With 1 billion plus registered users around the world, Facebook is one the biggest communities on the internet. By creating a Facebook Group, you enable a selection of these users to come together and discuss topics relevant to them.
One of the most common Facebook Groups is for jobs. For example, London Tech Startup Jobs has 10518 members, with highly engaged users posting jobs and opportunities several times a day.
If you don’t have a group for your niche, we highly recommend you create one and start building your own online community.
Turning this audience engagement into revenue can be challenging. In this post, we’ll share five top tips we’ve learnt by looking at Job Boards on the JobBoard.io platform.
1) Audience is King
You may have heard the phrase ‘Content is King’.
But for Facebook Groups, where 99% of content is user-generated, your audience is the most important thing. Unlike a newspaper, TV channel or radio station, which broadcasts a message, a Facebook Group is a club, which needs to be carefully grown and nurtured.
Facebook conducted a study in 2014. This research observed 472,231 new online groups. Shockingly, by the end of a 3-month observation period, 57% of the groups were inactive, ceasing to post new content.
The key to avoiding this to monitoring 3 key measures:
- Number of new members per day
- Number of genuine posts per day
- Number of comments, likes and shares per day
You need to keep your audience highly active, growing and perceiving your group as adding value to their lives. This means removing posts which break the rules, contributing to discussion when appropriate and promoting the group to new members who would add value to the group.
No matter how you decide to monetise your Facebook Jobs Group, focus on these key metrics to ensure your group remains viable. Should any of these metrics begin to fall, monetisation isn’t relevant, as your group will eventually fail. However, if you slowly grow these metrics, you’ve got a highly lucrative community, ready for monetisation.
2) Be a Great Admin
In the Facebook Groups study (Kraut & Fiore 2014), they found several key factors in ensuring group survival. The most important were:
- Page Decoration – Pages with a cover and profile picture were more likely to survive
- Admin Activity – The more active the admin, the more successful the group.
- Initial Group Size – Starting with a large group seems to increase the group’s chances of survival.
So, make sure your group has a suitable cover and profile picture, that you are checking at least once a day that rules are being followed and that you invite and promote your group as widely as possible.
3) Slow Down
The biggest mistake people make when monetising a Facebook Group is moving too quickly.
As we mentioned in point 1, the most important point is to ensure your group remains viable, active and growing. If you introduce too many changes, too quickly, you’ll alienate your audience and lose your audience.
So, implement slowly. Break your monetisation down into small changes over a 6-12 month timeline and keep them as subtle as possible.
Critically, you should never prevent discussion. Though it may be tempting to delete free job posts (or posts linking to other job boards) this will damage your audience in the long term.
4) Launch a Partner Job Board
Your first step should be to launch a niche job board, aimed specifically at your audience.
JobBoard.io is the simplest way to launch your job board, taking just 30 seconds to start. With our unique revenue share model you can start for free, today. You can start for free and we’ll take 25% of your job post revenue, or upgrade to a paid plan from $99 per month, with no contract. There’s no developers, upgrade costs, hosting, setup or other hidden fees to pay.
Once you’ve got your job board started, start posting jobs to it and promoting it as a separate entity to your Facebook Group.
5) Growing Your Job Board
Once you’ve got a few posts, start to post jobs links to your Facebook Group to your job board. Subtle, but it’ll start driving traffic towards your website, earning you revenue.
Importantly, with the new profiles database feature, you’ll start collecting email addresses. Use these to launch an email newsletter.
Next, repost job posts on your Facebook group on your job board. Message the job poster, and tell them you’ve posted it for free on your job board, and post a link to the job post page in the comments below the job post.
A few months later, pin a post to your group, offering an optional paid ‘Promote your Job Post’ option, where you’ll post their job to your job board. Finally, several months later, directly comment on job posts on your group, offering them an upgrade to your ‘Promote your Job Post’ option.
This slow process ensures your Job Board grows alongside your Facebook Group, without damaging each other, ensuring long term revenue.