I created a group on Facebook that got over 1 million members in 28 days. I then sold the group on sitepoint (now Flippa.com) for $5,000. I was offered $15,000 but had already signed for 10k. My point is, there are plenty of people who would love to have a group with 1,000,000+ members and who will pay big money to take yours. The “message all members” feature goes away at 5,000 members, or else the groups would be worth much more.
This is where FB Pages come in. FB pages have the potential to grow as quickly as groups and to get more members. The key here is that you can send updates, messages, and wall posts to every member of your page regardless of how many members there are. This makes facebook pages worth a lot more than facebook groups.
Before I sold my group, I sold advertising space on my “recent news” for $100 per day. There are many ways to monetize pages and groups. Groups are old school money on FB, pages are bigger new school money. I suggest putting your effort towards FB pages.
Here is my advice to creating 1,000,000+ member facebook groups or pages:
1. Follow pop culture and if a big event happens, create a group around it. Try and be the first to do so and people will join like mad. Example: When Heath Ledger died and “The Dark Knight” came out, someone created a group entitled “Heath Ledger Deserves a Post Humous Academy Award for his Role in the Dark Knight.” Not the shortest title but it gained more than 1,000,000 members within the month.
2. Play off of Nastalgia and common interests. A group called “If you remember this you grew up in the 90’s” has almost 2 million members. It is all about discussing things about the 90’s that people loved. A page called “When I was your age I had to blow in my video games to get them to work” has more than 2 million members. Another page called “Hot Showers” has 1.7 Million people.
3. Social experiments are getting old, but can work with a new spin. The original, 6 degrees of separation, where the only point of joining the group is to participate in an experiment got 5 Million people. These groups ask you to invite all of your friends and can go viral quickly. This is the kind of group I sold (now has more than 2million members).
My advice if you are planning on partaking in the Facebook group or page journey is to create a fake account and get a lot of fake friends (especially a fake hot girl). This way you don’t have to spam your real friends when inviting them to join your group or page and they don’t get pissed at you.
Good luck!
