The How-To: Leveraging Facebook Groups To Find Your Customers' Pain Points Joining Facebook groups where your prospective customers ask questions and share useful information is a smart way to understand their pain points.

To grow your business, you need to address your customers' pain points and position your business as a potential solution. That is common knowledge. But when it comes to figuring out exactly what these pain points are, many business owners goof. And the result? They direct their marketing efforts at the wrong audience or target the right audience with the wrong message. Either way, they wind with no conversions. Top dollars gone down the drain!

While a quick web search can open your eyes to tons of tips for researching and understanding your customers' pain points, you really don't have to try out too many strategies. One particularly easy, cost-free, and yet highly effective strategy that has consistently produced results for me is... using Facebook groups. Yes, just that.

In this post, I'll teach you how to use Facebook groups to nail down and identify the specific problems that your potential customers are facing.

1. Join Facebook groups where your prospective customers hang out
On Facebook, you'll find groups for every topic or subject under the sun. And you could join thousands of them, but you really don't need that- just focus on few groups that will have huge impacts on your business.

To find groups that are relevant to your business, use the "Search" field at the top of Facebook. For example, if your business offers pet grooming services, simply enter something like "Pets" or even "Pets USA" (change "USA" to your target location) to make it more specific. In the results page, click the "Groups" tab, and you'd see a list of groups whose members are pet lovers and owners. In my own case, I simply use search terms like "SEO", "Content marketing", "Bloggers", and other related terms to find relevant groups, since I'm a content marketer. And so far, I've been able to find Facebook groups whose members have problems that my business can solve. More importantly, I've been able to better understand the needs of my target customers.

On the results page, read the description of each group to determine if it's right for you. Most groups are closed, so you can only see their posts after joining. Be sure to join groups with a decent number of members. I use 1,000 members as my cut-off criterion. Join 10 to 20 seemingly relevant groups for a start. You'd ditch the not-so-good ones later.

2. Stick with few "high quality" groups
There's no way you can be consistently active in 10 to 20 groups. So, you need to cut down to just three to five of them. Now, you're not going to choose based on number of members. I've joined groups with over 100,000 members that turned out to be of no benefit to my business. And I've gained huge value from groups with less than 10,000 members. The most important factor here –after relevance, of course– is user activity.

One of the most active Facebook groups I ever joined is the SEO Signals Lab group, where members discuss the impacts of the various factors that search engines use when ranking sites. At the time I joined the group, it had just about 10,000 members. But I stuck with it for two reasons. Firstly, its members include my target audience- SEO experts, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and business owners looking to leverage Internet marketing for their businesses. And secondly, it's a highly active group where several posts pop up every day, with each generating long and insightful discussions among members. And on top of those, the group is tightly moderated, giving no room for spam or boring stuff. That's what I'd call an ideal Facebook group. And it's no surprise that the group is growing very fast, with member count already grossing over 27,000 as at the time of this writing.

So, in short, stick with few groups that have your potential customers as audience, are highly active, and are strictly moderated. Avoid groups with little or no activity, and groups where people just drop spam links.

3. Participate actively to make the most out of the groups
After selecting few relevant and active groups, start following discussions and listening to what members are talking about. When necessary, make relevant and helpful contributions and ask questions that would compel other members to tell you more about their individual problems that your business can solve. This way, you'd gain more insight on how to fine-tune your product or services to attract more customers.

One of the most powerful advantages of Facebook groups is that you can put up polls. These can help you understand the consensus among group members about a particular subject related to your business. And you can better understand the worst fears and concerns of your prospective customers as well as how to win their trust with your business.

Now, there's a rule: Don't promote your business! Flout this rule and you'd get kicked out of most strictly moderated groups. Rather, focus on providing valuable information and becoming a resource. And offer your expertise for free. When people see your name popping up over and over with your helpful posts attached, they'll deem you an expert in your industry and feel free to approach you with their fears and dilemmas.

Wrap-up
Facebook groups are among the best places to find the most passionate people about any topic or interest. As a business owner, you must deeply understand the pain points of your target customers. Joining Facebook groups where your prospective customers ask questions and share useful information is a smart way to understand these pain points. And it will give you deeper insights into what your potential customers expect from your business.

Related: Partners In Progress: Ime Archibong, Facebook's Vice President Of Product Partnerships