A Small Business Owner‘s Guide to Adding Admins for Your Facebook Group

As an entrepreneur managing an engaged Facebook community, I cannot stress enough the importance of having a team of admins to share the workload. Relying on just yourself to handle content moderation, member requests, and other management tasks around the clock can quickly lead to burnout.

With over 1.96 billion monthly active Facebook users, groups continue growing at a staggering rate. The average group size is over 200 members, based on Facebook‘s latest statistics. Hence, adding moderators and admins is crucial to divide the labor and maintain quality conversations as your online community expands.

Choose Wisely When Promoting Members to Admins

Handing the keys to your group over to someone carries a lot of responsibility. While it can be tempting to give out admin privileges quickly as a reward for loyal participation, I advise exercising caution. Here are a couple of tips from my experience:

  • Don‘t rush: Give new members time to demonstrate constructive behavior before granting advanced permissions. Monitor their conversations over weeks/months to determine suitability for the admin role.
  • Character over popularity: Look beyond how active or responsive a member is when considering admin candidates. Carefully evaluate empathy, judgment skills, leadership qualities, etc.

As an example, we once promoted a member to admin due to their frequent, knowledgeable contributions despite only being in the group for 2 weeks. However, they soon began aggressively deleting others‘ posts over benign disagreements. We realized too late that we prioritized the wrong traits.

The Permissions You Are Granting as the Admin

Before walking through the Facebook steps for configuring admin access, let‘s discuss what capabilities you are empowering group members with:

Admins vs. Moderators

There are two tiers for managing online communities on Facebook:

Admins Moderators
Full control over every group setting and feature Ability to approve/remove posts and members
Can promote other members to mod or admin Cannot change core group settings
Owner-level capabilities Mostly focuses on content moderation

In most cases, I recommend establishing a team of dedicated moderators first. Then selectively promote standout mods to the admin level based on proven experience.

Exact Capabilities Unlocked

Specifically, promoting someone to admin enables them to:

  • Approve or deny requests to join your group
  • Remove current members or other admins/mods
  • Edit your group‘s name, description, rules, etc.
  • Change posting permissions for members
  • Enable/disable commenting on posts
  • Fully delete the group itself

With such far-reaching powers, you can hopefully understand why I advocate caution when selecting your supporting admin team!

Next, let‘s walk through where to go within Facebook to actually grant someone these elevated permissions.

Step-by-Step Guide to Making Someone an Admin

The process for giving a member admin privileges is straightforward. Here is an overview of navigating to the right group management screens:

Facebook Group Admin Tutorial

Go to Your Group Page

Using Facebook on desktop or mobile:

  1. Click "Groups" on the left sidebar
  2. Select your group from the list

This takes you directly to your community page.

Access Member Management Tools

From your group‘s main page:

  1. Scroll down and select "Members" or "Manage"
  2. Open member management dashboard

This displays current admins and members.

Find the Member & Open Menu

Now on the member dashboard:

  1. Use search bar to find the member
  2. Click the 3-dot menu next to their name
  3. Select "Make Admin" from expanded menu

Confirm Admin Status

Final step:

  1. Check the confirmation pop-up
  2. Click "Confirm" or "Make Admin" button

And you‘re all set! As you can see, while promoting another member to help manage your Facebook group only takes seconds, putting in the work to properly vet candidates makes all the difference.

Closing Thoughts as a Fellow Entrepreneur

Drawing on my experience founding various small businesses and cultivating engaged online communities, I cannot emphasize enough surrounding yourself with a qualified, responsible admin team.

Relying solely on yourself will inevitably backfire as daily tasks like approving members and reviewing posted content becomes unmanageable for one person. I learned firsthand the hard way and nearly saw my first startup‘s early marketing momentum falter solely from Facebook group mismanagement exhaustion.

Hopefully this guide gives you a template for sustainably sharing the workload by adding Facebook group admins. Let me know if you have any other questions!

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