[Editor’s Note: This review of Supermetrics was originally published on April 11, 2018 and has been regularly updated since then for relevance and freshness.]

Have you ever felt the need to collate data from various platforms and compare them with each other to analyze their performance?

For all those involved in online marketing, the problem of data interpretation and visualization is not uncommon. We are often surrounded by a huge pile of data, from different platforms, which are hardly comparable with each other and sometimes, hard to interpret.

When this is the case, business reporting becomes more complex. Also, it becomes increasingly difficult to compare your efforts and the results you are getting. 

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Google Analytics is a great tool for data analysis, research, and data discovery. But, when it comes down to building customized dashboards for your clients, Google Analytics is not that flexible enough.

It is estimated that marketers spend 10 to 30 hours a month on reporting. This time, when saved, can be used to focus on more important and interesting aspects of our clients’ accounts.

This is where Supermetrics comes to the rescue. Ever since it was released as an add-on for Google Sheets, Supermetrics has been the answer to data interpretation and visualization problems. Gone are the days when marketers used to spend hours importing and preparing excel reports from Google Analytics.

Supermetrics is a powerhouse business analytics tool that brings all your metrics into one place and facilitates ease of analysis.

In short, Supermetrics stands for Less Reporting, More Analysis. 

Why Supermetrics?

Gathering information from different sources and combining them to display reports and graphs to our clients or organizations can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Let’s see how Supermetrics comes in handy in addressing our daily challenges as online marketers:

Integration With Major Marketing Platforms/ Multi-Channel Reporting

Supermetrics can be integrated with more than 40 platforms. Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Insights, Bing Ads, Twitter are some of the common ones.

It helps marketers to pull out data from multiple channels into a single view and, thus, make way for faster analysis. Along with different channels, it can also pull data from different accounts associated with the same channel, for comparison (different client accounts under the same channel).

This is especially helpful when a client has multiple accounts for different locations and wants to track progress based on certain metrics for all the locations.

What took hours earlier can now be done in under 5 minutes with Supermetrics.

No More Manual Copy/Pasting or Importing CSV Files

For marketers, time is money. Ironically, it’s time consuming to log into each platform every day and collect the data to be presented to our clients. Especially, if you are expanding to new channels, it will only increase the time consumed.

Supermetrics makes the process much easier and faster with its highly flexible sidebar. Getting metrics for dozens of sites is just a matter of a few seconds as you only have to enter the required details and Supermetrics automatically fetches the data for you. This can save a lot of your precious hours and also improve the quality of presentation.

Supermetrics promotes minimal maintenance and maximum observation, which means, the time used to prepare a report, can be used in delivering value to the client.

Save PPC Reporting Time

With increasing client base and marketing channels, data reporting and visualization has become more challenging and time-consuming than ever. Integrating data from different advertising channels into the same excel sheet, updating them daily and comparing the results is a tedious process.

For example, if you’ve multiple accounts for Bing Ads, and also use different advertising platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Ads, the amount of complexity and time involved in daily reporting of the data can easily make you bang your head on the wall.

This is where Supermetrics comes as the prophesized savior, especially with its Google Sheets Add-On feature and Google Data Studio integration. It helps to build the same excel report with all the data comparisons and complex charts, with all PPC channel data in the same place. 

With this, all the advertising data can be easily compared and the performance of one channel over the other can be analyzed almost effortlessly. 

Track Your Daily Spend

If you are involved in online advertising, you know the pain of tracking daily ad spends for every client to ensure maximum ROI. 

Once Supermetrics has pulled all the data on a spreadsheet, you can use data validation to create drop-downs and can flick through every client spend and how this is faring with the expected daily spend.

This provides much more control over the tracking process and helps to quickly monitor all the client accounts. All you only have to do is select the required client account from the drop-down menu!

Automated Dashboards For Performance Tracking

To ensure high ROI for each client, you can set dashboards and automate alerts based on when the performance dips below the expected level.

Any possibility of human error is, thus, eliminated by also ensuring client satisfaction. You can set alerts for performance, budgets and other metrics.

For example, you can set an alert when the bounce rate goes beyond a certain limit. This allows you to identify the possible causes and take corrective action before it’s too late.

Supermetrics Features – How it Works

Data Analytics, Visualization, and Presentation

As you are already aware, Supermetrics comes with a Google Drive extension. If you’ve selected Google Sheets as the reporting format, then you can launch Supermetrics from the ‘Add-ons’ menu.

Once you’ve launched the sidebar, you can select from the required Data Source for which you want the data to be reported. It can be Google Analytics, Facebook Ads or any other channel.

Once you’ve selected the channel, you can click on ‘Select Views’ to choose any one, or multiple accounts which are to be analyzed.

When you are done selecting the required accounts, you just have to choose the metrics you wish to analyze and Supermetrics will automatically fetch the required data for you.

The data can be reported in Table Form or can be visualized as a Bar Graph, a Pie Chart or any other option of your choice.  

Once the required data is fetched, Supermetrics automatically calculates how the numbers have changed over the week or month or even the past year for the same date range. 

So with Supermetrics you can get any metric you need, combine them with any dimensions and visualize them in any form you want.  

Scheduled Refreshing and E-mailing

With the introduction of Supermetrics Google Sheets add-on, marketers are saved from enduring the pain of updating multiple reports for clients every day. While I had to save a chunk of time every day for this activity before, now, it happens automatically!

Earlier, Supermetrics had grabbed a lot of attention with of its One-Click Refresh feature. You just had to click on the dashboard and data would be updated. Supermetrics has gone one step further with this feature by introducing scheduled refreshing and emailing.

This ensures your data is always up-to-date by scheduling a daily refresh of queries. You no longer have to open the file and click the refresh button. To top it off, you can share the results by scheduling emails, which makes it simple to share with people who don’t use Google Docs.

You can do this by setting up triggers. By clicking on the ‘Schedule refresh and emailing’ option under the add-on menu, you can choose daily/weekly/monthly refresh and email options and enter the destination email. You also have the flexibility to choose whether to email all worksheets or just one, send it as PDF or as an HTML table in the message body.

Ready-Made Templates

Supermetrics comes with a variety of templates handy for use and you can choose the one based on your choice of metrics and reporting style.

Choosing a template is simple. Go to the drop-down menu Add-Ons> Supermetrics> Template Gallery. From there you can choose a template you desire and then select the account for which you want the data to be displayed. Then click on Insert Template.

Once you are done, enjoy your colorful dashboard with the metrics you’ve chosen.

Manage Queries

You can access this feature through the drop down from Add-ons menu (Add-ons>Supermetrics>Manage Queries), although it is much easier to modify or manage queries from the sidebar. The pro version allows a total of 1500 query executions per day and the Super Pro version allows 10,000 per day.

It is worth noting that each query may result in multiple requests to the data source API. If you experience any of the data sources hitting their daily limit, you can manage the query by either shortening the data ranges or by altering the metrics and dimensions to lighten the query load.

The flexibility offered here is extremely helpful when a client asks for a month to date performance report compared to that of the previous month for the same date range. Such comparison is helpful in cases where the end of the month sales are to be tracked and analyzed every month.

Products and Pricing Structure

Supermetrics mainly has 2 products, namely Supermetrics for Google Sheets and Supermetrics for Google Data Studio. Supermetrics for Google Sheets is more commonly used for data analysis, whereas Supermetrics for Data Studio – for data visualization.

Both have their own set of benefits and you can select the one that speaks more closely to your needs.

So let’s review everything that Supermetrics has in store for us:

Supermetrics for Google Data Studio

Data Studio is a great tool by Google for creating reports and, especially, for data visualization.

To create reports or visualize data on Google Data Studio, you previously had to pull out data from Google Sheets and other selective data sources. However, the data from non-google sources had to be first organized in Google Sheets before importing it to Data Studio.

Google Sheets is a great platform for creating reports. But, it is not perfect when it comes to importing data into Google Data Studio. For example, if you want to transfer date and time values from sheets to data studio, you must make sure the date and time formats are compatible with data studio- otherwise, they’ll be shown as text.

Supermetrics solves this issue and makes the process much more breezy with its connectors for Google Data Studio. With the introduction of connectors like Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Bing Ads, LinkedIn Ads, MailChimp and 20+ sources altogether, it becomes incredibly simple to pull data and visualize them on Google Data Studio.

All of the connectors help to pull out data from multiple accounts of the same source together into the same report. You simply need to select all accounts while creating a data source on Google Data Studio. Monitoring spend and performance of multiple client accounts never got so easy.

You can start with the 14-day free trial and check if the product is the right fit for you (No credit card required!). After the free trial, Supermetrics offers different plans based on your choice of connectors and desired features.

Start your 14-day free trial of Supermetrics for Data Studio (No credit card required)

Supermetrics for Google Sheets (or Google Drive)

With Supermetrics for Google Sheets/Google Drive, you can automate the reporting process by automatically transferring all the data from different sources like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Insights, Bing Ads, Google Ads, Twitter etc. with your choice of metrics onto a single spreadsheet or document.

The Pro version is offered at $69/user/month. It also offers a Super Pro version targeted at digital marketing agencies and organizations with a major focus on online marketing and is offered at $149/user/month. It gives access to Adobe Analytics, Adform, and DoubleClick and also has an ‘hourly refresh’ feature.

Supermetrics offers a 14-day trial to thoroughly test the product and to see if you find it worth spending on. After the trial period, the free version can still be used but with limited access to Google analytics.

Start your 14-day free trial of Supermetrics for Google Sheets (No credit card required)

Supermetrics Data-Grabber for Excel

Marketers who are used to reporting on Excel, be it through the traditional CSV route or with Google API, can go with Supermetrics Data Grabber for Excel.

Just like Supermetrics for Google drive, you can automatically import data from multiple sources into an Excel Spreadsheet and access all of its features. This product will equip you with the necessary firepower for creating quick and reliable Excel reports. It works with Windows Excel 2003 and later versions.

Data integration for each channel is offered at a different price range. Common platforms like Google Analytics and Google Ads cost $39/month.

Supermetrics Uploader

Supermetrics Uploader automatically imports data from different advertising channels into Google Analytics. You will have all the campaign spends in the same place and easily compare your ad spends on each channel with the results. With automatic updation of data, you can easily track your ROI on Google analytics.

The pricing starts at $39/month for each advertising channel and allows 5 scheduled uploads daily. Packs with $79/month and $179/month are also available that allow 20 and 200 daily uploads respectively.

Supermetrics Functions

Supermetrics Functions is a product for skilled spreadsheet users who want complete control on how to display the data.

You will be equipped with a custom function that you can type into the spreadsheet cells, just like any of the spreadsheet functions like SUM or COUNT and there are no programming skills required.

Supermetrics Functions is offered at a pricing of $29.99/month for each data source.

Final Words

Supermetrics is an all-round business intelligence software that is tailored to meet the specific needs of online marketers. It greatly simplifies the process of data analysis and through automation, saves a lot of our precious time. 

However, the use of the products depends on your overall ability to use spreadsheets. Also, sometimes there is a possibility of data getting pulled into the wrong columns (which can be solved by selecting the right columns and refreshing the query). So, you need to stay alert and proceed with analysis only if the data makes sense to you.

The downsides are minor when compared to the amazing benefits offered by Supermetrics. With its flexibility and frequent updates, Supermetrics provides the required edge that is vital to the growth of an agency or organization.

For now, you can start using Supermetrics with the free trial and get used to the interface, before you can make a buying decision. 

With features like easy integration with multiple data sources, ease of data visualization and real time data analysis, Supermetrics is a must-have tool in every online marketer’s toolbox.

Start Your Free Trial of Supermetrics with Access to All Features (No Credit Card Required)

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I wish I could answer in a yes or no format. But then, I would be depriving you of all the insights and developments leading to the answer.

It’s a popular belief that nofollow links do not pass PageRank (aka link juice). Generally, they don’t. But, in certain cases, they shatter this dearly held notion.

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The purpose of this blog post is threefold, i.e, to understand:

1. What are nofollow links and when they’re used.
2. Why were nofollow links introduced and how they’ve evolved over the years.
3. Why they are important.

With that being said, let’s dive into the topic.

The Difference Between Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks

Nofollow links are links with rel=”nofollow” HTML tag applied to them. The tag mainly tells search engines not to follow them.

Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor texts across these links and, therefore, they should not influence search engine ranking.

In simple words, when a person plays with the HTML informing Google not to give any link juice to the referred webpage, it is a nofollow link.

On the outside, all links look the same. But, when you look at the technical side of them, the difference becomes obvious.

Every link is a dofollow link unless there is an additional rel=”nofollow” tag.

Although you can add the HTML tag on each and every outbound link separately, it is possible to nofollow all the links on a webpage by using plugins like “Title and Nofollow For Links” or “External Links”. You can then remove the nofollow attribute on selected links and turn them into dofollow ones.

Why Were Nofollow Links Introduced?

It all started in 2005 – Goodbye Comment Spam!

The problem of blog comment spamming was sucking the entire blogging community’s blood and the online giant decided to do something about it.

(Image Credit: Moz)

Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” would not influence the link target’s PageRank.

Following this announcement, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines quickly followed suit and decided to respect this attribute value. WordPress and other CMS systems today “nofollow” blog comment links by default.

However, solving one problem led to the rise of another. A few years later, Google’s Software Engineer, Matt Cutts, returned with a new announcement.

2009 – Controlling PageRank Flow

In 2009, Google introduced changes in the way how GoogleBot treated “nofollow” links so that webmasters could no longer manipulate the links for PageRank Sculpting.

“Nofollow is a method to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchor text.

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.”

What is PageRank Sculpting?

PageRank is an algorithmic formula used to decide the value of a web page based on the quantity and reputation of other web pages linking to it.

Back in those days, PageRank was divided equally between all the outbound links on a webpage. Imagine the links as pipelines through which link juice flowed from the referring page to the referred page.

For example, if a web page had a PageRank of 10 and there were 5 outbound links on the page, the PageRank passing through each link, to the target page, would be 2.

So what did Google change in 2009? It changed the role played by “nofollow” links in the PageRank game.

Considering the previous example, let’s say that 4 of the 5 links had nofollow attributes. Earlier, these nofollow links would stop the flow of PageRank to the target pages and deviate the full PageRank through the remaining dofollow link. Which means, a PageRank of 10 would flow through that one dofollow link (with a certain damping factor.)

This caused SEOs to bend the rules in their favor by adding nofollow attributes to less important pages and diverting all the juice to their sales (or money) pages. Anyone could boost the power of a page by linking it to a high PR page and changing the attributes of all the other links to nofollow.

The following graphic from moz clearly illustrates the before and after scenario regarding nofollow links and PageRank.

When Google changed the flow of PageRank in 2009, link juice was divided equally among all the links on a page irrespective of their nofollow or dofollow attributes.

2013 Update – Beware Advertisers!

In order to create a level playing field for all the webmasters out there, Google decided that paid links should not forward PageRank. Which means they should carry the rel=”nofollow” tag.

Google also strongly criticised hidden forms of advertising and introduced Link Schemes to bring things under control.

In this context, make sure you nofollow all the affiliate links and paid ads you post on your site unless you want to be penalized by Master Google.

Bottom Line: EARN your backlinks or get penalized.

We are not sure about how the nofollow dynamics work today in terms of PageRank. In fact, following the discontinuation of PageRank Toolbar by Google in 2016, there has been no evidence of the involvement of PageRank as a ranking signal.

But some experts claim that PageRank is still relevant.

When To Use Nofollow Links (and How to Identify Them)

Google’s algorithm is designed to boost valuable sites and penalize bad ones. Keeping this in mind, if you, unfortunately, happen to be the one linking to a bad site, you will most likely face the wrath of Google.

It’s a common practice among big websites like Forbes and user-generated content sites like Quora, to nofollow all the links on their website. Why?

These high DA sites link to a lot of different sources and its unreasonable to verify the authenticity of each and every one of them.

By using nofollow links, these sites protect their credibility and avoid being taken advantage of by unethical link builders. All they’re telling Google is that they don’t know where the links are pointing towards and, therefore, not to follow them (Bad news link-sellers!)

Next time you’re on a hunt for backlinks, use Chrome Extensions like “Nofollow”. It highlights all the nofollow links on the web page making it easy to go after sites with followed links.

Here is an excerpt from Business Insider where all nofollow links are highlighted.

Nofollow Links and SEO – Seriously?

Consider that you spend a great chunk of your money and time on building high-quality backlinks and all of them turn out to be nofollow links. Does this mean all your work just went down the drain? Not necessarily.

1. Nofollow Links Are Still Links

Most authoritative blogs and social media platforms use nofollow as part of their linking strategy. Does this mean you’ll avoid these platforms altogether?

The whole purpose of link building is to build awareness and share valuable content with others. Google perceives you to be of value when you’re linked by high quality sites and thus, will give you a boost in ranking.

Although they use nofollow links, authoritative blogs like Entrepreneur and Wikipedia can direct boatloads of traffic to your site.

Moreover, irrespective of nofollow or dofollow, having your brand name as the anchor text, creates brand awareness and encourages people to search for your brand on the internet.

Avoiding nofollow backlinks from major sites will deprive you of the traffic, brand awareness and the possibility of scoring tier 2 links (other sites linking to you.)

When Sandeep Mallya (Founder of 99signals & Startup Cafe Digital) was interviewed by Entrepreneur, all the referrals linking back to Startup Cafe Digital were nofollow links.

Well, a nofollow link is still a link and being published on a reputable site like Entrepreneur is not an everyday thing.

After all, why do you want to rank #1 on Google? It’s because you want people to find and click on your website. Getting linked by reputable sources gives a similar result and it makes no sense to squander the opportunity by avoiding nofollow links.

Bottom Line: On the right platform, it doesn’t matter if the backlink is nofollow or dofollow. Just go for it.

2. Yes, They Boost Search Engine Rankings

According to Adam White, founder of SEOJet, most web pages that rank #1 on Google, on average, have 20% – 40% nofollow links pointing towards them. (Check out his case study on SEMrush blog)

These webpages are probably ranking well because of a natural link profile. But, the possible influence of nofollow links on ranking can’t be neglected.

Google’s algorithm is complex. Although not declared openly, it secretly boosts nofollow links from high authority sites. But why is Google going against its own rules?

As discussed earlier, large websites employ a nofollow link strategy to protect their authority. This has another angle to it.

If nofollow links mean nothing, webmasters have no option but to seek followed links from sites of lower authority if they intend to rank well. If that happens, some untrusted content might find its way above the content backed by highly credible (nofollowed) sources. Google understands this problem and secretly passes “trust flow” through nofollow links referred by authoritative sites.

Besides, backlinks are not the only ranking factor for search engines. Web content quality and social signals are also significant for SEO. Nofollow links from reputable sites and social media channels speak volumes about your content quality and value delivered and thus, help you rank well on search engines.

This means a nofollow link from Forbes may be more valuable than a dofollow link from a blog of lower authority. This may not be always true. But, depending on the situation, nofollow links are useful when it comes to SEO.

3. A Natural Backlink Profile – They help Google Trust You

Did you know that having a certain percentage of nofollow backlinks is an important factor for Google to trust your brand?

What kind of a brand has 100% dofollow backlinks? Certainly one that has adopted unethical ways to earn them.

When most big blogs and social media platforms refer via nofollow links, it is impossible for any brand to have an insanely high percentage of followed backlinks.

A good link profile looks somewhat like this:

One more important characteristic of a REAL brand is running ads, which, by the way, are nofollowed. Although Google doesn’t crawl nofollow links, it is definitely smart enough to know what’s on the other side of the link. A brand that runs paid ads tells Google that it’s real and trustworthy.

Besides, having a natural link profile might save you from the dreaded Google penalty. Google bots, or the “policemen”, regularly crawl websites and they don’t go easy on rule-breakers.

Have an unnatural link profile is enough reason for your competitors to send a spam report to Google, get you penalized and throw you deep down the ranking ladder.

Bottom Line: Having a mix of followed and nofollow backlinks is a clear indication to Google that you’re real and are playing the SEO game ethically.

Conclusion

Google may not have decided to value nofollow backlinks as a ranking factor. But, it passes a trust score if the referring site is credible.

It’s advisable to approach link building with a white-hat, long term mindset. As Google Webmaster Guidelines rightly indicate- “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings”. A good test would be to ask yourself- “Will this help my users?” or “Would I do this if there were no search engines?”

The mantra should be to build backlinks from trustworthy, reputable and diverse sources and avoid questionable ones.

Lesson learned – Nofollow links are not be frowned upon anymore.

If you found this article useful, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

[ctt template=”4″ link=”eg9YF” via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Nofollow Links: Everything You Need to Know[/ctt]

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Do you have a Facebook group for your business? If not, do not wait further to leverage the power of the largest social media network in the world.

Facebook has got an incredible reach today which is reported to be over 1 billion active users per day. Last year, Facebook had introduced a lot of new features for groups to build communities and the trend will continue this year too.

Facebook groups have considerable advantages over Facebook pages when it comes to promoting a business. The primary goal of every business is to have a highly targeted audience to facilitate ease of conversion. Facebook groups help garner a high level of engagement and promote the business in a way desired by the business owner.

Many business owners create Facebook pages with the same intention and get disappointed when they do not receive the level of engagement they expected. Why does this happen?

The answer is multi-fold and requires that you understand how exactly Facebook Groups and Pages work.

Facebook Page vs Group for Business

Facebook pages and groups have a significance of their own and serve different purposes. Our concern is to identify what promotes our business in the best way and explore that avenue.

Facebook Pages are meant for public figures, businesses and other entities to create an authentic and public presence on Facebook. A page is public by default and mainly serves the purpose of keeping your audience or followers informed about the developments or about various aspects of your business.

For example, you can follow Facebook pages related to products relevant to your business and get notifications about all their posts on your newsfeed. This will give you ideas to implement for your own business by keeping track of what others are doing.

Facebook Groups have different dynamics when compared to a page and are better suited for building a business. A Facebook Group is designed with the intention of encouraging communication within a small group of people where they can share their common interests and express their opinion.

Groups allow people to come together for a common cause and thus promotes a high level of engagement.

For example, you can join Facebook Groups related to your business and get an opportunity to identify and engage with your target audience. You can identify what your target audience wants and implement these ideas for your own business or with your own business page.

Benefits of Creating a Facebook Group for Your Business

As discussed, when it comes to growing your business with Facebook, Groups have certain advantages over Pages. Let’s discuss them in detail:

Build A Community

If you have a Facebook Page for your business, your content is constantly fighting for people’s attention along with other updates on their newsfeed. To tackle this problem, business owners require advertising budgets for using paid ads to continuously promote their businesses.

This challenge is eliminated by creating a Facebook Group for your business. Creating a Facebook Group is a great way to bring together and interact with a group of like-minded individuals. If you frequently indulge in a healthy discussion with your group audience, they will come to your group often to devour the content that you are offering.

Receive High Level of Engagement

People want to interact with a person and not a business or a company. This is the reason why business pages don’t receive the expected level of engagement.

If you have a group for your business, you will be the face of it. People will feel more comfortable to open up and share their concerns with you and thus help you understand the thoughts and concerns of your target audience.

Build a Relationship with Your Audience

As discussed, if you frequently interact with your audience, they will feel more connected to you. By answering their questions and solving their problems, you will be perceived as an expert and will be the go-to guy when they need help.

This builds trust, which is the foundation for all business transactions. The group enables you to demonstrate your expertise and help people, thus building a strong relationship with them. It is a win-win situation for both.

Receive Immediate Feedback

You will often need feedback from your audience about your products and other aspects of your business. You can conduct polls or ask questions and receive feedback from your audience in a short amount of time depending on the level of engagement your group has garnered.

Many businesses use a strategy wherein they conduct polls or ask questions to their audience about a product they are planning to release in future. By doing this, they’ll get a fair idea of how their target audience is going to perceive the product and thus decide whether it is a good idea to launch that product or not.

Place Call to Action that Converts

Groups enable you to pin important posts for all group members to see. This is a great opportunity to place a Call to Action that grabs the attention of your audience. 

Although it’s not likely that all of your group members will respond to the Call to Action, most people eventually will. When people perceive you as a person who adds value, they will trust you and they’ll be much more inclined to respond to your Call for Action.

How to Setup a Facebook Group for your Business

Creating a Facebook group for your business is a simple process. But, what’s more important is the processes you should follow once the group is created.

Before creating a group, it’s ideal to create a facebook page for your business if you don’t already have one. Facebook does not have the option of publicly promoting groups. This is where your business page will come in handy. We will be discussing more on this later.

Let’s discuss the simple steps you need to follow to create a Facebook group;

1. Open Create Group Window

Open your profile and click the drop-down menu in the far right corner of the menu bar. Then, click on “Create Group”.

If you have a business page, the Create Group option is available on the bottom left corner of your page’s cover photo. (Also read our post on how to verify your Facebook business page)

2. Choose a Group Name

If you haven’t already chosen the name for your group, there is no need to over analyze the process. Your group name is not written in stone. If you don’t like the sound of it, you can change it later.

Facebook also gives you the freedom of creating as many groups as you want. So feel free to experiment until you find what suits you best. While choosing a group name, ensure that it gives a clear picture of what the group is about. Preferably the name of your business or the product, depending on what the group is created for.

You can also invite people you know, to join your group. However, you can keep this step for later consideration. If Facebook asks you to add at least 1 member before you create a group, that should not be a difficult task!

Keep one thing mind- Do not add people to your group without their permission. This will only create dummy members. If people don’t like to join your group, they will not participate actively in the discussions. This will hamper the engagement level in your group.

3. Choose Preferred Privacy Settings

When you create a group, Facebook lets you choose between three privacy settings- Public, Closed and Secret. The image below is from Facebook, clearly describing the details related to each privacy setting.

It’s advisable to give some thought to this process before you decide to proceed. For a small group, the admin can change the privacy settings by going to the Edit Group Setting menu.

However, for a group having over 5000 members, you will only be allowed to change the privacy to a more restrictive setting (Public to Closed or Closed to Secret). Once you do that, you will have a 24-hour window to change your decision, after which it becomes irreversible. Once you have selected the privacy setting, click on Create.

4. Personalize Your Group

Your group is now available for you to see. However, to influence people to join your group, there is more work to be done.

Make sure you update the important elements like the Cover Photo, Description, Tags and Location, for your audience to clearly understand what the group is about. Choose an image that resonates with your group and need not always be about your brand or business. Utilize the description space to clearly articulate your group. 

Ask yourself, “What do I look for in a group before i decide to join?” and act on those things for your group.

5. Edit the Membership and Posting Settings for Your Group

When increasing members, managing your becomes increasingly difficult if you don’t have the right settings in place. Depending on the nature of your group and your privacy settings, you can choose to either monitor all the posts before they go live or you can choose to be liberal about it.

By clicking the Edit Group Settings option just above the group wall, you can update the membership and post settings to suit your needs.

My suggestion- You are the King of your group and the King must have control over everything that happens in his kingdom!

6. Start Posting Content

Once you’re done with the ‘behind the scenes’ work, you can start pumping content to your group. The key is to follow a schedule and ensure that you post regularly. Always keep your group active.

As your group gets strong on members, the members will start conversations among themselves naturally. You’ll see more engagement with every post and all the efforts you’ve put into building your group will create a snowball effect.

How to Build Your Facebook Group

Once you’ve your group up and running, it’s the things that you do day in and day out that will make the difference. The group should be your top priority because if you put the work into it, it will reward you to multiple times the effort.

Here are some tips to help you build a following with high engagement;

1. Show Your Face Often

Initially, your group will have only a few members. This means that it’s up to you to initiate the discussions in the group.

When you are just starting out, you have the most valuable resource with you- TIME! With only a few members on board, make sure you comment on every post and answer the questions. Let people know that you are there when they need help. Help people perceive that they are part of a valuable community.  

Also, encourage new members to introduce themselves. This helps them break out of the cocoon, show up more and participate actively in the discussions.

2. Set Guidelines for the Group

To build a healthy community, it’s important that you keep your group spam free. It is your group and you cannot allow random members to post spammy links and offend your valuable members.

To prevent this, you can create a post which clearly explains the Rules and Guidelines the members are expected to follow to be a part of the inner circle and pin that post. Pinned posts appear on the top of your group feed and enable all the members to see this upon joining your group.

It is possible that sometimes genuine members unknowingly post links by mistake or without the knowledge that it is inappropriate to do so. In such cases, you can delete the post and send them a personal message with a gentle warning reminding them of the group’s guidelines.

If the problem persists, do not hesitate to ban the member. You can’t take the risk of all the hard work that you’ve put into the group go in vain. As your group grows in size, it helps to keep a moderator to ensure the group is spam free.

3. Promote Your Group

No matter how good your content is, it is of no value if you don’t get people to notice it. It is the same with your group too.

A Facebook group has the potential to grow much faster than a page. But, the process does not happen overnight. It requires you to invest a significant amount of time and resources in the process.

There are many ways you can promote your group. Some of them are:

• Promote Your Group in Other Groups

You can search Facebook for groups similar to yours. Before you start promoting, it is better to first introduce yourself to the admin and understand the group rules. Remember, you don’t want to look like a spammer and end up getting blocked by other groups.

Spend some time in the group and be a valuable contributor. Once you gain credibility, you can start promoting your content and your group as it will look more natural.

• Encourage Influential People to Join Your Group

Start by making a list of people you want to add to your group. Then, share some of their content you found helpful to genuinely benefit the members of your group. When you share the content, make sure you tag the respective person to let them know that you’re promoting their content. Often this will encourage them to join your group on their own without having to look pushy. Simple trick, isn’t it?

• Promote Your Group with Paid Ads

How can you do this if Facebook doesn’t have any option to directly promote your group? Remember the discussion we had about having a Facebook page for your business?

Your Facebook page may not get the level of engagement you desire, but it will help you a great deal in getting your group in public and even attract a lot of new members.

To promote your group using your business page, copy the link to your business group with a short, relevant description and post it on your page. You can then promote or boost the post to reach the targeted audience and get people to join your group.

Final Words

Congratulations! You are now equipped to create a Facebook group for your business and eventually grow it to attract more like-minded people. If you are serious about growing your business, then treat your business group as the top priority and put your heart and soul into it.

Also, it is important to enjoy the process. This goose isn’t going to give you the golden egg overnight. It takes patience and constant nourishment to see the results. If you are in it only for the result, then you’ll not have enough drive to follow through during challenging times. Enjoy every step of the process and focus on building a valuable asset for your business. 

This post was originally published by Mayur Kamath at Startup Cafe’s Blog on Feb 6, 2018. 

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