EP 285 — Facebook Group Marketing That Actually Works for Coaches (No Posting, No DMs needed)
Facebook group marketing that actually works for coaches isn’t about spending hours posting random content or trying to be spammy or sell in someone else’s group. The truth is, most coaches waste time in Facebook groups because they don’t have a strategy that builds real connections and leads to paying clients.
In this episode, I’m sharing how to use Facebook groups the right way so you can grow your coaching business without ads, funnels, or burnout.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
Why most coaches use Facebook groups the wrong way (and what to do instead)
How to find the right groups where your clients are already spending time
The simple daily actions that actually attract coaching clients
How to build authentic connections without being “salesy”
Why Facebook group marketing can be one of the best free strategies to grow your coaching business in 2025
If you’ve been looking for a place to get in front of your ideal clients and start forming real connections, without paid ads or strategies that feel pushy or sleazy, this episode is for you! I’ll show you how to use Facebook groups in a way that feels natural, simple, and effective so you can start turning conversations into paying clients.
Tools I recommend for coaches:
Flodesk (email marketing): https://flodesk.com/c/DEBBIESHADID
Descript (video editor): https://get.descript.com/cj4n2vzke4vu
Connect with Debbie:
Website: https://www.debbieshadid.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/debbieshadid/
🎙️ Listen to the podcast: Life Coach Business Building School: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/life-coach-business-building-school-with-debbie-shadid/id1502118085
Don’t forget to subscribe for weekly episodes on coaching business strategy for women over 50, tech tools for coaches, and simple business growth strategies that really work: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz6RS8kQGMLJqJrK9uKdjtg
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Transcript
[00:00:00] have you ever wondered if Facebook groups are worth it for growing your coaching business? The answer is yes, but only if you know how to use them the right way. In today's episode, I'm gonna be showing you exactly how to make groups that work for you, whether you're joining someone else's group or starting your own.
Let's start by talking about how you show up in other people's group. Here is a rule of thumb that I don't want you to break. Do not be a creep. Think about it. Someone else took the time to build that group. It's their house. You wouldn't walk into somebody else's living room and start handing out flyers about your business,
You never want someone to do that in your group either. Instead. Be interested. Go into that group because it's something that you're already interested in. Give answers, connect with people. Be a friend. Y'all. Remember how to do that. Be friendly. Be of good service. Be helpful. Don't [00:01:00] talk in that group with the ulterior motive of getting clients.
Be in that group to make connection and to make friends. Make sure that you're always posting from your personal profile, not from your business page. And trust me when I say this, you actually never need to sell yourself in a group. If you are helpful. If you offer support and encouragement and answer questions, do you know what will happen?
Somebody will come look you up. It happens every time. This is one of the things that we teach our clients inside of the business building boutique. We only teach free marketing and Facebook groups are a part of that, but you have to commit to doing Facebook group connecting regularly. So here's what I recommend.
Find three groups that seem ideal for your niche, and then commit to being in those groups. 30, 60, or 90 days before you ever make a decision about the group not being the best group for you, and I would lean more towards 90 [00:02:00] days of being in the group before you ever make a decision about it.
once you're in the group, I want you to set aside time on your calendar, commit to being in there consistently. This is the only way that it works. three times a week for 30 minutes. Set a time on your calendar to go into those groups and interact. You can use the little search icon up at the top of the group and search by keyword and find words like overwhelmed or stressed, and whatever that is for your niche.
You would know what that would be, and then go in and search that word and answer the questions that have to do with that. Only. I might search keywords like get clients. Or technology, or I'm stressed, things like that, and I can find the questions or the conversations that people are having about those particular things, and then I can go contribute.
And I tell you, I hardly ever go do this. And when I [00:03:00] do. Almost every time somebody connects with me outside of the group, they send me a dm. Now, a couple other things that I want you to note for best practices is your personal profile page. It actually needs to be set up so that people understand what you do.
Now, I'm not talking about a banner that is really salesy. I'm talking about. Having your contact information with your business, you can put three lines in your personal profile and you can actually include a website. You can say, grab my freebie right here. You can give enough information that people are clear about what you're doing without having to have a banner.
Where you're selling 'em. Every time somebody sends me a friend request and I go over and I look at their profile and it's like, I'm gonna get you 20 clients in one month. I'm like, I'm not gonna be your friend. don't do that to people.
Make sure you're in those groups because you care about people and you care about their problems. Then do the same on your personal page. Show up as a kind human [00:04:00] being with your business contact information and start up a chat with them. if they DM you, because you mention something about. a process that you used that really helped you lose weight, or you mentioned a strategy that you used in your financial planning, something like that, or in a relationship, you fill in the blank.
When you do that, they'll send you a dm. Then you can have a conversation back and forth. Don't just send 'em your link to schedule a time to chat with you. Don't be selling 'em right off the bat. Build relationships. If you are selling your coaching for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, $7,000. Why rush it. Allow there to be time to build up a relationship, okay?
Make sure that you go back and forth, even have coffee with somebody. The world needs connection right now, so go have coffee virtually with somebody, get to know 'em, and then when the time is right, because you are so wise and full of wisdom, the opportunity will [00:05:00] unfold. If we haven't met each other, I should stop for a moment and do that.
I'm Debbie Shadid I've helped thousands of coaches not only build, but grow profitable boutique style coaching businesses. What I'm sharing with you today is the exact type of strategy that I teach my clients so they can attract their own paying clients without spending money on ads and without getting lost in complicated tech through our coaching.
Our clients go and they do things like Facebook group interaction. They come to our coaching calls and they're like, okay, I said this. What should I say next? That's literally the way we support our clients. Alright. Let's move on to you starting your own Facebook group. Now. Let's talk about creating the group, the logistics of it.
First of all. You are responsible for making this group the best. It is not up to your members as they join to be the one that makes the group exciting. It's you that makes the group exciting. don't commit to build a [00:06:00] Facebook group until you are ready to commit to being present there. I want you to think about naming your group in the best, simplest way.
Make sure that when you go search in Facebook groups for groups that are similar, don't have the exact same name as somebody else's, but logically look and see what should my group be called that will make sense that somebody would search for. Now, what is the benefit of having a group? I actually had a client ask me this question, which is making me wanna do this episode for you.
She said, should I have a business page or a Facebook group? And then how do I connect with people if I do have a Facebook group? So let me answer that question for you too, as I go through what it takes to have a Facebook group. First of all, you should have a business page. Will you get any business off your business page?
Probably not. Will you have much activity? Probably not, but it is a place where Google can [00:07:00] find you. So why would you not have it there? It's free. Put a cover on there. Again, add your link, maybe your calendar, link your website link and tell people, join my group. The reason why you want to have a group is that Facebook will show the people who are in your group.
It's more likely, I should say, to show you their posts. So that's the benefit of doing a group. Now, how do you grow the group? Well, that takes some work too. First of all, you can go to the invite button. Once you set up your group, click the invite button and you can invite people that you personally know.
That's one thing. The other way that you can do that is through these other groups. People might come to look and see who you are. They might see that you have a Facebook group and join your group. You also sell the idea of joining your group on Facebook through your posts on LinkedIn, through Instagram.
You tell people why they want to be [00:08:00] part of the group. What is the value that you are bringing? What are you gonna give them in exchange for the commitment that they made to join your group? So you gotta have all of that thought out. Once you decide on the name and you get your group set up, you have to make sure that the settings allow the group to be found.
If you make it private, nobody can even find your group. I recommend that the group. Actually be private once somebody gets in it so that people can have the opportunity to write anything they want without somebody in the world finding their post. But it does have to be searchable. Then you wanna set up the questions, the entry questions.
You are building a business, and the purpose of having this group is to grow your email list. And the only way you can do that is by offering something of value in the three questions that you ask when somebody comes to enter your group. you might say, tell me what you're most interested in. What are [00:09:00] the problems that you have in this particular topic?
And grab my free training here where I teach you X, Y, and Z by dropping your email here. Very important point. Now you can let people in the group without getting their email address and only about half the people are going to give you their email address. So it's up to you how you want to do that. I actually end up letting people into our groups without an email address because I intend to have them sign up for something else once they get into the group.
I like to think, well, I'm gonna get 'em so excited once they're in there that if they didn't give me their email address to begin with, they will give me their email address once they get into the group, because they're going to want to attend to one of my free trainings, or they're gonna want the free resource that I have.
Something along that lines. Now Let's talk about engagement. How do you keep this group interesting? Now, in the beginning, I'm just gonna warn you, it is like you are on an island by [00:10:00] yourself, talking to nobody. Once you start building the group, it might take a month before anybody interacts.
Now, I hope it's sooner, but I always like to paint the picture that it's further away because I want you to commit to be there no matter what. I actually would like you to commit to starting a Facebook group for like six months before you ever make a decision. And remember, you need to have a plan for what you're gonna do in there.
Let's say you decide every Wednesday to have a coffee chat Where you teach something to your niche client, and let's say every Friday you have open coaching, those are two things that you promote to the general public. Hey, join my Facebook group because I teach something every Wednesday, either live in the group.
Or you can sign up and get on my Zoom link. either way, live in the group is nice because people can engage with you anytime. Now, I will mention to you, I like the idea of you going [00:11:00] live inside of your group because it notifies everybody.
It tells everybody that you have gone live. Because they're being notified because they're in your group. That's the benefit. Okay? So go live in that group. Anytime you have something you wanna talk about, anytime you wanna have something to teach, one word of caution, do not tag at everyone on every single post.
That is so annoying to me. When I joined Facebook groups and everybody is tagging at everybody over and over, I leave the groups. So make sure that you're careful about how often you tag the at everyone. Now, I will say inside of our coaching communities, I do use the at everyone often. And that's a different kind of Facebook group.
I'm letting people know, Hey, our Zoom call is changed to this time, or Here's the resource I told you about in our recent coaching session. Or Here's the free Canva graphics we talked about. I'm tagging at everybody that is [00:12:00] actually a client inside of our group. that's one way to do it.
But when it is a public group. Don't tag everyone because everybody in the whole group gets the notification. But if you go live, you will show up most likely in their feed as if you are going live. I do encourage you to have your coffee chats, maybe that way you can also experiment with having 'em offline, but ideally your coffee chat would be live in the group.
Where people can drop questions. They might even know the topic ahead of time. So you could say, on Wednesday, I'm gonna be talking about this. Make sure you leave your questions here. Always be prepared when you go live to carry the conversation. Do not depend on anyone engaging while you are on. live One thing that's weird is that you can ask a question and when you go live, you'll see there's a delay.
It'll look like nobody's answering, and you'll be onto the next topic, and then somebody answers. there's this kind of [00:13:00] delay, so it's better for you to be prepared. To fill all the time that you wanna talk, and then go back and answer in the comments, anything anybody says, that's a great way to build after you go live to build engagement.
And then the Friday coaching session that I just mentioned, that would be the time where you have people sign up and they actually get the zoom link to come to that because it would make sense to have open coaching, conversation, connection, networking, whatever it might be. In a Zoom room. Okay. The other thing that I wanna tell you is that you need to schedule posts for that Facebook group that you grow to ensure that there is new content coming up all the time.
I actually schedule our posts an entire month at a time. about 50% of the posts are value posts where I'm actually giving good strategies, good ideas, good resources. You can even share other people's podcasts, books you love to [00:14:00] read. You can share articles or blogs or Instagram posts from other people, other creators, other coaches.
You can share those, which is also very interesting, and that makes it so that you're not creating all of the content. and then the other 50% of the time, what I want you to do is have engaging posts. Those are like the engagement things that you ask, like do you like coffee or tea, or, what's your favorite Starbucks drink?
Or Where should I shop for red lipstick? Right? If you guys know me, I wear red lipstick. Ask the questions that will get people talking. Remember, Facebook is all about being social. That is actually the point of the groups. Facebook created those groups so that people could connect with their own tribe, and you could be social in there.
So provide an opportunity. For there to be some social activity. You can also think about this group as a long-term dating relationship. I always like to talk about this when it comes to somebody getting on your [00:15:00] email list, and this is no different. You would not marry somebody tomorrow that you just met.
don't expect somebody to buy coaching from you when they drop into your group. You have to date them and imagine that it might take a year. Of getting to know you before they finally decide that they're gonna take the next step and schedule a call with you. Now, let's talk about how you can grow your group through the efforts of other people in the group.
All right, when you have somebody join the Facebook group, you can actually create a contest within the group. let's say your first a hundred people who join the group. Once you get to a hundred, then you do a fun contest and you ask those people to invite their friends, and you make a video.
You have to show 'em how to do it, click the button that says invite, and you'll have the option to invite your. But build a contest around this. I'm gonna share with you my own story about growing a Facebook group like this. I [00:16:00] started at the Facebook group and the first thing I did was invited enough friends that I had a decent group of people in there.
Now I had all the posts pre-scheduled. I told people what the purpose of the group was, and then I invited this core group of people to basically be the founding members of the group. I went in there and I got very active in that group. I tagged individual people's names. I asked them questions because they were people I knew.
I created conversation. Then I put together a giveaway and I gave away not only a coaching package with myself, but I came up with some gifts, some real gifts, like a hundred dollars Amazon gift card. Plus I asked other coaches to give a gift, and we created a bundle that was like $10,000 coaching bundle.
And we ask people to invite their friends and we tracked it on something called Group Boss. That is actually a [00:17:00] tracking tool that you can set up and it will tell you the people who came into the Facebook group, it will document the answers to their questions. So it will capture their email addresses on a spreadsheet.
This is actually brilliant, and it will tell you who invited. Who, so you set up this spreadsheet with the columns? And it will give you that information. I actually built my Facebook group to over 1500 members in one month, and there was about 4,000 people invited. we had this $10,000 giveaway, and every day I would go in and I would say, Hey, if you're new to the group, I would create a welcome post.
And I would tag each person's name, make sure you tell us where you're from, and then I would invite the new people. If you wanna join in on a super fun contest, this is what we're doing. We're giving away this ultimate coaching bundle, and I would invite them to then start inviting people. And I also [00:18:00] kept track of who invited who, and I made a leaderboard that I posted every day.
I showed who was like winning the contest. I made competition within the group. So I would say like Shelly has invited 453 people and Debbie has invited 359 people and Lisa has 200 people. I would post that multiple times a day.
at the time? I used a tool called Group Leads. Now I mentioned Group Boss. I will actually leave a link for Group Boss. That's what I've most recently used. But when I grew this actual Facebook group, I use something called Group Leads. It is just an extension on your Google Chrome browser, and when you open up the Facebook group,
then it will capture all of the answers that people have submitted. And again, It will track to see who has invited who to that group. that is a super, super fun thing to do. One of the benefits to the people who decided to.
Add [00:19:00] to the coaching bundle. So the other coaches who said, yeah, I'll give away a coaching program, or I'll give away a gift, whatever it is, I let them go live in that Facebook group then. I allowed them in exchange for the gift that they would be giving as part of the giveaway. I allowed them to go live, promote their business, share their, resources for free.
So it was a win-win for everybody who was part of the giveaway, and it was definitely a win-win. For the people who were inviting people in the contest. It created so much energy. There was so much collaboration, so much momentum. It not only grew my business, it was fun, you guys. Now I'll tell you, during that 30 day period, I was literally on Facebook in that group.
From morning 6:00 AM until midnight, I was in there interacting, interacting. But you guys, I added 1500 people to an email list because of that. it was worth every moment to do that. So that is what you can do with a [00:20:00] Facebook group. Now, before we go on, I wanna talk to you about getting visibility as a speaker.
if you've been listening today and you wanna grow your business, you wanna grow your authority, your reputation, in a very short amount of time, I wanna invite you to the Design Live Thrive Summit. This would be a great opportunity for you. We have this event two times a year, and We are currently feeling our next summit speakers, many of our past speakers. They literally gained clients within the first week after they talked, some actually landed clients before this summit. here's the difference that I want you to know. We don't just have you be a speaker at any summit.
We actually support you the entire way. If you have never spoke at an event. We actually help you create your talk. We do all of your email marketing. We draft all the emails with your information on it. We do the social media posts, the graphics, the captions. We even write scripts for you.
That way [00:21:00] you simply show up, showcase yourself as an expert. And we will sell out of this next summit. We're already a third of the way full, and we only announced enrollment this week. So join us for the Design Life Thrive Summit. You do need to schedule a call with me, debbie shadow.com/schedule. We will sell out.
Okay, back to Facebook groups. So let me bring this all together for you. When you interact in other people's Facebook groups, you gain visibility, you create connection, and it is free exposure. You run your own group. You also create know, like, and trust. You also build your audience in just a different way.
Once you get somebody into your own Facebook group, you can also interact with them much easier. Through a dm, you can tell people in the group, Hey, I sent you a direct message, and you can have a conversation with the people in your group. Now, outside of your group, that's when
you can also get [00:22:00] really personal with people and say, Hey, I know what you know you're doing in your life, or what's happening for you because you've been talking about it in the group. I'd love to have a conversation with. you, we can talk about how I can support you. Schedule a time here.
You can do that now because you have your own group, but I recommend that you do both. I recommend that you work in other people's Facebook groups and just be incredibly charming. And then I recommend that you build your own group if you're ready to commit to it. But do both of those consistently.
You're actually building a free funnel. a funnel is how you bring people into you, So it's free. You'll get noticed. You can have people check your profile. You can have people go through your free trainings, you can grow your list. And by the way, once you grow your list, you have to nurture those people through email marketing.
I'll talk about that in an upcoming episode. So here's the takeaways. Facebook groups are literally one of the best ways. To grow [00:23:00] your coaching business. If you have an opinion other than that, I can tell you you're not doing it right. Every time I have a client come in, they're like, I've already tried that.
I say, listen, we're gonna do it this way. And I give 'em the exact specifics to it. And when they do that and they follow the plan that we have, I'm laughing because it always turns out somebody says, you're never gonna believe this. And I'm like, yes, I believe it. It works. They're always surprised because they have a consultation from a Facebook group interaction that was not their own Facebook group where they were not selling, where they were just being a human, who was being loving and considerate and kind to somebody else that was looking for support.
I would also love to help you. Get your business to the next level. Build it very quickly to have you have consultations on your calendar, to have you have new clients in just a matter of a few weeks. Join us and save your spot for the Design Life Thrive Summit. Again, it happens twice a year, so if you happen to be [00:24:00] listening to this later, and it's not fall 2025.
We have two summits a year, you'll always have an opportunity to sign up for our next summit. This one, however, is filling quickly. Your next best step is to schedule that time with me, debbie sha.com/schedule. I will leave the link just right below this video. Do not forget to subscribe. Hit the bell, get notified.
I share tips like this all the time, and I've just literally given you the rundown of how to do Facebook group marketing, how to grow your own business with free groups, how to grow your email list through a contest and how to really make connection in other people's groups.
Okay you guys, that's it for this week. Send me a dm, tell me what your Facebook group is and tell me what is happening for you. Ask me any questions and I will answer those for you. So we will see you next time. and I can't wait to have you be a speaker in the Design Live Thrive Summit.
We'll see you later. [00:25:00] Bye-bye.
