Key Tips
- Try using community tags to help people find your community by interest or location.
- Use popular words related to your community's subject matter in your communities' name.
- Promote your community using a Facebook Page.
If you have a closed community, a Page can provide a public face to the community and help attract new members.
Make your community easy for people to find with keywords and tags
Admins recommend using popular words related to your communities' subject matter in your communities' name, since potential community members might search for those common terms. For example, a parenting community might want to include “parents,” “moms” or “dads” in their community name. This will help interested people find your community when searching for those words on Facebook.
Consider using community tags to make your community easier to find.Location tags help people search for and discover communities that are relevant to their area.
Create a Facebook Page to use as the public face of your community
Some admins recommend creating a Facebook Page to help promote your community, especially if your community is a private community. These admins use a Page to spread the word about their community and give prospective members a sense of the communities' culture. Examples of what you could share on a Page include upcoming public events your community has organized, achievements like successful fundraisers or articles related to your communities' subject matter.
A Page can also help you vet potential members. People who have seen your Page before joining your community might have a better sense of whether the community is a good fit for them. By reading people's comments on your Page, you may be able to tell which folks are a good fit for your community, too. You can link the Page to your community so people can easily request to join, or you can proactively invite new members you've seen commenting on the Page.
Help people find related communities by linking them
As more people join your community, you may notice that members might not be interested in the same topics. For example, a cat community might have a growing number of members who only want to talk about Siamese cats. Other members are only interested in their own cat's breed.
Experienced admins suggest creating a separate linked community for these specific topics. You can link the new community to your main community to keep members connected to the larger community. Linking communities makes it easier for members to discover these related communities.
You can also use Community Chats to support casual, real-time communication within your group. Imagine starting a chat about cat adoption or memes, inspired by a group post about cats. Or, you could take a passionate debate on a group post about the best local Thai food and turn it into a real-time chat. Chats are a way to complement your group’s feed by diving deeper into specific interests and encouraging more conversations; in turn, bringing your group closer together. Like your group page, you can invite both members and non-members to chats (but if your group requires admin approval or join questions, non-members will be directed to complete those first before joining).
Audio transcript
"One great way to really grow your community is to promote it on your Facebook Page. There’s a lot of people that might have not even known that this resource existed, had it not been for us posting about it on our Page. It’s actually something we see in our member vetting process, where we ask: 'How did you find the community?' A lot of people point to, 'We saw it on a post you had on your Facebook Page.' So I definitely recommend admins to take advantage of that linking and really cross-promoting." - Joelle, Community Admin
