I Tried Using Hashtags, Influencers, and Reddit to Grow my Facebook Group
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Over the course of this past week, I’ve been brainstorming ways on how I can use hashtags, Influencers, and online communities to bring awareness to my new Facebook group.
I created my Facebook group, The Positive Dressing Room: A Mis-Size fashion Community, for a class assignment on social media community managment. Although I was not previously keen about Facebook groups, my experience within this group has absolutely changed my mind about how much of an impact they can make on people’s lives.
My group is geared towards mid-size women (mid-size being between the 10 –16 U.S. size range) in order for them to share their #OOTD (outfit of the day), ask for fashion advice, share mid-size must haves, and uplift each other. Within the past few weeks the “worth” of my group has been evident in my members responses and thankfulness towards having a space where they feel “seen” and “understood.”
I am eager to continue invite more mid-size girls to the group so the first thing I did was research popular hashtags used within this larger community and implement them into a Facebook post on my personal account.
Although this post is aimed at my Facebook friends, I made the settings available so anyone can view the post. I utilized 5 hashtags geared towards mid-size and body positive communities on the internet. Within an hour of posting this to my page, I had 4 request to join the group.
I had previously posted about my new group on Facebook, but failed to include an eye-catching piece of creative content to pair alongside my copy. I feel that this video graphic increased the amount of views I had on my post and thus allowed for more visibility for my group.
I created this graphic using the Facebook Video templates in Canva and was sure to customize it with the same fonts used in my group’s header image. I hoped that by including a snippet of a previous mid-size fashion video I posted to YouTube would bring in a bit of interest to my target audience. (Click the link below to see the video graphic in action).
Along with sharing this post to Facebook, I reformatted it for Instagram Story.
Here I decided to include 3 hashtags in the story in order to increase visibility to those who don’t already follow me.
I am still waiting to see if I receive any Direct Messages inquiring about the group or asking me to invite them to the group directly — although I have hope it will peak interest in my fellow mid-size ladies.
Speaking of Instagram, I also utilized it to reach out to an mid-size influencer. I found Lauren, “midsizelolo” on Instagram through a mid-size related hashtag and truly loved her content. It appeared that she recently started sharing her mid-size related content in August 2020 and has over 2.4K followers on Instagram. She seems to be active on her page and provides great outfit details for other mid-size girls.
I decided to reach out to her via Direct Message and explained a bit about my group. I am still awaiting a response, but again — I am hoping for the best!
Another way I looked into advertising my group was by using a similar themed group. But after a Facebook search I could not find anything towards mid-size fashion and did not connect with any general fashion related groups I thought would be useful to share my group link within. I then took to Reddit to find a women’s fashion community and came across a comment asking for “midsize fashion recs.” The post within the “women’s fashion” subreddit only had a handful of comments and I shared a quick reply with a link to my Facebook group. Below is a screenshot from the conversation, and to keep the anonymity of Reddit, I’ve blocked out my user name.
I’m interested to see if this comment will bring about any interest towards my group or if it will be deleted by the admin with the idea that it is “self promo.”
Overall, I think that these three methods would be useful for anyone trying to grow or bring awareness to their Facebook group or other online communities. And, I’m looking forward to continuing to develop a place where mid-size women feel confident and can share fashion inspiration.
