How to Have a Successful Facebook VIP Group

We’re living in a virtual world, friends. If you want your direct sales business to grow, you need to be online – no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Part of living in this virtual world is having a Facebook VIP Group.   Some call it a customer group, some a VIP group, whatever you want to call it; it’s a place where you can chat with all of those customers who have purchased from you and are engaging in your business.

If you haven’t built a group yet, you may be wondering how to run a successful VIP group. If you have a VIP group but are struggling to grow your membership, feel like you’ve hit a plateau, or are just burnt out trying to do all the things, I will help you revitalize your group with a few simple tips!

Let’s dig in…

What is a VIP Group, and why should I have one?

First, let’s chat about what a VIP group is and why you should have one. A VIP group gives you an easy place to deepen customer relationships and make yourself super sticky! We don’t want customers that just purchase one time. We want them to come back to you again and again because you are their go-to rep for their product.

How do I start a VIP Group?

It’s super simple to create your own Facebook group. You know exactly how to do it if you’re currently partying in groups. Just go to your Facebook Business Page and click “Groups.” Then click “Create Linked Group.” You can also create one as your personal Facebook profile, but we highly recommend linking it to your Business Page if you use it to run Facebook parties.

If you’re brand spanking new to direct sales, you could simply convert your kick-off party to your VIP group since it’s already full of friends and family members interested in your product. If you’re creating your group from scratch, please, for the love of all the things, don’t mass add all your friends and family. Send a personal message to your favorite people and ask them if they want to join. If so, share the link or invite them from within the group.

I also recommend making it a “Closed” or “Private” group. This makes it feel more cozy and private and also keeps everyone and their brother on Facebook from seeing your posts.

What should I post in my VIP Group?

For many, the struggle of being consistent in your customer group is real. Using themes will save the day (and week)! Themes will assist you in your content strategy and not only let people know what to expect but will also allow you to schedule ahead, which will save you tons of time. It’s a win-win!

Let’s break down some themes by day and week, shall we?

Daily Themes:

• Monday – It’s the start of a new work week, so many seek motivation. Schedule inspirational quotes, funny memes, and videos that will gently push them into being productive with a smile on their face.
• Tuesday – I don’t know about you, but a good #tiptuesday gets me every time! Share a tip or hack about a product you sell or that relates to your lifestyle. Your followers will eat it up!
• Wednesday – Midway through the week, people love to feel the love from others – even total strangers! Give them a shout-out and have them comment with their “Wahoo” moment so they feel your support and everyone can cheer them on. We rise by lifting others!
• Thursday – Give your audience a chance to increase their brain activity with Think About It Thursday. Fun trivia and optical illusions are always popular choices, as are word problems and puzzles.
• Friday – It’s the end of the work week! Reward your fans with an exclusive Freebie Friday to feel special and appreciated. Post a Feature Friday where you reveal a favorite product feature or topic you know they’ll go nuts over.
• Saturday – Everyone’s out and about on the weekends – but they’re still checking in on social! Get them engaging with you by sharing a Saturday Selfie, or keep it light and encourage them to share their weekend plans using only song titles!
• Sunday – Most people think of Sunday as a day of rest, a family day, and it very well can be – but for most solopreneurs, we Slay the Day and use it to prep for the week ahead. Use your Sunday content to share what your fans can expect from you for the upcoming week.

Weekly Themes

Weekly themes are pretty simple when you break them down. Referring to a site like National Day Calendar makes it easy! You’ll be able to create content and schedule it for holidays you never even knew existed!

I like to peek at the upcoming themes and brainstorm how my products could fit in. For example, if Cinco de Mayo is approaching, what products do I have that center around yummy Mexican food? If summer is right around the corner, I would probably spend a week or more chatting about travel products or how to get my skin summer-ready. The possibilities are endless here!

You can also use weekly themes to share about upcoming events, like if you’re having a Flash Sale, Mystery Host Party, or a new product about to launch.

And, of course, let’s not forget about seasonal content. If it’s a new month or the season is changing, daylight savings time, etc., remind your fans about it! People get busy, and the days fly by – so you’d better bet they’ll appreciate a visual to keep them on track!

How often should I post in my VIP Group? 

A great goal to aim for is posting once a day in your VIP group. However, that might be a stretch when you’re just starting out. So start small. Set a goal to post three times per week. Then try four or five. Work your way up to where you want to be. Consistency is key with a VIP group, so however often you decide to post, just stick with that until you feel comfortable creating content and are consistent in doing it. Don’t burn yourself out.

How do I keep my VIP Group engaged?

Engagement is the key to your VIP Group’s success. It doesn’t matter if you have two people in the group or two hundred. Once you start crafting content that brings people back, I promise your group will grow! A customer group is a perfect spot to have new customers engage after a party, a place to continue conversations and sharing, where they can get to know you more personally. It’s essentially your tribe! So, here are my top tips for growing and engaging that tribe to help your business thrive!

• Go Live – I cannot stress enough how important going live is! Your group members need to see that beautiful face on the screen. It can be intimidating at first, but the more you do it, the more comfortable and confident you’ll become.
• If you have products that you can share virtually, go live and share. It doesn’t need to be anything crazy, just a quick 5-10 minutes demoing something fun. There are a lot of options for all businesses. The biggest thing is to make sure it’s a tutorial, not a sales pitch. Your group is the place to teach and inspire.
• Pick a time each week and stick to it. The most important part is to be consistent and keep it real. Don’t worry about cleaning those dishes or the laundry in the background – people know you’re human. Play off that. It usually inspires some extra connections!
• Create Challenges – Everyone loves a little friendly challenge, and it gets them posting and engaging. If you have a jewelry business, create a challenge to wear a different piece each week and share the photos. A clothing business? Challenge them to post a new, fun way to wear this season’s scarf. Theme the challenge around what you’re selling.
• One thing I would do is create a Pinterest board for each challenge and share ideas and things that other members shared with their permission. I’d then encourage them to head over there to engage with my content as well – and it works! This may take a bit to get rolling, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t have 95 people responding to your challenge right off the bat. It’ll take time, and that’s ok. This is a long game!
• Ask All The Things – Use a poll to ask your members what they want to talk about or learn about; you don’t have to sit there guessing what will get them engaged.
• A couple of years ago, my son was doing a math assignment and had to poll everyone and ask what their favorite lunch food was. I helped him out by posting it in my customer group. The response was amazing! It dawned on me what a great tool this was for content generation. I learned everyone in my customer group had a wild obsession with tacos, so I started theming more content around tacos, and everyone loved it!
• Don’t go crazy with polls, but it’s a perfect place to start if you’re struggling to come up with ideas. The customer group, and in reality, your business, is about serving your customers. Ask them what kind of things they love or want to see, and let them drive your content as you move forward!
• Be Consistent in Your Branding – Not only is it important to be consistent in your posting, but it is also important to have consistent branding on your posts. Consistent branding for your group content makes your content easily identifiable in the Facebook feed and will encourage your followers to engage with you.

How do I grow my VIP Group?

The first step to any successful and profitable Facebook VIP group is having – you guessed it – members! Here are some ways to find those new members:

• Promote your Facebook VIP Group during Parties – As a direct seller, where are most of your new customers coming from? Usually, it’s parties! Invite all the guests who attend your parties to join your Facebook VIP group. Make sure people know about the group and constantly invite new faces. Here are some ideas: Facebook live video during a virtual party, business cards at an in-person party, or personal asks when you’re chatting people up in either party scenario. That’s when your Facebook VIP group will start to build and grow.
• Link your Facebook VIP Group in all the places – Part of creating new relationships for your business is the follow-up. It’s not just about asking friends to join your customer group during a party; the follow-up is just as, if not more, important. When following up to ask what they thought of the party, ask if they’ve received their products yet. Then, invite them to join your private Facebook VIP group for tips and tricks on making the best use of the products they just bought. Having them in your Group will give you the opportunity to get to know them better, so you can maybe even ask them to host or join your team in the future. So, make sure your party attendee follow-up emails, texts, or calls always include an invite to your group.
• Two other places to add your group link are your email signature to prompt questions and your business page. Don’t be afraid to put your link out there – if people don’t know about it, how will they know what a great community of friends they’re missing out on?
• Focus on serving and providing value – If you come from a place of service, you will grow your business. The point of a Facebook VIP group for your customers is to do just that: to make them feel like they are VIPs and deserve all the juicy little nuggets to make their lives better with your products and in general. Make your group value-focused.
• This doesn’t mean you can’t sell products, but think about how you’re selling those products. Give them how-to videos, provide them with freebies, and offer up your insider tips and tricks. Don’t just say, “Buy my stuff, please,” because that will put all of your customers off and hurt your direct sales business more than help it. Make your Facebook VIP group a place where people WANT to hang out and bring their friends because they love what you’re serving up so much!
• Be consistently engaged – For your Facebook VIP group to grow, you need to be engaged. You need to be posting daily. You need to respond to every comment and prompt conversations between your new friends and customers in your group. If there is no engagement, no fun things to discover, why would someone want to join?
• To drive engagement, though, the main thing you need to do is show up. Just show up. This doesn’t mean you have to live on your Facebook customer group literally or that you need to spend two hours thinking of what to post every day. But it does mean you need to hop on for 10 minutes while dinner is heating up to answer a few questions. It means you pop on for a Facebook Live to say hi while the baby is napping for a couple of minutes. The more you consistently engage with your customers in that group, the greater the benefit for your long-term (and short-term) business growth!
• You can schedule every post for a month, but once it’s scheduled, make sure to jump in the comments section and interact. This will save you time and allow you to be consistent without the stress. Engagement is born from consistency!

My VIP Group is crickets! How do I fix my VIP Group?

Has your customer group been filled with crickets? Not sure where to start to bring it back to life? Don’t despair. It happens to the best of us! Don’t take it personally. Grabbing their attention again doesn’t have to be hard. Let’s dig into a few simple steps to revive your dead customer group and turn them back into Chatty Cathys!

• Get Rid Of The Dead Weight – No offense to them, but you don’t need to keep the members who have no intention of being active in your group. If they aren’t ever going to engage, they need to go. Before you give them the boot, you can simply message them that you’re going to remove them from the group as the Facebook algorithm is based on engagement rate (fun fact!), and you have noticed that they haven’t been active. Let them tell you they want to stay – maybe they do, and they’ll perk up! But if not, letting them know they must go is the nice thing to do.
• Post Low Risk, High Engagement Type Posts – Your group members are there because they’re your customers, BUT that doesn’t mean they want to be sold to all day long. Build up your community relationships and keep the tone interesting and upbeat by adding many engagement posts that will grab their attention and ask for their advice and interests.
• Go Live – Even if your group is dead, you can revitalize it with the power of going Live. Don’t worry if no one is watching live in the beginning. They will watch the replay. You’ll come to love it, believe me – it grows on you, AND it’s great for your group members to see AND hear you – they’ll engage so much more!
• Create A Poll – Wanna know a secret? People LOVE polls! They can’t resist them, so creating polls in your customer group is a simple yet strategic way to get them to engage while you’re also learning more about them. They get to voice their opinion, and then YOU get to comment and tag them to ask why they chose that and start a genuine conversation. It’s a beautiful thing to watch!
• Devise A Plan – Creating a content calendar will help you grow by leaps and bounds when bringing your group back from the dead. Consistency means everything, and with a schedule, you can ensure that you’re posting at least once a day so that your members receive notifications and see that your group is alive and the place to be!
• Change Your Customer Group Name – This isn’t something I suggest doing often, but when you change the name of a Facebook group, every single member will receive a notification. This, of course, means that they’ll remember that they are IN your group and decide whether or not they’d like to remain in the group or leave on their own accord. Members who have no intention of purchasing or engaging with you don’t need to stay in your group. Period.

Now, let’s see that Facebook VIP Group take off! Alright, friends, now that you have the 411 about how to take your Facebook VIP group to the next level, let’s get rid of all those negative thoughts from previous “failures” (I prefer learning experiences) and do the dang thing. I promise you that once you put these tips and tricks into practice, you’re going to watch your Facebook VIP group and your business truly reach new heights!