How to grow your facebook group to 1000 members in just 2 months

Main lesson from getting 1,000 group members in two months? That there is NO magic. There is just a process that if followed correctly, takes you to the end goal. This means that by using this process you also can get 1,000 group members in two months.

What I am going to share with you in this post is what coaches charge thousands to teach you! In fact, I actually hired a coach to teach me all of these👇 which I am now sharing with you for FREE.

Why? Because when I got started, I was confused, had no clue what to do and so, really wanted to find a guide to teach me how to grow my Facebook group but couldn’t find any! So I told myself that once I “crack the code” and learn how to do it, I’d create that guide and make sure others can now find and access it for free.

Let’s dive straight into “the process” that I used to get 1,000 group members in two months without using paid advertising.

Step 1. Set Goals
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You have to be very clear on what it is you’re trying to achieve, short-term and long-term. In short, set goals and know your ‘why’. Firstly, it is important to set some metrics such as ‘get to 1k members in two months. Apart from having clarity on where you want to get, this will help you understand what needs to be done in order to meet the goal in due time.

Secondly, knowing why you are creating this group in the first place will help you build a strong foundation and strategy that are meant to take you there. For example, you could build a Facebook group purely for support and networking reasons or the goal might be to get leads for your coaching business! Once you know your ‘why’, you can focus on the ‘who’. Assuming the end goal is to get coaching clients, you have to ask yourself who these coaching clients are. Who are you targeting?

Yes, I am sure you are tired to hear “niche down, identify your target audience”, but it is indeed crucial. Why? Because this allows you to know where these people spend time, and what types of resources they consume which helps you understand where/when/how/what to post!
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Step2.  Select 5 External Groups
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To grow your Facebook group, you need to find people who want to join. Assuming you don’t have the budget to invest in paid ads, you’ll have to use organic marketing to grow your group. On Facebook, there are two simple ways to attract prospects: either from your personal profile or from other external groups.

What you want to do is find 5 Facebook groups with your target audience where you will post consistently. Why? Because most of your new group members will come from these groups! Your goal is to create content that will attract these prospects.

In this regard, the process for group selection is very important! Firstly, you want to find groups addressing your target audience. Secondly, it is important for those groups to have great engagement. Otherwise, you might end up in a group with 20k members full of spam where people do not engage with any of the posts! No engagement = no visibility = no group members for you!

Now, the issue is that most free groups with great engagement don’t allow promotion posts. And so, you might want to consider getting a Premium membership in paid groups that for $27-$97 per month will allow you to promote yourself.  I used a combination of both!

To make it easier for you to find external groups I compiled a list of 100 Facebook Groups that you can use to attract prospects for your group. You can easily access it here.
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Step 3. Create 1 or 2 leads magnets or ‘freebies’
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These lead magnets are free resources that your target audience wants! Guides, eBooks, checklists, or templates work well. You can always outsource this part to a freelancer.

Freebies are a key component in attracting new members to the group! Why would they join? Because you will share the resource in the group, and in order for them to access it, they have to join the group first! Smart, right? 😎

What freebies to create? Talk to and observe the behavior of your clients - what they want, what their biggest struggles are, etc. Write a guide to show them exactly how to solve their biggest problem or get to where they want.
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Step 4. Plan your Content Calendar
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With the groups selected, you now have to think about what you are going to post there! The structure that I used and worked well for me was to post in every group, every week: one engagement post, one value post, and one group promo or freebie (check Copywriting section to find out more about these types of posts). In the beginning, you might not have time to create value posts. That’s fine, you can start with the other two types.

These posts don’t have to be different for each day in each group. That’s where planning comes in. If you plan your content in advance you can easily see how many posts you need for each type of content and rotate them between the groups. For example, if a post works well, you can keep it for 4-5 weeks. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It’s enough to have just a few good posts - quality over quantity.

But let’s admit, that planning in advance is not intuitive for many of us. We get overwhelmed by our daily tasks and even creating the posts for a single day can seem like a lot. Now, creating and planning the posts for a month can seem intimidating. But I want you to understand that this barrier is just in your head and the benefits of taking half a day or a day to create and plan your content in advance are huge! I cannot stress this enough. It makes a big difference because you can now use that window of time on post-engagement and performance measurement.

Tip: If allowed, you can also go Live in these groups to build a stronger relationship with the audience and position yourself as an authority. Don’t just go live to tick a box. Be intentional about it, know why you do it and what you want to get out of it! Our guide on how to create a great Facebook Live is here.

Check out our ready to go content calendar template for Facebook
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Step 5. Copywriting
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During these 2-3 months I have learned that the most critical skills to master in this journey are your copywriting skills. It all comes down to how you use words to: communicate your message, make prospects read your post, and make them take the desired action (e.g. comment below).

How do you develop your copywriting skills? The best way is to get a coach to help you navigate this much more efficiently, but you can just start learning yourself. Start noticing what works for yourself and others, and what posts get the highest engagement. You can take screenshots and sort them according to post type. Don’t just copy-paste those posts, but learn from them and why they work. Even if initially you start by replicating their style, in time you’ll develop your own style as you will know what works. I will now give you some specific indications for each type of post.

Engagement posts are usually those questions you see on standard Facebook backgrounds. The objective is to get as many comments as possible. The key thing to remember is to make them SIMPLE, easy to answer, and ideally targeted to your target audience e.g. “Coaches & Entrepreneurs! How early do you wake up? And Why?”. This simple post had 329 comments. Why? Because it’s targeted, addresses a relatively hot topic, and everyone can say something about it without putting in too much thought!

Value posts are those posts where you share valuable information. These can be lessons learned from your past experience, or any insights or tips & tricks on a specific topic. The objective is to position yourself as an authority and build your credibility over time. The key thing is to learn how to write it in such a way that people want to read your post, so the headline and sub-headline are incredibly important! You want to get their attention, create curiosity (so don’t reveal the solution from the beginning), and make them what to press “see more”.

Group promo posts are those posts on standard FB background when you usually ask people to promote themselves in the comments while attaching a link to your group as well. This can sound something like “Today is PROMO day! Promote yourself and GET CLIENTS in @The Coach Tribe! Share your offers below". You are asking people to share their offers below because everyone wants to share their offers, and the more comments you have, the more visibility your post gets.

Freebies and lead magnets, those resources that you’ll be sharing for free, have the objective to get as many people interested in them as possible! The key here is the way you write the text for the post. You can have the best resource out there, but if your text for the post is not written in a specific way you might get no replies at all. I have seen people with basic resources get hundreds of replies just because they knew how to write a good post!

Freebies usually have the format of a standard Facebook background plus text. You want to focus on the benefit that they will get from your resource and ideally create urgency. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself: why should I care about this? Let’s take the following example “Do you want more clients? I just created a guide to show you how to get clients without paid ads. Want a free copy?”. This post that I used had 207 comments in the first 22 hours! Why did it work?

1. I clearly state the benefit - get more clients
2. I create urgency “I just created” - be the first one to get it
3. I directly ask them if they want it (“Want an invite?” also works well in these posts)
4. I used the word FREE - it’s a very powerful emotional trigger that is often irresistible.

You have the content. You have the plan. What’s next?
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Step 6. Engagement
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What happens after you post something? Ideally, you’d stay online for a while to see if there is any immediate engagement. If there is, you should aim to reply to comments as soon as possible. The faster you reply, the more chances you have for that person to see your comment, take the desired action and further engage in the conversation. If you reply in real-time to the first comments, a trick that works well is to reply by asking them questions e.g. “Is it ok if I send you a message with the link to the eBook?”. Their answer will trigger Facebook’s algorithm to boost your post because it now knows that people are interested.

If you are interested to discover how the Facebook algorithm works and how to leverage it to get more leads and clients, make sure you read this article.

There are cases where even though there are no comments immediately, the post can still become viral. What I usually do is let the post for half a day or one day - if it performs I keep it, otherwise I delete it and post again.

For engagement questions and value posts, you want to reply with genuine comments, nothing related to your offer. For group promo, I usually reply to each comment personally inviting them to my group. Although I have some scripts that I copy and paste, I am often considerate of each comment and tailor the reply when needed! When it comes to lead magnets, there are two ways: reply to their comment with what they need to do to access the resource or send them a direct message! I have found that sending even 10 direct messages a day to different people can boost your visibility so even more people can see your posts!

As an example, when someone comments on my post showing interest in the free resource, I usually reply like this: “Awesome! I’m sure you’ll find lots of value in it! I have attached the guide to my group here @The Coach Tribe. As soon as you’re in, you should be able to access & download it!. Enjoy!!!” (with emoticons and space in between the lines). See what I did there? I redirected them to my group instead of giving them the resource straight away. They get the FREE resource, you get new members. Win-win situation! I sometimes say “Let me know when you joined so I can accept your request/let you in”. This will generate additional comments which will increase the reach of your post.

Nonetheless, it is very important to analyze everything that you do. This will help you understand what works and what doesn’t! Initially, it would be useful to track the following three categories: the text that you have used, the type of background, and the date & time of the post. Why? Because these variables can influence the way your post performs! They are your real-time feedback.

Important considerations

When you have so many external group posts to manage, it can be easy to forget to engage in your own group. But a group without engagement is a dead group. No one will see your posts! So you want to make sure that you welcome people and encourage them to engage! Ideally, you’d have a content calendar for your group as well. I recommend including the following: intro posts for welcoming and asking new members to introduce themselves, engagement questions, value posts, and promo threads (where you encourage your members to promote themselves).

If you want to speed up the process, you can simultaneously try to attract new group members by using your personal profile. Posts that work really well on personal profiles are “story posts”. These are the type of posts that can help you really connect with your audience and be remembered! They are usually more personal and they talk about something related to your past experience or current realizations. Once more, you have to know what is the objective behind that post. If the objective is to get group members, then you have to structure the post accordingly.

Now, let’s assume you start posting and you see no results. Or maybe you see results in the beginning and the numbers drop. What do you do? Do you stop posting? No. You stick to the process and you consistently do what needs to be done. Keyword? Consistency! You have to keep showing up every day, monitor your performance, and then iterate! All of these require time and it’s important to have patience and understand that this is a process.

The important things are:

1. create and plan your content,
2. consistently post and engage,
3. measure your performance,
4. iterate.

Going hand in hand with what we’ve discussed above is my guide with Sherri-Lee Woycik, a Facebook marketing and ads coach that has been in business for 12 years and has 55k+ followers. So if you want to learn how to leverage Facebook, create challenges and live stream shows, and fill your calendar without the 24/7 grind then this is a must-read guide.

That’s it! That’s the “magic”. Follow this process and you will get 1,000 group members in just a couple of months. Or why not even more? Just remember to be genuine. People feel it. Authenticity sells the best.

You’ve got this! 🙌

If you have any questions, feel free to drop them here and I’ll do my best to answer them as soon as possible! Hope this helps!

Download the full ebook on how to grow your Facebook group to 1000 members in under 2 months here.

• How to use facebook live to engage coaching prospects cold - free ebook
• 100 facebook groups for coaches to get clients - free spreadsheet‍
• Organic facebook marketing content calendar template for coaches

P.S. Don't forget to subscribe to my podcast so you can be the first to access incredibly valuable conversations that will help you scale your coaching business! 🚀

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