
How to Add 1,000 Members to Your Facebook Group Fast!
It used to be that having a fan page or a business page was a great way to get organic reach on Facebook. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work anymore. Pages are having a harder and harder time with solid organic reach and seeing increasingly diminished returns on their efforts.
Now businesses use Facebook groups instead. But growing your Facebook group can be a challenge. Especially if you’ve never done it before.
That’s why, I’m going to show you why you need a Facebook group and the EXACT methods I’ve used to grow my group to over 20,000 members.

The Benefits of Facebook Groups for Business
There are many benefits to using Facebook groups if you own a business.
The biggest benefit is that it’s one of the few places you can still get real organic reach on social media. That means that you can engage with and sell to your target audience for free once they’ve joined your group.
Groups can be incredibly active places and bring huge revenue into your business without having to spend money on ads, but they are an optin environment. That means that people have to elect to become part of your Facebook group and that takes a bit of strategy to accomplish.
The Strategy Most People Use to Grow Their Facebook Group (Don’t Do This)
When most people try to add people to their Facebook groups, they do it by directly advertising their group on Facebook.
This SEEMS like it would be effective, but in my experience joining a group is too big a leap for most people to take right off the bat. This is especially true if they’ve never heard of you before.
It’s kind of like asking someone to marry you on the first date. There needs to be some steps in between that get people comfortable with you before they make a commitment to your group.
Do This Instead: The Best Way to Grow a Facebook Group
I’ve tested this extensively and the best way that I’ve found to get people to join my Facebook group – so that I can interact and market to them for free – is to invite all the people that like my Facebook page to join my group.
NOTE: It’s OK if you don’t have any likes to your Facebook page yet. I’ll show you how to do that next.
But before I get into how to get likes on your page, it’s important to have your Facebook group linked to your Facebook page. You can see how I do that by linking my Facebook Ads Mastermind Group to my Ben Heath Facebook page.

Now that you have those two linked we can move onto the next step – growing your Facebook page likes.
How to Grow a Facebook Group with Ads
If you are starting from scratch or don’t have many likes on your page yet, the easiest way to grow your group is to use Facebook Ads.
This is a two step process.
You want to get people to make small commitments to you – liking your page – BEFORE you ask them to make larger commitments – joining your group.
The first step is to get people to like your Facebook page through a like ad campaign. A Facebook “like” campaign is still one of the least expensive campaigns to run on Facebook and can be quite effective at growing your page likes and getting people primed to join your group.
How To Set Up a Facebook Like Campaign
- Name your campaign
- Select buying type – auction
- Select campaign objective – page likes
- Name your adset
- Name your ad

The campaign level you can leave alone. It’s all set to go.
Then you go into the adset level and set your targeting. For a page like campaign you want a LARGE target audience. Here are a few basic guidelines.
- If you operate locally, then target your geographic area and leave the rest of the targeting alone.
- If you operate nationally or internationally, also select a broad audience. For instance I would select business page admins since we primarily offer a Facebook advertising service. This gives me an audience of almost 1 million people. This gives me a nice balance between a targeted audience and broad reach.

At the adset level you will also want to:
- Exclude people who already like your page
- Leave placements and delivery the same
- The option for “lowest cost” should be already selected. That is what you want.
Next you will go to the ad level.
Important: Ads for like campaigns should be very, very simple.
For your image, unless you already subscribe to a paid image service, use the stock image option in Facebook. That way you don’t have to pay for images. It’s a good cost saver and Facebook has a surprising amount of nice images.

Your image should:
- Grab people’s attention and be interesting
- Be related to your industry
- It doesn’t need to to be super specific for a like campaign
Next you will add your copy. Your copy shouldn’t be about you. It should be about why someone should like your page and what they will get out of it.
Your copy should be:
- Simple
- A single sentence
- WHY someone should like your page

Even the best marketers don’t always get it perfect the first time. It’s best to try several combinations of copy and photos to see what works best for your like campaign.
WARNING: You used to be able to ask people to like your page in your copy. You can’t do this anymore. It’s against the Facebook terms of service. Instead, use a simple sentence and rely on the like button in this campaign.
Building Your Facebook Group
Once you have people “like” your Facebook page then you go through those likes and invite people to your join group. All you have to do is click the “invite” button next to their name.

IMPORTANT: There is a limit to how many people you can invite to your group per day. It seems to be around 50 or so. I go through and invite people until Facebook won’t let me do it anymore. Make this part of your daily workflow, or have a virtual assistant do it, and your group will grow day after day.
Sometimes there are people on this list that you may not want to invite. They might leave a bunch of negative comments on your page or you just may not like them. You can choose to hide those suggestions and just skip over them. There is an x that comes up when you hover near an invite that lets you hide someone. That’s what I do and it works well.

How to Grow a Facebook Group Organically
If you already have a bunch of page likes on Facebook, then it’s easy to grow your Facebook group organically. You simply follow the steps above to link your Facebook page and group together and then invite people to your group. I normally see close to a 50% “take” rate when I invite people this way.
You can also earn page likes organically by posting regular content, but this is not a fast process anymore. If you are running ad campaigns from your page on a regular basis you will also automatically get likes to your page. You can then invite those people to your Facebook group.
Grow a Facebook Group – Video
Here’s an explainer video where I walk you through this process step-by-step and show examples of how it works.
If you want to learn more techniques like this to grow your Facebook ads knowledge and ability, go ahead and join my Facebook group here. I give out a ton of training in the group that you won’t see anywhere else.
The Bottom Line on Adding 1000 Members to Your Facebook Group Fast
I have found that this two step approach of page likes and inviting to the group works extremely well and has a lower cost per group member than advertising directly for people join a Facebook group.
In order to grow this method, once you get a like campaign that is working at a cost you like, you can add about 20% spend a day to your like campaigns in order to increase the amount of people liking your page.
Remember, you can only invite about 50 people a day to your group manually, so once you reach 50 to 60 likes a day that is a good place to cap your spend.
The great news is that if you are consistent with your like campaign and the invites then your group will grow quickly and be at 1,000 plus members before you know it and you will have an audience where you get great reach and can market to them at no cost going forward.
MARKUS
Hello Ben Heath, thank you for this great blog/site of yours. I managed to link my page to one of my groups, unfortunately I didnt manage to invite many members at once. My page has more than 30.000 likes. Thank u very much in advance
Ben Heath
Hi Markus, thanks a lot.
Facebook only lets you invite a maximum of 50 members or so per day – sometimes less. I would invite as many as you can each day and over time you will really start to see your group grow 🙂
Rana Anwar
Hi Ben,
I am Rana Anwar, from Egypt. thank you for all the tips and videos:) Welcoming people to the group is one of my favorite … people actually reply to the message. I have a page with 45K fans, yet when I tried to add people Facebook showed me a message that I can only invite people that I engaged with them in the past week.
Br,
Rana
Ben Heath
Hi Rana,
That’s interesting and not something I have seen before. You might find that those conditions change soon and you can invite more people. Facebook seems to change the rules regularly and is not consistent across accounts.
Mike and the mechanics
Thanks, you helped us a lot.
Regards,
Mike and the mechanics
Ben Heath
Glad to hear it Mike 🙂
Nate Dogg
When I try to add people from my linked page onto my group, there are no options for suggested people and when I type in a name on my page that name just disappears from the text field and nothing happens.
Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong or what is happening?
Thanks in advance
Ben Heath
Hi Nate, are you interacting in your Group as your Facebook Page? You need to do that instead of interacting as your personal profile.
Jamie
Hi Ben,
I’ve been trying to invite my Facebook page members to my Facebook group for the past year but it always comes up with the same message ‘There aren’t any fans of… to invite at this time.’. I have over 2000 page members and about 50 group members so very strange. I’ve seen a few people have this problem, but I can’t find anywhere how to sort it. Any ideas?
Ben Heath
Hi Jamie, that’s very odd. Have you tried adding some more Page members and seeing if you are able to invite the new ones?
Jan Wild
Any reason you can think of that the Invite function is greyed out on my Group page? I have about ten times more page followers and I would like to invite them to my group but FB doesn’t allow that function. I am interacting as my page 🙁
Ben Heath
Hi Jan, Facebook limits how many people you can invite in a short period of time. The feature should come back soon 🙂
Elie Maylaa
Hello Ben and thank you for your hard work , i started to invite people from my page that has about 30k to my group , but the invite button was working the first 3 days and after that its saying ” There aren’t any fans of… to invite at this time” maybe because i am inviting them manually one by one as well?
and when i invite them manually one by one , some of them are already members of my group but still say that i can invite them again , its weird :S
Ben Heath
Hi Elie, you are very welcome.
Facebook limits how much you can use this feature. That means they will remove it from time to time but you should get it back in a couple of days.
Kokui
Hi Ben,
Great post, super informative! Does the feature to invite people to your group still work if they like a post on your page as opposed to the actual page itself?
Ben Heath
Hi, provided people like your page, that shouldn’t make a difference 🙂
HP
Ben,
While setting up my target audience I noticed the broader my reach the less my estimated daily likes are. Should it not be the opposite?
Thanks
Ben Heath
Hi Henry, yes you are more likely to see the opposite. I wouldn’t pay much attention to the estimates, they are often inaccurate.
SONIA KAUR
i desire to increse the members in my private group pls advs
Ben Heath
Hi Sonia – just follow the steps in this article 🙂
Devon
I am actually in the process of trying to figure the limit. Facebook had their bulk invite feature integrated to top 500 members. I have done that a couple of times. I tried doing 300 solo and that blocked me, I tried doing 90 that also did not work, and I just tried 75 and was also notified I could not send anymore.
It might also be at a page level or a per group level. Will have to test and see.
Ben Heath
It also seems to fluctuate. Sometimes we’re able to invite a lot more than others.
Bruce Powell
Hi Ben, do you know if they have a daily cap on how many people you can remind about you group invitation? Going to Facebook jail is very unproductive and I have done several stints there. I am looking to avoid it at all costs. Thank You for your attention.
Ben Heath
Hi Bruce, Facebook put a limit on all that sort of stuff. I don’t know what that one is specifically I’m afraid. Facebook doesn’t divulge that sort of information.
Adarsh Mishra
Nice
Kay
This really helped! Linking my page and group was essential! TY!
Ben Heath
Awesome – glad to hear it 🙂
Richard
Hi, thanks for a very informative article.
I used this strategy on my new facebook group, and I noticed that while first few days were good, the pace of getting like slowed down quite a bit near the end of my 7-day ad campaign.
Does that happen often? I guess trying out different geological location or waiting a couple of days before restarting would be better?
Ben Heath
Thanks Richard. That can happen and it could just be that your audience is more active on the platform on certain days of the week. I’d give the campaign more time, you may see that happens every week or that it was a temporary blip. In the first 7 days Facebook will be doing a lot of experimentation in your campaign to try and work things out.
Ken
I have a new FB page and group linked. I used a 3rd party to create a likes campaign. Over the past couple days I have 500-1000 likes. Is there a proper amount of time between when someone first likes your page and when you invite them to your group? For example, is it a good practice to invite people new to the FB page right away to the group? Or should you give it some time? And if you give it some time how long do you recommend? I invited about 40-50 people today but haven’t seen any requests to join the group.
Ben Heath
Hi Ken, I’d invite them right away. Strike while the iron is hot.
Precious
I can’t invite friends from my Facebook into my new group again please can Facebook still allow me do that and within what time limit
Ben Heath
Facebook does limit the use of that tool. If you’ve been using a lot recently then it may have been temporarily removed in your account. It will come back though 🙂
Md.Rafiqul Islam
Have a nice day! Great post. Vast information gathered. Thanks a lot.
Ben Heath
Thank you very much – you too!
Wendy
How do you do a mass invite? I have linked my Facebook business page to my new group, there are just short of 20k people on that page. I would love to be able to invite about the 500 at a time!
Ben Heath
Facebook won’t let you I’m afraid Wendy.
Wendy
Is there a way to mass invite?
Futich Xhileo Gorgeox
Can you help me to increase my members in Group page?
Kyla Rodriguez
Hi. I made a group on Facebook and it lets me invite members but they don’t get added automatically if I changed it to a public group where they automatically get added? My people invite their friends but if their friends don’t join it doesn’t show in my numbers so I was just wondering if I changed it to public if it would automatically add them.
TJ
Hi Ben, thanks for posting! Are you still using this strategy and if so, could you share your current cost per like, cost to acquire a group member, and your sales conversion ratio once someone joins your group? Also, what are you selling in your group and what’s your price point? I currently run ads to a landing page for group member joins and am interested to see if the approach you highlight here could lower the cost to acquire a group member and the cost per sale once a member is in the group.
Thanks so much!
TJ