How to Grow a Facebook Group, and How Facebook Decides Which Groups Are High Quality

A lot of people ask me about Facebook groups. How do you grow them? How does Facebook decide to prioritize group X over group Y, and which practices actually work today?
I’m sharing a reply I wrote in another group on the same topic. Hope you get some value out of it 🙂

At the end of the day, Facebook communities, and Facebook in general, run on their own algorithm:
Facebook decides which groups to show under suggested groups, how to rank groups in its search engine, and how much exposure each group gets in every user’s personal feed. Those are a lot of decisions that affect how your group performs.
Nobody knows exactly what the algorithm is, but people who have worked in this space for a while can make educated guesses, just like an SEO does with Google.
In the end, I think there are a few guiding principles you need to internalize to move forward:

1. You have to do things that line up with Facebook’s interests. What are Facebook’s interests? Facebook is a business, and its main goal is to keep users on the platform as long as possible. When users are on the platform, they see ads, and that’s how Facebook makes money.
   Keep Facebook happy and be more attractive than the other groups, and Facebook will reward you by prioritizing your group over others.
2. There are active steps you can take to bring more users into a group. Some practices are more white hat, some are gray, and some are more black hat. There’s no right or wrong here. It’s a game, and you need to understand the possible consequences of each move and decide what fits you.
3. In the end, even if you bring users into the group by whatever method you choose, if those users don’t interact with the group’s content, it won’t hold up. Facebook will notice and cut the group’s reach. A group of 1,000 engaged members beats 50,000 dormant ones.
   That’s why the practice of taking an existing Facebook group and changing its topic usually doesn’t pay off.
   There’s a lot more to consider, but the formula comes down to this: bring users into the group + manage the group properly + make sure there’s content that keeps users in the group. Once you do that, Facebook will help you grow.

Want more content on this topic? Have questions? Drop them in the comments 🙂

In the image: the growth rate of one of my groups over the past week