Group Funnels Review – Initial Impressions

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Hey, what’s up? It’s Sam Frost here from reviewsboss.com. In this really short video, I’m going to give you my initial impressions of Group Funnels. So this isn’t a full in depth review, that’s going to be coming soon, but I have been using Group Funnels for a couple of weeks now and I just want to, I guess, share a few thoughts about what I think of the product so far. So basically what Group Funnels does is it makes the management of a Facebook groups easier from the perspective of collecting information. So if you’ve worked with Facebook groups before and if you’re interested in Group Funnels, you probably already have a Facebook group. You’ll know that when people join your group, there’s a few different settings you can have and one of those settings is that you can basically set questions for membership. So you can say, specify up to three questions and people have to respond to those questions, and depending on their responses, you can approve or disapprove their request.

Most Facebook groups, especially business or sort of, yeah, more specialist ones don’t just allow anyone to join. You can make a group to just allow anyone to join it when they click the join button, but generally that’s not a good idea because you’ll get a lot of spam requests. So basically where Group Funnels sort of comes from as a lot of people will run groups, I guess half as an education resource and half as a lead generation resource. So for example, I run a group, a digital marketing for Kiwi businesses, so it’s a digital marketing group specifically for New Zealand based businesses. It’s got only a few hundred members in it, but a great little community in there. When people join, I ask them a few questions basically, are you going to accept the rules of the group? What is your business? So I can confirm that they actually have a business. Then the other question I ask is do you want to get our newsletter and if so, what’s your email address? That’s an optional question, but if people do want to join the newsletter list, they can fill out their email address and click submit and I’ll get that response and I can add that to my autoresponder.

There’s a massive problem here and that’s when you approve someone’s request in Facebook groups. So, you open up your group and there’s a moderation queue of people who are looking to join, you can review all those answers and you can filter on people who answered and people who didn’t and so on and so forth. But when you click approve the request, what happens? Basically that person is approved into your group and their answer’s disappear forever. So if you didn’t catch their answer at the time, if you didn’t grab their email address at the time, if that’s what you’re looking to do, or didn’t grab the name of their business or whatever information you’re trying to collect, that’s it. You can’t get it again without just reaching out to them really and asking them directly.

So what’s the solution? Well, the solution or one solution is Group Funnels. So basically what Group Funnels allows you to do is set up a Google Sheet, so you use Google Sheets, a free product. Most of us are probably familiar with it. You add a basic template so each column becomes a specific field and then when you ask questions, you set up your Group Funnels’ system using a Chrome extension and plug in your group, Group Funnels sheet and do a few little things on the back end. Basically when you click to approve members, either individually or generally, you’ll be doing it as a bulk approval process. So you filter for every unanswered questions and you then hit approve for those ones. What happens is those people’s details are pushed the Group Funnels. Then from there you can push those people’s details to the specific sheet for that group. So if you run multiple groups, you’ll have multiple different sheets.

Yeah, basically that’s all Group Funnels really does. It just allows you to capture that information at the time of approval and that’s really useful if you’re trying to gather things like email addresses, for example. So Group Funnels is proving pretty popular with people who run those coaching Facebook groups or how to run Facebook ads or SEO agency secrets or the kind of thing. Probably if you’re watching this video, you know exactly the conduct group that’s popular with Group Funnels.

I’m doing things a little bit differently. Apart from my digital marketing group, all the other groups I use it for, like entertainment groups around, so I have the world’s largest Futurama fan group for example. One of the questions when you join that group is, do you want to receive our newsletter? I get people, not huge numbers, but decent numbers saying, “Yes, I’d like to receive it.” Well, I can grab their email details and I’ve got evidence then as well and time, date, name, written proof that they wanted to receive those emails. So if I ever had any issues with spam requests, I can go back to that group sheet and say, “Well, actually, look, here you go, you did request that content. So yeah, basically, that’s what Group Funnels does.

My initial impressions so far that it’s pretty functional product. It’s not exactly got the greatest interface have ever used. I mean it’s definitely a bit sort of pieced together. The interface could be better. It could have much, much better instructions for set up. But the actual process works. I mean, it would be nice if it integrated directly into autoresponders like MailChimp or AWeber or whatever you use, but I suspect that would require a lot of development work. I mean, actually putting everything into Google Sheets is pretty nice. I wish it would just push things automatically to a Google Sheet. Instead you have to go and approve your queue in Group Funnels, on the Facebook group membership panel and then you go into the Group Funnels’ Chrome extension, so you have to be using Chrome. I don’t think it supports any other browser. Then from there you push to the relevant sheets.

So for Group A, when you submit from Group Funnels’ extension that pushes everything to the relevant shape of a Group A. Then you can do things like filter out duplicates or filter people who didn’t respond to the questions you wanted. So you can grab all those email addresses and upload them into your autoresponder or do whatever you want with the data. But yeah, initial impressions of Group Funnels, it does work quite well. The pricing seems pretty reasonable for what it is. I guess it all comes down to how seriously you’re taking your groups. If you’re growing a very small niche group, you’re the only one doing approvals. You don’t get a lot of requests. It’s probably just easier to manually copy and paste the responses to each question and it’ll save you a bit of money.

But if you are doing a higher volume of approvals, maybe you’re having to approve probably 20, 30 plus people a day into any given group, it will save you quite a lot of time. Just the fact that it does it all for you, apart from having to push the data from Group Funnels to the sheet, that is really nice. I mean, the other thing I’ve found as well that is quite cool about it is Facebook groups doesn’t debug out quite badly when you try and bulk approved people into a group, so my Futurama fan group is a great example of this. I get a lot of membership request every day. If I, without Group Funnels, if I select [inaudible 00:06:43] answer to the membership questions and click approval, generally I have to sit there and keep clicking over and over again and only a small number are approved at any given time and it can be quite laggy and buggy and sometimes you have to manually approve a few and then refresh the page and it’s just a bit frustrating. With Group Funnels that actually worked really, really nicely. You just click approval and it sort of sequentially goes through and does each one and it does work well.

So what I’m basically saying at the moment is Group Funnels seems pretty good. I think the value of it will really come down to how aggressively you are trying to grow and develop groups and what you want to collect the data for. If you’re just collecting membership request information and you don’t actually have any commercial value in that, well don’t bother because it’s just a waste of time, but if you are looking to collect email addresses or want to collect business names for example, so you can follow up and do some manual outreach, might well be worth it.

I’m going to do a more in depth review of Group Funnels where I screen capture and show you through the product and show you how it all works and cover pros and cons and more detail. But for now, my initial review of Group Funnels is quite good. Like I said, I don’t love the interface. I think there’s ways it could be improved, but it doesn’t do the job it says it’s going to do and that to me is an important thing. So yeah, do stay tuned for my full review of Group Funnels. Or otherwise do check out the product. In the meantime, I’ll leave a link in the video description. Thanks.