How to Strategically Post to Facebook Groups with Agorapulse

Did you hear the news? You can now post to Facebook Groups with Agorapulse.

This is a big deal for any Facebook group manager who wants to be more strategic and effective in the way that they use their group.

As the manager of several Facebook groups, this feature helps me further streamline my work. Rather than needing to manage my pages in Agorapulse, and then log into Facebook to post my content in my groups, I can now do it all in one place. It also allows for better collaboration and more options for creating content.

Post to Facebook Groups with Agorapulse

Like other types of accounts, adding your Facebook group to your Agorapulse dashboard just takes a couple steps.

First, choose “Facebook group” from the list of possible profiles to add.

Next, you need to authorize Agorapulse to post to Facebook. You will have to do this for each new group.

Finally, you’ll get a prompt to add the Agorapulse app to your group itself.

The prompts through this process are easy and quick to follow– it took me less than 2 minutes to add a new group to my Agorapulse dashboard.

Note: You must already be an admin natively on the Facebook group in order to link the group to your Agorapulse dashboard. If you’re not, ask a teammate to make you an admin on the native Facebook group platform.

Using Scheduling Tools for More Strategic Posts

Now that you have your Facebook group added to your dashboard, how do you best make use of all your new scheduling power? There are three primary functions you will want to use:

• Categories and queues for your content
• Republish for important notifications
• Adding a team member for better collaboration

Let’s take a look at each in turn.

Using Queue Categories to ensure a strong mix of content types/themes

If you are not using content queue categories for all of your social media posts (including Twitter,  Instagram and LinkedIn), you are missing out.

Queue categories is perfect for groups. You can use them to create predictable posting patterns– such as theme days– so members know what to expect. Here are a few things you can try out:

• Monday Motivation. Have your group members share something that inspires them, or react to something that you create.
• Tuesday Tips. Invite your group members to share tips from their area of expertise.
• Fanpage Friday. Many groups encourage people to help one another by liking each other’s social media profiles. If this is a good fit for your group, try this one out!
• Goal setting. It can be a powerful thing to encourage your group members to set goals within the group and then hold one another accountable.
• Book of the month. Ask your group members what they are reading.
• Quote of the day. Ask your members to share a quote they love.
• Challenges. Set a group goal and then give them the step by step instructions on how to get there and have them report back to the group when they are done.

These are only the tip of the iceberg.

Think about what will most help and engage your group, create several post and add them to your queue. You could easily set up monthly posts on topics like this in a queue and have a solid start to a whole year’s worth of content.

The most important word when choosing content for a group is “engagement.” In this space, you want to think about what your group cares about and how they want to interact with other group members.

Use Schedule/Republish to get your point across

Your group rules (community guidelines) are a crucial part of your Facebook group’s success– and it’s a good idea to make sure everyone’s up to date with them. Scheduling posts about upcoming meetings and reminders about important information can help everyone keep up.

Sometimes there are things you want to make sure your members see, but that they don’t need to see forever. For that, using the republishing option is a great tool.

Within this option, you have two choices: republish regularly or schedule again.

The first one is good for a temporary thing that you want to go over a few times. This might be reminders about what to bring to an upcoming event, a reiteration of new rules, or a reminder that something is coming up.

When you choose this option, select a number of days between posts, and how many times total to post.

Alternatively, you might have a date-based reminder that needs to go up more than once. If your meetings are always on the second Tuesday of the month, this is a fast way to schedule a reminder to go out every month and schedule out for a few months at a time.

Still not sure if scheduling is best for you? Trying to better understand queues? Learn more about the differences between queue v. schedule here.

Add a team member to coordinate with your co-Lead

If you manage a Facebook group for a client or co-lead one with a partner, you know how easy it is to cross wires and post at roughly the same time.

With Agorapulse, all group admins can schedule content in advance so that it’s spread out and doesn’t overwhelm the group. Plus, you can easily see what’s coming up and decide when to add additional posts to the mix.

Engage new members with this shared resource

How can you make new group members feel part of the community?

With the Agorapulse scheduling feature, you can add the images of your posts to a group photo album. This is great for collecting and organizing posts that new members may be interested in– a bit like a mini on-boarding resource.

Some ways you can use this include:

• Keeping all photos for a single event in one place
• Helping people get to know one another by adding a welcome image that you can add to an album
• Creating an album of tips or important resources
• Creating an album based on different subgroups (for example occupation)

When you have your content organized in the group, it will help you grow.

A lively, engaged group

Bottom line– Agorapulse makes it easy to start posting strategically to Facebook groups. Groups can be a successful tool if you use a little planning in your process and now it’s easier than ever to do so.

(And before you ask, right now you can publish to Facebook groups using Agorapulse. However, there’s no option to get the inbox or reports for groups.)