Where Did The Facebook Groups Go?

The free groups of Facebook have been getting shut down over the last few months.  You know the ones....

"Join my free community mastermind"

"Network with like-minded individuals"

...the ones where you get added to a group, the owner is seen as an "industry thought leader" where they can basically pitch you whenever you like.  For free or very cheap.

It's a pretty terrible strategy, but people like it because its cheap.  Lots of people like cheap things.  I don't.

Now those pages are going bye bye.

In the high level business masterminds I'm involved in, we've been hearing the rumblings around our communites of people having their groups shut down.  Especially the ones that are "free" but are in reality a pitch fest and so-called credibility boost for the page admin.

Now Facebook Releases Paid Subscriptions.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-facebook-features-paid-subscription-groups-digital-joshua-fechter

Thats right - PAID DIGITAL GROUPS.  ONLINE COURSES.  All within Facebook.  It was inevitable.  The writing was on the wall for a long time.

Sounds great right?
You'd be wrong.

If you've ever attempted to run ad campaigns where you can't say "weight loss", "diet" or "food plan".  Campaigns where you can't talk about anything vaguely health related for fear of your account being shut down - PT's and Gym owners have felt the pinch of this over the last couple of years.

Can you imagine if your COURSE was actually within Facebook.  All of a sudden they can review what you are teaching.  Breach their guidelines and your DATABASE AND CONTENT is gone - or in the best case scenario held to ransom.

Last Facepocalypse people were losing ads accounts left right and center.  Anyone using leadpages at the time had their lead funnels decimated to rubble.  People were running scared... and rightly so, they were breaching Facebook Terms - and Facebook decided to enforce - hard.  I won't be surprised if once this rolls out a LOT of people lose their groups.  Their sole source of "clients".

• Your marketing and advertising should NEVER be dependent on one source.
• Your database should be something YOU own, not a heap of likes in a group that you have ZERO control if Facebook take down.
• Your membership site should be on YOUR website... it's not even hard or expensive.
• Your content should be on YOUR servers, not youtube, vimeo or elsewhere - although at least at this point these video providers haven't been taking steps to "moderate" the content in their system.
• Your business needs to be under YOUR control.

Need help? Reach out and I'll be happy to give you an hour of my time to figure out where you're at and if you're at risk.