How One Facebook Group Nails Engagement Every Day

Keeping your Facebook group full of activity can be tricky. Some pro tips suggest asking questions, including calls-to-action, perfectly timing your posts, and even using more emojis. Others suggest publicly welcoming new members to keep the group feeling connected.

But what are the most successful groups doing to create engagement?

In my quest to better understand Facebook groups, I joined a few. One of my favorites is a group called Black Travel Movement. In it, nearly 400,000 members connect to talk about their travel experiences, share photos and videos, ask travel-related questions and offer tips. As you might expect, not all 400,000 members are actively engaging in the group, but enough of them are that this group sees new content daily. I figure if there’s a secret to Facebook group engagement, this group is in on it.

So, what is it that separates the active groups from the duds?

First, I think it’s important to note that engagement is not created in the Black Travel Movement group so much as the perfect environment for engagement was created. Members don’t need to be prompted to interact here, although they sometimes are. Entrepreneur Neil Patel says, “a [Facebook] group is for interacting with a tribe,” and these members have found theirs.

The key is members of a tribe already feel a connection with one another. The members of this group engage because they’re genuinely interested in travel. Who doesn’t want to gush about their experience in Thailand or sound like an expert on activities in Belize? Aside from just quantity, this group has quality. They’ve been careful to add people who are truly interested in the group’s purpose; making sure prospective members are a good fit will always help to foster better engagement.

While this community keeps engagement going without much prompting, it’s certainly not left to run itself. Admins are very visible and clearly in a leadership position. With a group of 400,000 people, that’s necessary. It’s obvious that admins and moderators are actively enforcing the guidelines.

Their type of visible regulation weeds out unwanted posts and it likely keeps some would-be detractors from going rogue. It’s not a total ban-fest, though. The group’s leaders are helpful, too. They offer actual suggestions on the best types of posts and encourage people to contribute something valuable to the conversation.

On top of that, posts are vetted and approved before they’re visible to the group.

The admins themselves provide a great amount of value, too. They run contests, announce events and trips, and share about other travel-related things that happen outside of the group. There’s a crossover into the real world that gives an added benefit to engaging with this group.

Once, an admin even announced that United Airlines was hiring — something that might be interesting to people who love to travel. (And no, he doesn’t work for United Airlines.)

If there’s a takeaway from the success of the Black Travel Movement group, it’s this: a compelling purpose, present leadership, well-established setting, and the feeling of being surrounded by like-minded individuals will always lead to powerful engagement. Always.