Arne is an entrepreneur that helps other entrepreneurs grow their business with Facebook groups. He helps with branding and helping you get your message out there. Arne will explain why groups have an advantage over a lot of other platforms and channels. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!
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Arne Giske Background:
– Millennial Entrepreneur Facebook community and Millennial Entrepreneur Podcast
– Studied small business management & marketing and learned the foundation that helped his current business
– Shares tips on how to grow a Facebook Group
– With a group of 35,000+ and over 5,000 people he’s taught to grow groups
– Been to over 10 countries and a dozen states in 2017.
– Say hi to him at www.fbgroupsforbusiness.com
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TRANSCRIPTION
Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff.
We are doing Skill Sunday, because today is Sunday. With us today to talk to us about how to grow our business via a Facebook group – Arne Giske. How are you doing, Arne?
Arne Giske: Hey man, doing good. Excited to be here!
Joe Fairless: Yeah, nice to have you on the show, and excited to learn about your background, how you have grown Facebook groups to help your business, and then how you can help us to grow our Facebook group for our business.
A little bit about Arne – he has a Millennial Entrepreneur Facebook community, as well as the Millennial Entrepreneur podcast. He studied small business management and market and learned the foundation that’s helped his current business. He shares tips on how to grow a Facebook group all the time, and today he’ll be sharing that with us.
He’s got a group of over 35,000 and also over 5,000 he’s taught to grow groups. With that being said, Arne, do you wanna give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus, and then we’ll get into it?
Arne Giske: Yeah, absolutely. A quick note, and testament to what I do, ever since that bio got sent out, we’re not at over 55,000 members, and served over 10,000 entrepreneurs on how to grow their groups. So I’m out here doing it, I’m really building up a big, awesome community, and helping a lot of other people do this. It’s just been so amazing to see the power of how we can use social media to attract the right types of people into our audiences, into our lives, build super strong networks and build a business at the same time.
There’s gonna be a ton of different ways to show you guys how to do that, and really how to do it right the first time. I had four failed Facebook groups before I had this fifth big, successful one, and I want you guys to not fail the first time.
Joe Fairless: Fair enough! Well, I love learning from other people’s mistakes – that’s the best way to do it, right? So how should we start our conversation?
Arne Giske: I think what we really have to look at is the number one core piece of social media for entrepreneurs, for people who are trying to build an audience, build trust, and then have that actually turn into business growth – the very first piece of that is the personal brand. That’s what is making Facebook Groups really stand out, versus a lot of other channels. You can even do this on your personal profile, or your business page… But we’re finding groups are best for engagement, they’re best for growing wildly huge audiences as quickly as you can with targeted people, and they’re a lot of fun, too.
So I think what I wanna cover first is a few of the elements of personal branding and how you can really craft that story to pull in the right people, and actually get them to pay attention and wanna do business with you.
Joe Fairless: I love it. Yes, let’s do that.
Arne Giske: Alright, so when I’m looking at somebody who’s wanting to figure out how to build a group, the very first thing is the core promise. This is before somebody ever gets to know you, gets to know your brand, gets to know your products, your services, your offers – there’s a core promise. For you, what do you think that would be? Would that be helping people get started in real estate investing?
Joe Fairless: Well, why don’t you do a hypothetical case study.
Arne Giske: Alright, so I’ve just worked with someone the other day on this – her core promise is she wants to help people get out of debt and live a life of more freedom. She does that through helping them build their businesses, but there’s so much more than goes into her brand and her story… So you’ve gotta think about the number one thing you can have that’s gonna attract people in.
What that is is regardless of that person, their story, their history, anything, it’s something that’s gonna attract in a complete stranger. Once you kind of get that set, then you’re gonna start introducing them to more things about you, your back-story, and different things that are going to keep them engaged, entertained, and wanting to get to that next step of working with you.
So I think the biggest piece of getting them to trust you is showing up as a human, because people are tired of too many marketing messages, too much spam… They want to know that they’re doing business with a person. Some of the best ways to do that is showing up on video, doing livestreams, offering free Q&A… Different ways to just get people into your sphere and trust you a little bit, and know that you are a real person, and not just a robot, not some giant company… You’re a real person, maybe even in their neighborhood, and somebody they might wanna do business with.
Joe Fairless: Okay, makes sense.
Arne Giske: Some of the other pieces you’re gonna wanna look at is the different pieces of credibility and social proof. Let’s say for example if you want to help sellers in your area, and they have their goals of getting good deals, getting deals done fast, so they can get out of whatever situation they have. So if you wanted to show that, you could do a quick video or a post telling a story of how you just helped somebody sell their house. A lot of times, people might have different circumstances that led them to needing to sell their house, and if they share that story, it’s gonna be really, really powerful.
I’ve seen people who needed to sell their houses due to medical debt and all these different things, and really figure out new options and new paths, and needed that money. As a real estate investor, if you are buying properties like that, you are really helping people out. When people see those stories, they don’t forget them. So that’s what’s gonna make your brand unforgettable, and also show that yes, you are actually actively buying houses, helping people out, and giving people new opportunities.
Joe Fairless: Basically, we’re establishing what our core promise is, and then we’re showing that we’ve delivered on that core promise through different stories.
Arne Giske: Exactly. So there’s a whole range of different types of content you could do for that. I think a lot of people get very caught up in showing just the business side of things. As powerful as a story like that is, and showing that yes, you are doing things, you can do a lot of different types of content, showing up with even parts of your personal life, things going on in your family, things going on in your community, and kind of reminding people that you are a well-rounded human being and not just a company and not just an investor. This is what’s gonna get people paying attention to your posts, it’s gonna give you more flexibility to what you can post online. So having a varied content strategy is gonna help out a whole lot.
Joe Fairless: Okay. And what mix would you recommend to make up of that content strategy?
Arne Giske: I think it really kind of depends on the topics and the person, but even something like 30% business and 70% other could be good, and out of that 30% business, maybe even 5%-10% of that would be directly promotional. The other 20% could be things like those stories, or educational material… There’s just so much flexibility in what you can post online, that it’s going to keep people engaged, keep people entertained, remind them that you exist, so when they do need your services, you’re the first person they think of.
So I think that’s actually the most powerful piece of leveraging a Facebook group and social media. Chances are a lot of your competitors aren’t, so even if they shook hands with you and ten of your other competitors in your town, met them, and two months later if they have no previous contact with them since then, they’re gonna forget they exist and they’re gonna remember you exist. So it’s a really great way to eliminate your competition around you and stay on the top of minds of your ideal people.
Joe Fairless: So core promise, then deliver with social proof of you delivering on the core promise, and then have varied content that keeps things fresh… And then what follows?
Arne Giske: That and making sure to do live videos is gonna be really cool… Because I think a lot of people put too much thought and effort and energy into producing really good-looking marketing and all these fine graphics and all that, but at the end of the day you’re gonna do business with people, you’re gonna shake hands with people. It’s not gonna be polished, it’s not gonna be produced, and they wanna see who you are, what your voice is, what your messaging is… So that’s gonna help out a lot. I definitely recommend at least one livestream a week.
Joe Fairless: And by livestream you mean one Facebook Live video? Okay, one Facebook Live video a week… And anything else in the process that we should be aware of? Because after going through the process, I wanna ask you about your group and just learn how you got it up to the numbers that you have.
Arne Giske: Definitely. So also part of the process is making sure you give people an opportunity to work with you. Make it easy for them. So you wanna add things in the group description, the pinned post, and your videos and your content, say “Hey, if you need help with X, Y and Z, here’s how to reach out to me.” That should always be one central spot, whether it’s “Give me a call, fill out this form, book a call here, talk to my assistant” – whatever it is, you wanna have that consistent and you want to have just that one entry point where people can start to figure out how to work with you.
Joe Fairless: Okay, so with your group in particular – when did you start it?
Arne Giske: I started it just under two years ago, and it took about six months to get it to the thousand member mark. I was kind of putting half effort in, but once I hit that thousand member mark, I really started to realize the power of that, of having a thousand entrepreneurs in one place, that were all paying attention to what I had to say. I wasn’t monetizing it before that, and I knew that there was potential to do that, and attract a lot more customers and clients into my business.
So that’s when I got really serious about understanding how Facebook worked, how people liked to consume material in groups, what made them take action to become customers, and what types of content could go on in the group that would make it really enjoyable, but also educational, and still help me grow my business.
That kind of helped me get on the path to being a lot more consistent, a lot more strategic, and the cool thing is once your Facebook group hits between 500 and 1,500 members, it hits this kind of tipping point. This is where Facebook starts organically sharing your group out to more users, who they think might be interested in the group.
That is shown by a couple different factors, number one being the name of the group – so having it be relevant, keyword-heavy, and that kind of thing. Mutual friends, interests – all these different things determine whether or not your group gets recommended to somebody. This is also really good for local groups as well. So if you do have a local group, a certain area you’re going for, make sure to set your group to local, and then that’s gonna be shared out to a lot more people in your town.
Then I pretty much got very consistent. Honestly, if you take away anything from this whole interview, consistency is the number one thing. Everyone says it, but not everyone does it… But everyone who does it has a successful group. So you’ve gotta be consistent with showing up every day, posting, starting discussions, answering questions, helping people out. That will hugely compound your success and your results within just the first few months.
So I knew I had to be consistent, I knew I had to be helpful, and that’s when the growth started to skyrocket. I went from 1,000 to 2,000 in the next month, I went from 2,000 to 3,000 in one day – we got a fast company feature for being one of the top Facebook Groups to be in, and we got 1,000 people in a day, and from there we kind of rode the wave. We caught all this new engagement, and Facebook just started suggesting us out like crazy.
From there, it just kept going up and up and up, and we stayed consistent, we built this amazing community, and people wanted to show up in there every single day to learn and connect with people and find new opportunities.
Joe Fairless: You said to have some certain keywords – how should we know what types of keywords we should put in there?
Arne Giske: If it’s local, I would definitely say local, like the city name. Another thing is having it not be about the brand or the name… Because if I had a group that was called “Arne’s Awesome Hangout Group For Millennial Entrepreneurs”, it would not catch much attention, because people scroll Facebook very quickly, they see the suggested groups, and they see the first couple of words of a group name before deciding whether or not to click on Join. So you wanna have the first three words of your group name be very relevant to whoever you want to attract.
There’s a few different ways to spin it, especially for real estate. I saw somebody that had “Buy, Sell Real Estate” for a certain town, and people were posting properties, there was a lot of realtors, a lot of buyers, a lot of sellers, all of this going down. And the genius behind it was selling mortgages. So she was the only mortgage broker in that group, and she had a monopoly on over 20,000 people. So in her maintenance of that group, she was able to position herself as the go-to mortgage person, who would come with tips and facilitation, and generate a ton of new business out of it. So there’s a few different ways to spin it, and the cool thing is there’s also a couple ways to show up in other communities and kind of build a name for yourself in your local area, and start generating leads without even being pushy or salesy or anything as well.
Joe Fairless: Anything else as it relates to growing a Facebook group that we haven’t talked about, that you think you should mention or we should talk about to help us?
Arne Giske: Yes, I think one of the biggest pieces is — the reason my first few groups failed and most people’s groups fail is they see it as a sales channel or a marketing channel, meaning they go to post their ads. That’s all they show up to do. They don’t have discussions, or any of that; it’s just sales and marketing… And that’s not why people join in groups. You have to look at your group as a branding channel, not a sales or marketing channel. What that’s gonna do is it’s going to help you build your name, build your credibility, build your brand awareness, your connections, help people become more educated, and then that way you become the go-to person so that once they go and seek out where to find more help from you, that’s when you can start hitting them with more of the marketing and sales messages… But it does not happen in the group. So that’s why I recommend people have one central spot to send people, to start hitting them with marketing messages. It could be an e-mail opt-in, or a phone call… Any kind of thing that’s gonna get people off of the platform, into an environment where they’re expecting to get sold to and marketed to. So that’s gonna help out a lot.
Joe Fairless: Arne, this has been really helpful. How can the Best Ever listeners get in touch with you and learn more about what you’ve got going on?
Arne Giske: The best spot would be FbGroupsForBusiness.com. We have a bunch of resources, there’s a free [unintelligible [00:16:19].02] over there as well, kind of showing you how to optimize a few things to make sure it’s really growing like wildfire… And also, if you guys wanna see how we’re running it over in the Millennial Entrepreneur Community – awesome group, great community, so I’d love to see you guys in there as well.
Joe Fairless: And that’s FbGroupsForBusiness.com, yes?
Arne Giske: Exactly.
Joe Fairless: Perfect. Okay, we will put that in the show notes pages – or I will; I have it right there, I’m looking at it, in the show notes page. Thank you so much for talking to us and educating us on how to grow a Facebook community, how you’ve grown yours, and the very practical, step-by-step tips for us to implement.
I really appreciate it. I hope you have a best ever weekend, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Arne Giske: You too. Have a good one! Thanks so much for the opportunity.