would I feel excited to engage on these posts? For me, the answer is no; I wouldn't. I would avoid, avoid these types of posts. And so, again, for me, I don't use that feature. You can see that neither of these features are turned on inside my group, but there are some features that I do use. Let's keep on going.
The next section is all about managing people, and you can either approve members automatically. So when people request to join your group, you can set up some criteria and automatically approve members, or you can automatically decline members. You'll notice here that I don't have "approve member requests" turned on. I don't want to automate that. The reason being is I want to actually capture some information from the members when they come in my group. Let me show you here. I'm going to go over to my group, and in the menu here, you can go down to "membership questions," and you're going to see that I have three membership questions set up inside my group. And it's asking people some important information about what stage of business they're at, do they want help with something? I'm also collecting email addresses. Now, this information is very important, and I want to save this inside of a database so that I can use this to nurture my leads and turn these leads into paying customers and clients. So this is why I don't actually have this feature turned on in Admin Assist. I don't want Facebook to automatically approve these people; I want to do it using a tool that I'll tell you about in just a second. And that tool takes all these people and puts them into a database. I'll show you my database here, and I'm just going to scroll through. You can see that this database is full of literally thousands of people who have come into my Facebook group, and they've answered those membership questions, and I'm saving their answers inside this database, so they go on my email list, and I can reach out to those people who are saying that they want more help. So again, that's why I don't have this turned on. However, you'll notice that I do have "decline member requests." If I have this turned on—let me show you here—I'm going to click on "Add," and you can add different criteria that will decline people when they request to join your group. And you can see the example that I have here: "no profile picture." So if you click on this, it says, "Decline member request if person does not have a profile picture," and then you can turn on some optional settings here. I can click on this, and I could automatically send that person a message saying, "Hey, if you want to be part of this group, you have to have a profile photo." Well, why do I have that turned on? I'm going to exit this. The reason I have this turned on is because people who don't have profile photos, they're generally not engaging, engaging on Facebook, and I really want to create community inside my Facebook groups. I imagine you do as well. And so, filling up your group with people who don't even have a profile photo is likely going to drag down the engagement inside your group. And so, for me, I just reject those people automatically. You can also choose to suspend people from your group, if—and then there's a bunch of different criteria here, and you can go through the steps and set these criteria. Again, for me, I have that turned off.
Here's, however, where Admin Assist has become very valuable for my Facebook group, and this is managing the content, managing posts. So you'll notice that you can decline incoming posts automatically, and I do have this turned on, and there's four different criteria I have. Let me walk you through these. So you can simply click on the "Add" button, and then you can choose the different options that you want to set up that'll determine whether Admin Assist automatically approves or declines a post coming into your group. So for me, I've declined any posts where the author has had their Facebook account for one month or less. Why is that? Well, the reality is, most people already have a Facebook account. If they're actually using it, as a person who's creating new Facebook accounts at this stage, it's usually people who are creating a second profile or creating some sort of spam profile. So I don't want to let those people create content inside my group; it's probably going to be spam. The second criteria I have here is, "Post has re-shared content from outside the group." So an example would be here: if someone is taking a post that they create on their personal profile or created on a business page, and they're trying to share that into my group, that's the type of content I don't want inside my group. It's usually promotional; it's usually very unrelated to the nature of my group; therefore, it's spam. I want Admin Assist to automatically remove it from the group. "Author does not have a profile picture." Well, Admin Assist is declining anyone who's requesting to join without a profile photo, but imagine if someone joins the group, removes their profile photo, and then they're just going to use this anonymous account to spam inside your group. You can tell Admin Assist, as soon as they create a piece of content, automatically decline it—very helpful. And then finally, "Author has violated group rules in the past 28 days." People who are violating the rules can't post inside the group.
You might look at this and say, "Okay, I get it. You're creating these rules, and that's preventing people from posting inside your group." You might think, "Well, why don't I just turn on post approval?" And if you're not familiar with post approval, let me show you what that is. I'm going to go over to, back into this Audience and Influence group, and I go down here to the group settings, and when we go down here to "manage discussion," you'll see there's something here called "require post approval," and mine is turned off. If you were to edit this and go and turn that on, what that means is that posts by members must be approved by an admin or moderator. So if someone creates a piece of content, it doesn't actually go into the group. All content created by your members goes to you or one of your admins or your moderators, and your admin or moderator needs to click the approve button. Then, when you click it, that post gets approved, and it goes inside your group. Well, you could do this, and then that would lock down everyone from posting automatically inside your group. The reason why I don't do this is twofold: Number one, I don't want to have to do the work, nor do I want the admins in my group to have to do the work of approving every single post that comes inside the group. It can just turn into a lot of work; it's too much; it can be automated. The second reason why I don't turn this on, and I don't recommend it for you either, because it actually trains your audience to be less engaged. Think about how you would react if you were inside my group, and you had an important question or something that you wanted to share. You created a post; you took your time to create that post; maybe you put an image or a video; you posted that in the group, and then nothing happened. That's frustrating, extremely. Yeah, your post has been sent to an admin, and now you have to sit back and wait for the admin to see it and approve it. That can be frustrating as a group member; it can actually train your group members to say, "You know what? It takes too long; it's, it's not worth my while. I'm going to stop posting content inside this group." That's not what you want. And so, instead, I like to use these rules to prevent spammers while still allowing my actual authentic group members to create content and share inside the group. Very cool feature; this is very helpful. You can also set up automation rules to remove, publish posts if they hit certain criteria. You can turn off commenting automatically on certain posts based on certain criteria, and you can move the post to the review section, like I just talked about, if it meets certain criteria. Again, I don't use any of these features; this specific setup is all I've needed to really moderate posts inside my group. This is what I recommend for you as well. Now let's go on and take a look.
You can also automatically manage comments. You'll see I do have two rules set up for managing my comments: If the author has been reported two times or more in the past 20 days. So this is if members of my group are offended by someone, and they report someone, that person's reported twice, that person then is shut down from commenting inside my group. Similar, if the author has violated the group rules in the past 28 days, then they're also shut down. And this is really helpful because it prevents members who might comment in harmful ways from making any comments. I don't want the members of my group to feel unsafe engaging in my group, so these two rules can really help out.
Now, I do have something else to show you that it relates to this managing comments and managing posts. You might wonder, "Well, where can I see this stuff? What happens to the posts and the comments that Admin Assist is removing on my behalf?" Well, there's a very cool feature that does exactly that. I'm going to go back over to my Audience and Influence group, and I'm just going to scroll down here, and you can see over the menu I'm in the section called "Activity Log." An activity log basically records everything that happens inside your group and shows who took the actions. So when we go over here, you can actually see the most recent action inside my group was done by Admin Assist, and it says, "A post by Rosemary was automatically declined," and then I can click on "See details," and I can see this is exactly the type of thing that I want Admin Assist to do on my behalf. It sees that Rosemary tried to share this video inside my group; it's a spamming piece of content; it's not something that's going to benefit the members inside the group; therefore, I'm really glad that Admin Assist went and automatically removed that for me. I could undo this, so you can override any of the actions that Admin Assist does, but I just wanted you to see that over here in the activity log. As I scroll down, you can see Lucy; she's done a bunch of work. So Lucy's an admin in the group. Here's another couple of actions by Admin Assist. So you can see Admin Assist; it is saving us time, and it will do the same for you as well. The activity log is very helpful to see what Admin Assist is doing on your behalf. Now let's go down, and we'll take a look at the last section here; it's managing chats. I don't know if you're using Community Chats inside your Facebook group, but basically, it's like a group chat for any member inside your group or for anyone who's going to a specific event. For me, I don't use them at all. I find that it actually detracts from conversations inside the group. I don't want my group members to have side conversations inside this Community Chat; I want them to have conversations inside the group where everyone can participate and where it will spark my Facebook algorithm to make sure that people will see content from my group more often. So for me, I don't use Community Chats at all, which is why I don't have Admin Assist doing anything related to these chats.
So as you can see, with the new tools inside Assist, you can remove a lot of the moderation from your Facebook group, which frees you up to focus on making real relationships, creating content, nurturing your leads, and making sales. Those are the important things that you should be focusing on. Now, in full transparency, I do want to say that there is a tool that I use that automates all of my Facebook marketing, and I mentioned this earlier; it's called Unipro. And if you've never checked out Unipro, you got to check it out. Go over to uno.com. Unipro finds leads for me that are really targeted, brings those people over to my group, gets them to join my group, as I already showed you; it fills up my database with email addresses and answers to questions as people join my group; it nurtures those leads, and it makes sales for me. So if you're using Facebook and Facebook groups to build your business online, you got to check out Uno; it's been a game changer for me, and I know it will be for you as well. That's what I've got for you in this video. If this was helpful, give this video a like, and if you have any questions about how to use Admin Assist inside your Facebook group, feel free to leave those below. I'm happy to help out. And if you haven't checked out Unipro, you got to check it out. Go over to uno.com. I know it's going to be such a game changer for you. So thanks for checking out this video. Can't wait to see you in the next video.