Have you ever used a Facebook share group, thought about using a Facebook share group, or wondered what they even where?
I’ve spent some time trying them out, so that I could report back to you whether they’re worth your time!
Today we’ll talk about whether or not share groups on Facebook actually work, and whether you should spend your time on them.
Table of Contents
Do Share Groups On Facebook Work?
What are Facebook Share Groups?
There are groups on Facebook that allow you to be part of threads where influencers share.
You can choose a Pinterest thread, for example, and drop a link to a pin you’d share.
Others in the thread will share, or like, your link and you’ll go back and do the same.
The rules for each group can vary, and they have groups for various purposes (e.g. blog post shares, Facebook post likes, Twitter retweets, etc).
Why Did I Start Using Them?
I’d used these very seldom in the past, and when I did it was in a very limited capacity.
At the end of May, we moved Tots Family to its own domain from a subdomain.
It was Family.ThinkingOutsideTheSandbox.CA. We thought it was a good idea intentionally, however it was not.
The SEO isn’t as good, as it piggybacks off the main site.
About a year ago we decided to start redirecting it to its own domain, and in May we took the change and changed it over to TOTSFamily.com completely.
Now the long subdomain is the redirect, and the site has its very own domain.
Long story short, this caused us to take about a 50% drop in traffic.
A very significant drop (10s of thousands of page views a months).
This is caused by a significant drop in domain authority, meaning lots of our SEO “Juice” fell to the wayside.
To try and minimize the impact the change had, I joined Facebook share threads.
In the month or so I tried share threads, I found that they did work.
Perhaps not as well as you would think, however.
Repinning Threads
We have a group called Pinterest traders where we trade shares on pins.
I love this type of sharing, because we aren’t artificially inflating our stats at all.
It’s just a marketing tactic to get our content in front of more readers.
Tailwinds does this for us also.
My biggest issues with share threads is sending people to your site to share from there, then counting in the page views from these people into your stats that you report to brands and advertisers.
We scale stats back to account for sharing, since I don’t think it’s fair to charge advertisers for non-genuine page views.
The upside is that once people share the post into networks like Stumble Upon, it’s fair game and views are based on reader’s actual interest.
Analytics
May 2nd – May 31st and June 1st – June 30th are the periods we are focusing on.
We changed domains the last week of May.
In the time period, our page view sessions went up by 4.25%, users 2.93% and page views by 2.92%.
So they did go up a bit.
That 4% equates about 3,000 or so, but that is pretty much from the people in the share threads.
One year ago around this time, we grew around 5% in the same period.
Disclaimer: We also started a account, which is completely worth the monthly fee! It is amazing for scheduling your Pinterest post, and I’ve seen a lot more Pinterest traffic since joining. We saw an increase of about 2,000 views from here.
Things People Hate About Share Threads
Sometimes people don’t complete them.
It’s important to go back and always reciprocate.
Some bad apples come in and drop their links and go.
You also after to be careful, because you find yourself sharing content that may not apply to your niche, or be of the same quality as your usual content when reciprocating.
You have to evaluate if that would be more detrimental to you than beneficial.
My Final Thoughts
It’s a tool for your toolbox, but not a cure all.
You still need to focus on quality content, including images, and sharing worthy content.
Content is Queen.
Linky parties are great.
Sharing on your own and having a social media strategy is important.
YouTube channels and other avenues of promoting your own content is right too.
Take a look at what you’re gaining from threads and evaluate it. I’ll continue with them through the summer, and likely stop in the fall when our traffic generally grows naturally.
That’s it for this week!
