Living The Red Life - Facebook Groups in 2025: The Secret to Building a Thriving, High-Engagement Community

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Natosha Navarro and Anisa Crespo, co-founders of the Million Dollar Moms Society, join the podcast to share their expertise in building and monetizing Facebook groups. The duo met online and combined their skills—organic growth and paid advertising—to create a thriving community. Throughout the conversation, they outline a structured three-step system for setting up and automating Facebook groups to maximize engagement and monetization. They debunk the myth that Facebook groups are outdated, providing insights into their continued relevance across different industries. The discussion also covers organic growth strategies, leveraging ads, and advanced tactics like retargeting potential customers to increase conversions. Their insights offer a clear roadmap for entrepreneurs looking to build successful online communities.CHAPTERS02:36 - The Three-Step System for Facebook Groups04:12 - Why Facebook Groups Thrive in 202506:03 - The Psychology Behind Online Communities07:27 - How to Start a Facebook Group with No Followers09:04 - Strategies to Grow a Facebook Group Organically10:15 - Using Ads to Scale Facebook Groups11:18 - Converting Group Members into Customers12:09 - The Power of Social Proof in Communities13:45 - Building an Email and SMS List from Your Group15:21 - Advanced Tactics for MonetizationConnect with Anisa & Natosha:milliondollarmom.orgIG - milliondollarmomsocietyAnisa IG - keepingupwiththecresposNatasha IG - Natasha_marie_mdmsPODCAST - Magnetize and Monetize Your MarketConnect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

How do you see Facebook groups in 2025? I think that every platform has its place, right? Instagram, TikTok, you can make money on all of those things. But for our ideal clients, Facebook groups are really what has helped us grow in our business. And that's how we help other women as well. What people want typically is not necessarily your product. They want access to you, typically.

They want more of you. And so the more that they can be able to connect with you and talk to you and get advice from you and think that that is, in the long run, going to serve people so much more in a world where we're all really disconnected. My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in wonderland and change your life. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today we're going to dive into the world of Facebook groups, building communities and monetizing them and know before

you start thinking Facebook groups are dead they're absolutely not. They're life-kicking and these guys are here to prove it. They run the Million Dollar Moms Society and they help moms build businesses, mostly through communities, Facebook groups, but I've been told it's not just for moms, so don't worry, everyone can build a Facebook group. Guys, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having us, we appreciate it. So, if people don't know who you are,

do you wanna just start off with an intro and how you got into building groups and communities? Yeah, absolutely. I'm Natasha Navarro, the co-founder of Million Dollar Moms Society. We actually met, this is my beautiful partner, Enes Icrespo, and we only met online about eight months ago, which is kind of crazy. But we saw each other doing, you know, things, big things, and decided we wanted to come over and do a collaboration over competition.

And she was starting a Facebook group that grew very rapidly and doing it all organically and I had the skill set of ads so we wanted to bring that together and grow a group. Cool. Well, both of you welcome. Excited to have you here. I wanted to do this and talk about Facebook groups, communities because my background, most of you probably don't know either, my fitness business that I grew in my 20s, we grew our Facebook groups

about $65,000. We were making tens of thousands of dollars a month just from that group. So I've seen firsthand, like almost 10 years ago now, the power of Facebook groups, and they just keep getting better, right? And I wanted to break down to the members, which we're going to do, how you're adding thousands of new people into the group, how you're monetizing and obviously making money, building a community, and how your clients are doing the same. So let's jump into it. Let's give a broad overview. What is the system behind the groups? Yeah, so we really have a three-step system, which we also do a lot in our 3-day group, but it's all about creating the system inside a Facebook group, so making sure it's set up strategically. That's the biggest thing is every Facebook group is not created equally.

And that's like the headline, the SEO, how it's searchable. Everything, your membership questions, your SEO searches, your branding, everything, making sure that your description is SEO friendly. So making sure you're drawing in the right client. And then going and automating it. That's where a lot of people miss the mark, I think, is making it so much harder on themselves because they have no way to create automation. And we do that by having a welcome video right when someone comes in, they give some calls to action

and calls out your ideal person right away. We have an automated DM that goes out. We have an automated email that delivers a freebie to them. And then the third thing is going to be making sure that you're able to monetize it with that automation and actually giving them things to buy from every single level of your offer suite. Great. And let's just talk about this upfront. Like I kind of joked, but like they've been around a long time now and at least in the marketing world, right? Where stuff comes and goes every year. So are they dead? Are they doing better now, worse now, average? Like how do you see Facebook groups in 2025? Yeah, I mean, I think especially for women,

they really thrive inside of communities. And that's why we're really passionate about Facebook groups. I think that every platform has its place, right? Instagram, TikTok, you can make money on all of those things. But for our ideal clients, Facebook groups are really what has helped us grow in our business. And that's how we help other women as well. Yeah, I can see that. So my fitness business back then was actually female. I was teaching females how to lose weight and stuff.

So I definitely could see different demographics, not just gender, but different activities and stuff. A good example is I haven't used groups recently, myself, much, like for personal use, but I just got this like special triathlon bike that you can bike indoors on and there's like massive hundred thousand person Facebook groups and I joined a couple and it's like people are in there all day every day and it really kind of reminded me of like, wow, they're really like thriving in these almost sub demographics and certain demographics and groups.

So what are the best sort of businesses or people are listening saying, could a group be good for me? How'd you talk someone through that? Well, we joke a lot for some weird reason this year, I had this vision that I'm gonna learn how to make sourdough bread, I do not bake, bake okay but I looked and did a quick search it's not easy to make either I looked at it one time like I'm just gonna buy my bread yeah like I am NOT like Susie Holmigrad also this was like a big

dream for me and I went online and I was like looking for groups there's a group with 800,000 members a sourdough people that just go in there and they monetized it it's brilliant so if you think about any niche that's in the market, there's almost no niche that will work. Like we work with people that are in MLMs, that are affiliate marketers, that have their own thing, that have brick and mortars, as well as online businesses. We have a client with a petting zoo. And there's a group. There's a niche for it. There's a niche. So there's almost nothing that we've come across thus far where you can't create a community of people group for him. There's a niche for him. There's a niche. So there's almost nothing that we've come across thus far where you can't create a community of people.

And this also allows you to kind of control the algorithm a little, because you have people that want to be in there and hear what you have to say. Well, and I always come, you know, I think I became good at marketing because I'm good at psychology. And I always come back to psychology that, you know, the whole tribes community thing is not going to change.

It's been alive since cavemen exists, right? And tribes. So it's maybe the place where they'll hang out changes a little, but Facebook groups are still one of those places, Reddit forums, those sort of things. So yeah, I can definitely see that. And let's talk now.

So if someone doesn't have a group, they're listening, they're interested in starting a group, do they, there's a couple of questions. How do they start? And also, do they need like a massive following or big buyers list to start? Because I do speak to a lot of members and they're like, well Rudy, I don't really have many customers,

so will it get traction? Will it be embarrassing if I have 200 people? Can we talk about that? Yeah, we actually hear this question all the time from potential clients. They're like, I don't have 10,000 followers. I don't have, you know, and the beauty of it is you don't need to.

Sure. You, that's what you're creating inside of the group. You're creating the space where people that want to be there can come there. So now they're not just following you for your whole entire life. You're offering them something very specific that's of interest to them or there's, you know, you're solving a problem for

them. So they come to your group and that is where the following gets created. And we're teaching you how to organically go out and find those people. So even if you don't have a following of anyone, let's say you have zero followers, we're going gonna show you how to go inside of other people's groups really strategically and bring them into your group. And the exact ideal avatared person that you wanna have, that's gonna be somebody who is obsessed with you and wants to buy everything that you have to offer. Yeah, well let's double down on that.

Give me a couple of tactics on how do you grow the group. Right, so someone's listening, they sell skincare products, they go, okay maybe I could make a group around beauty and anti-aging, right? Okay, so I email it to my list, I guess. What else do I do to start growing the group? So, I mean, strategically, you can just go on,

there's a whole section that's created group. And like we said, you want to make sure that it's intentional with how you have it set up. Once you have it set up, what we're teaching you is how to go into other people's groups. So as, you know, think outside the box a little bit. Someone with skincare, you don't want to go into a skincare group because there's people already in there probably doing what exactly what you're doing.

But maybe you go into a mom's group, a mom's group or they're busy moms. So similar like the lookalike audiences. Like complementary but not competitive. And you're going to go in there and you're going to create engagement posts. Nothing that's salesy, but something that says something like, here, who here is a busy mom who doesn't have time to do her makeup in the morning?

A post just like that. And all of a sudden, these women start posting me, me, me, and then you're saying, well, actually I have the perfect group that you might enjoy where I give free tips and tricks on how to do a five minute makeup in the morning for busy moms. And then you invite them into the group.

And so now you start growing it strategically with people who are your exact person that you're looking for, but you didn't have to do it in the salesy way. And it's people who are gonna get valued from what you have to offer. Good, so number one, like I mentioned, you can obviously promote it to your current list

and socials. Number two, you can go into similar groups and promote it there through content driven marketing, I would call it, right? Where you're adding value first, building trust, authority, and then a call to action to get more of what you just sampled maybe to go there. Number three, can you run ads to Grow Group? That's what we do.

The second. So we did the first 5,000 of our members, we did organically. And then we were like, okay, we want to even automate that more. So we started doing ads and we targeted exactly who we're trying to get to. So we know exactly like our person's name is Jessica, she's 42, she's a mom. We know where her interests are. So every ad that we have is targeted just to her. We're speaking to her.

Are you running an ad like, hey, join our community and group or, hey, get this free download PDF inside the group? We've done it both ways. But on Facebook, there's actually a place inside the group. We've done it both ways, but on Facebook, there's actually a place called Ad Center where you can run it directly to the group. So now it didn't. It didn't move that to you.

Yeah, it's new and honest. I had to do it through a bridge page because it actually stopped you. It's so nice now. It's wonderful. And not everyone has access, which we found through a lot of our clients that we have workarounds.

But yeah, we actually can drive people right into the group and it helps grow it a lot faster. And you're driving them to the group, sorry, just to confirm, just for a community or for a free download or something inside? Once they come in, there's a membership question. So we're asking them for their email address and exchange because ultimately what we're actually teaching people to do is to build an email list. Like we found very quickly TikTok can go away, right? Instagram can go away, Facebook can go away.

So we want them to learn how to create a... And nowadays SMS too, I always teach email and SMS back when I was doing this eight years ago, whatever. There was a system that was super, you know, like secret back then where they joined the group and you had the email and it was apt and built the list. And now I imagine you can do that for SMS too maybe ask their phone number, go to the SMS list. We've tested it both ways where we'll ask for both the email and the phone number and everything goes

into our CRM and we're able to get them both ways, target both ways. But yeah, so we definitely offer something and we encourage you to have something to offer. And you say that in the ad, hey, join this group and get a free thing or do you just say, hey, join this group to learn, blah, blah, blah. We have two different ads that we run. Honestly, they're both really effective. Good. So that's ads. And one tip on this, we were talking about earlier back in the day when I was doing it, one of my like ninja hacks was anyone that went to my cart page, which is like your warmest people, most people don't

know you get like a 90% abandonment rate on the cart page. So 90% of your buyers don't actually buy. I would run retargeting ads to those people to get them in my group because I had all my members there. So they come in this fitness group with 50, 60,000 people, and we had like 100 posts a day. So a very active group. And out of those 100 posts, probably two to three were like transformation before and after photos. So it's like it's the best marketing in the world. Like literally, like you can't beat it.

You come in this community of 100 people posting a day, and three or four posted before and afters. And some of them were like 40-pound weight loss, like real crazy, and it was just so great. So what do you mean about like, you know, like that sort of more advanced tactic, like getting your best potential customers in there, you see a big lift in conversions and everything doing that? We have our current, because actually the way we get most of our 99% of our clients come from our Facebook group. So they're already in the group and then they're also in our

private groups when they become private clients. And they're in there singing our praises all the time, which is exactly what you want. Well, yeah, because they become like ambassadors. So I had a few people, I knew their personal names out of a hundred thousand members because they're like running the group for me with one staff member helping and it's pretty incredible yeah. Yeah we're really excited. Everybody that comes into our group even though we're you know rapidly growing at thousands a month we still take the time to get to know the people that are coming in and talk to them and they'll say wow we feel like you actually see us

it doesn't feel like we're just a number in another group and this is a place where they want to be engaged and they want to you know buy ultimately. So let's talk about that. We talked about growing the group. How do we keep the group engaged? Because a lot join and never do anything in there, right? And the percent I'm sure from average group is like 90% probably never do anything, right? I'm sure yours is way higher, but how do you get it way higher? We offer a VIP membership inside of our group.

So certain people are allowed to post on the main wall. They can promote their business and that's how it really stays engaged. Do they pay for that? That's a paid membership. That's the first way we monetized our group. So the people who are paying the VIP membership they can post on the wall, promote to the group and then all of the members who are not paid members will comment, so now they're promoting their business. So it's really, really highly engaged. Back in the day again, I'm dating myself a lot in this episode, people would go live

in the group to drive engagement. Still a good thing? We allow them to go live once per week, post once per day. However, Facebook is really not big on live anymore. It's not really effective. They really like reels, the solid color background posts. Those are the viral things. Are you guys doing a lot of videos in the group?

No, we have everything automated. Oh, so you don't like, because back in the day when it was really big and live has got big, it's like we were going live once a week and doing all this engagement. Yeah, we'll go live if we're like promoting something or if we're promoting another member, like highlighting a spotlight VIP member to share their business with the community. Other than that, we never go live. We have like our automated posts that go out the same thing goes out every Monday, every

Tuesday, every Wednesday. So you're pretty hands off. It's very useful. It's just like you're creating content, uploading it. Yeah. Okay, great. What other engagement tips do you have? So obviously you have your members that can pay and post more. How do you get people active that maybe are not engaging or dropping off or quote unquote, like a dead member

where they're not doing anything? I think sometimes just creating the engagement posts that are really simple. We're all very busy. We're thinking about a million things a day. So something to stop the scroll, what'd you have for dinner last night? People know what they had for dinner last night.

They can reply, I had steak and potatoes, like whatever. And that really keeps the engagement high as well. And then you can mix in your sales poses and other things. So a lot of stuff that spurs comments, right? People love to talk about themselves, right? So anytime you give people an opportunity, then you actually care about what they have to say. Either if that's them promoting themselves, or you want to know about their kids or about their family or about what their interests are, people want the opportunity to speak. They want that opportunity to be heard. So the more you can do that makes it less about you and more about your audience and your client, the higher engagement you're going to get. Good. Okay, last phase of your system, right? And that, you know, what I see is the most logical is that you

grow in the group, keeping it engaged, and then obviously we will have to pay our bills at the end of the month, right? And monetize. So how do you push, you know, in an ethical way, in a great way to not hurt the community, how do you sell and make money from the group? Our first way right off the bat that we teach our clients is having that welcome video. It's like a two- minute video that tells them that they get tagged in it right away with our automation series. And most people when they get tagged with something tend to want to watch it. So it's like fast and punchy.

It tells them who we are, what they have to, you know, what we have to offer, but it gives them very specific calls to action. It's like, if you are the person that wants to promote your business inside of this group, comment VIP. If you're the person who wants to grow your own Facebook group, comment this. If you want this person who wants to grow your own Facebook group, comment this. If you want this, comment this.

And we get people commenting all the time. So right away, people are coming into our group and raising their hand saying, hey, I'm interested in what you had to offer. And that's pretty much how we're generating our leads. Yeah, so it wasn't big back when I was doing it, but I know more like in the last few years, it's become really big.

So we've helped some clients with it, is also taking people to the DMs. Yeah. Right? So you're doing that when they come in and... That's another thing that's automated. They get a welcome DM. Crazy. Back in my day, everything was manual. You had to tag everyone one by one. I like that you make it sound like you're 80 years old. Yeah, I know. It's just what it feels like. It's like everything's automated now.

And they're getting that email also. Within seconds, they're getting tagged in the video, they're getting a DM, they're getting an email with the offer. It's like automated Facebook. It's just so nice. And so you're saying that you were sorry, you were saying so the automation tags them and then DM sends them an automated message and Facebook allows that? Is this built in now? Yeah.

Oh gosh. Wow. Crazy. So yeah, it's really cool how you not only do this, but pretty much automate the whole thing. Because yeah, but it was definitely like super manual back in the day. It's crazy how they made it. So they've really, Facebook has facilitated it for sales.

Absolutely. Right, for the business owner now. That's why, I mean, there's billions of people on Facebook. So for anyone, you know, talking about Facebook, being dead and cruise being dead, I think that there's so much opportunity that's still there. And a lot of times people are kind of like waffling between multiple different platforms. But what we decided is that we were going to get really good at one.

And so that's why we focused on where we felt we could create the most community and the people who are going to get the most value in the shortest period of time. And for us, and I think a lot of other businesses, groups, is the way to do that. Sure. So within that, you're DMing them or emailing them, or getting them to reach out, and then you and your clients are upselling to high ticket. What if there's an e-commerce person listening, selling a $40 skincare product? I think that this system does really well

with low ticket offers, and that are more like evergreen models. Of course, we have our system built up to where it leads to the high ticket, but even if you are somebody who's just going to have that $40 offer or $40 product or whatever it is that you're selling over and over again, that almost actually makes it even easier,

because you know exactly who you're targeting, you know exactly what you're selling every single time, and you can gear all of your messaging towards that. With us, we're kind of gearing our messaging towards people at different levels as they come in, like, are you this person, are you this person, are you this person, because we have something for you at every phase. So let's just to wrap this whole strategy part up,

a few examples. So I'm going to give you a business, tell me what sort of group you'd create around it, okay? So skincare. So with the skincare, I mean, you would want to have something probably that's very niche down, either that's about makeup you'd create around it, okay? So skincare. So with the skincare, I mean, you would wanna have something probably that's very niche down, either that's about makeup or that's about a really specific type of beauty product

or line that you wanted to create. Maybe it's, like I said, the busy mom who only has five minutes to do her makeup in the morning. And so you're creating like tips and tricks on how to get that done and what your makeup that you would suggest that's gonna be the highest quality and give you the best coverage for that short period of time. Okay, next one. An author, a person that helps people write best-selling books.

We actually have a group like this. So for that type of group, I would make sure that you would pick a niche type of writer, someone who's like maybe into the romance novels or into, you know, somebody who's into a very specific genre of writing. You want to go into groups that are going to be targeted towards creative people. People that think outside the box, who have like artists and that are passionate and are looking to put all of their creative juices on paper and turn that into a book and then give away tips and tricks on how to write faster,

how to potentially even use, you know, automations and AIs to brainstorm, how to create efficiencies inside of this book, how to, you know, set up brainstorming sessions, like a three-day event or it's like a brainstorming session that you can do inside of the group. Good. Last one.

Let's go fitness. They teach high protein recipes. Oh my gosh. The fitness is so easy, as you even said. I mean, we've done this even with like an MLM that we had done where we brought them in and again, it was about bringing in the entire community to do before and afters. Lots of tips and tricks, but definitely the before and afters are huge. And if it was like hyper, you know, if their big product was they had a recipe

cookbooks and they sold high protein products around it, would the would the group be called high protein recipes or like how would you position it? As far as like SEO, we try to tell you that come up with your first, the first two or three names, which should be something branded, something that's like QC branded, that's towards drawing in your, like whatever you wanna stick with.

But after that, everything should be SEO. So if you're very focused on high protein, that better be in your name. It's like high protein diets, making sure like, and every single word that you need to use, one of our secrets is that we tell everyone to go to the search bar and type in words that you think your client might type in

when they're looking for your type of business and see what other groups are out there and what words they're using. The ones that are ranked the highest and coming up the most, they probably are coming up for a reason, they probably already have words in there that Facebook is pushing their stuff because they're like, oh, you said you wanted an egg, you know, white, an egg white protein breakfast. And they're typing that in exactly. And that's coming up. So

really paying attention to what other people are saying inside of their names as well and to get ideas for you. Good. So last question on groups. And I want to ask you some more entrepreneurial stuff quickly. So one of my friends started a business called school, right? And I people always that you know, like I see schools taking off a lot, especially in our community Obviously most people sit on Facebook. Do you how do you see those two intertwined? You think school will take over like what's your thoughts on that? I like school actually used a lot I think it's a really amazing way to you know

Build a community and to be able to like even create a little competition where you're getting like, you know, certain things. But I still feel like groups create the most opportunity for people to be able to connect on a one-on-one basis between having the DMs and being able to go live and having these different things. Inside of school, sometimes where the disconnect is happening is you're having, the way some people have it set up is you're having to do certain things to get access to certain problems. I see schools go for more paid models. You want 500 people at $50 a month, but Facebook, everyone already has it. There's always way less friction when everyone has it. Like I said, we love school, but I think for us, like that is where we have found our community, the women that we want to attract are living on naturally every single day.

Like they're just going on there when their kids are napping and it's just happening. So coming to that then, so under 30, like if your target demo is under 30, will Facebook groups not work as well? Cause most under 30 don't have, you know, don't use it as much as like over 30? I don't think so.

I think that there's still a space for people. A lot of times every business that you see will still say, check out our Facebook, you know, check out Instagram. I do think obviously Instagram is a little more popular, but it's really hard to create a community. Yeah, it's weird. Like my age, I'm like the cutoff. Like I'm still pretty much on Facebook a lot.

But like anyone younger than me. It's like Weird lights that 30 yeah, it can I mean you definitely can do it But what I would suggest doing if you are someone under 30 who's looking to do that is have your following on Instagram But then drive people into a group in order to connect with them because that way there They still are looking for a space to connect to you. What people want is- Well, Instagram started communities too a little. I saw that, but it's still not- Are you testing that? Yeah.

I feel like it's still not the same. It's still not at the same level. And what people want typically is not necessarily your product, they want access to you. Typically. They want more of you. And so the more that they can be able to connect with you and talk to you and get advice from you and pick your brain, I think that that is in the long run going to serve people so much more in a world where we're all really disconnected.

Great. So last couple of quick questions, just more you as entrepreneurs. More rapid fire. I'd love to hear your biggest win, biggest thing you're proud of in business. You want to go? Okay. Right now our biggest win is that we have built this community up in a very short period of time and that we hit six figures within six months of launching our business. This year we're on track for our first million dollar year, which we're super excited about.

And honestly, being on the Legacy Makers and doing things like this, consider we only launched six months ago. We have done a lot in a very little amount of time with two kids under mine are two and three and hers are four year old twins. Like we've made a lot happen. Great, great. And then the flip side of that, I always say entrepreneurship seems glamorous, but there's a lot of BS behind the scenes. What big is, you know, heartache, failure, challenge you've had to face?

Yeah, I mean, I think number one is always mindset, right? Like waking up every day, making sure that you're in this right state of mind because no matter how successful you are, life is going to happen around you, bad things are going to happen. It's how you overcome those things and being resilient. For us, we were doing so many things before we came together and we decided we're not going to chase two rabbits and catch neither one of them. Let's dump everything, create something amazing and build an empire.

And that's what we did. Yeah. And you can always, you know, like it's smart. Like I always teach start niche, become well known for that. And you can expand. Like I became famous for like Facebook ads and marketing and funnels and then more broader business now, branding, socials, TV, everything. So, but I couldn't have jumped to those higher things first.

You have to come like a master. One thing in the group is we are like multi passionate entrepreneurs between the two of us. We have a million things that we are skilled at and love doing, but we even already we're starting to expand. Yeah. Good, good. Last question then, if people want to learn more,

maybe come to one of your events where you teach these things or join one of your groups to see how do they find you? You can go to milliondollarmom.org. That's our website. It has a lot of stuff. Moms. It is not just for moms. We love to help all women build their dreams.

You can find us on socials at milliondollarmomsociety. You can find Anissa at Keeping Up With the Crespo's on Instagram or her name, Anissa Crespo, on her Facebook. I'm Natasha Marie on Facebook or Natasha underscore Maria MDMS. And yeah, I mean, pretty much everything is Million Dollar Mom Society. You can search and find that.

And we don't discriminate against the fellas either. No, follow a lot of tactics today, love it. It's what this show's all about, breaking down the strategies. So hopefully it helped and reminded people groups of still alive and kicking and doing well in 2025. So great stuff. Thank you so much for having us.

Thank you. Of course. We appreciate you. All right guys, keep living the red life and I'll see you soon. Thank you. Thank you.