Wish your Facebook feed only had highly curated content from the people in your community? Have you heard about Facebook Workplace?

And what if all these people loved your brand and sent you hundreds of referrals? Not bad. Facebook Workplace is one of the best solutions for creating this highly engaged community. Remember, people spend an average of 50 minutes every day on Facebook. There’s almost zero learning curve to Facebook Workplace because it has a similar interface to Facebook. It took me less than several minutes to understand it - faster than Slack, Meetup, or any other community-based platform.

You can barely tell the difference between Facebook and Facebook Workplace.

Facebook Workplace is relatively inexpensive starting at $3/month per a user, then $2/month per user when over 1,000 people. In return, you receive an unlimited file, photo, and video storage. You also receive unlimited team and project groups.

How does it work? Similar to Slack, the Facebook Groups act as channels for different conversations. Then, there’s the main news feed. Just like regular Facebook, you can create a status to show up in this news feed:

Who uses it?

Everyone from educational organizations sharing updates across different chapters to shipping companies connecting crews through Live video.

One of the main differences is the types of groups you can create. You can create private groups for only particular team members, project-oriented groups, and even multi-company groups for better collaboration.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, there’s a catch. Everyone needs an email that links to the same domain. At first, I thought this was a bad idea. However, after participating in Facebook Workplace communities, I’ve quickly changed my mind. Several benefits I’ve seen from unique email addresses:

1. Makes the community more exclusive
2. Enables a more secure login process
3. Establishes uniformity among community members

Get Started!

If you want to get started, then create your account and invite your coworkers in bulk (can only do this if you’re an admin):

1. Click Add People to the right of your profile
2. Check to make sure your file type is supported
3. Choose an import option and follow the prompts

To invite peers individually, type their domain-tied email address under Invite Coworkers, then click Invite. You can invite multiple coworkers by entering multiple email addresses.

If you decide to use Facebook Workplace to create a lead generation community, then you probably want in-depth stats whether overall, group specific, or people specific. Facebook Workplace provides these analytics to help you understand where you need to improve. So, if you’re looking to test different tactics and strategies for engagement to understand what works, then you can now do that confidently.

Sure, there are many community options with analytics. Why not use a regular Facebook Group? Why not use a Slack community? Facebook Workplace provides an extremely efficient way to communicate around the different niches pertaining to your industry. So, as your community grows, these niches within it, do too. Companies represent the perfect example. All the employees work towards the same mission, but many work in different departments - support, sales, marketing. To keep the outliers participating in your community and generating referrals, then Facebook Workplace will help them do so.

Facebook Workplace provides community organizers a more exclusive place to nurture and grow their audience. There’s almost zero learning curve. If you’re looking to increase word-of-mouth referrals or make use of a better place to make your community feel special, then you’ve found it.