If you haven’t started a Facebook group for your business, now may be a good time to start.

Facebook groups can help you build a strong community, build up credibility with your customer base and connect with people who want your goods and services.

Facebook Groups are more important than ever, given the ongoing decline of organic reach at the largest social media platform in the world. According to Facebook’s own data, organic reach has decreased from 15 percent to about 2 percent since 2012 and, after last year’s Cambridge Analytics scandal, it certainly will get worse. After that news broke, Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to show more content from users’ friends and family—and less from fan pages or business pages.

More than 200 million people have signed up for Facebook Groups since they were initiated three years ago, which proves the interest is there.

A Facebook group is like a forum, where members with similar interests discuss topics, share content, like tips, photos, videos or observations and support each other.

Using a Facebook Group as part of your marketing strategy can help you:

  • Connect with your audience in a meaningful way
  • Share experiences
  • Build up a community
  • Promote your products and services
  • Test new products or services
  • Answer questions from your customers
  • Provide additional value, such as exclusive discounts to group members
  • Improve your overall service

It’s one of the best ways to interact with your customers online, and it is completely organic, which means you don’t have to spend anything. You invite members and choose who gets to take part in the group.

Facebook Groups are easy to create, too. Simply log in to your profile or page, click on the drop down icon on the far right of the page, go to the group option, then ‘New Group’ or Create Group and follow prompts from there.

You will have to select from one of the three types of groups:

  • Closed Groups: anyone can search, find and request to join the group, group admins approve who can join. Only members can see posts. Closed groups are generally the best ones for businesses.
  • Public Groups: anyone can search and find public groups, but in order to get a notification the user has to request to join. In public groups, anyone can accept the join requests.
  • Secret Groups: Only the group members can search and see this group. Thus, no one can send join request to the admin of this type of group. Only the admins can accept the join requests to this group.

What do you think? Have you formed a Facebook Group for your business? Let us know in the comments!