How Sneak built a 43,000-strong Facebook community

In the first hour of a Sneak product drop, our Facebook community can account for up to 50% of the day's revenue.

That's what six years of building one of the most engaged brand communities in the energy drink space looks like. We now have 43,000 members who share and champion the Sneak brand, with very little input from our team.

👋 I'm Lauren Carroll, Head of Community at Sneak Energy. I've been with the business since it launched in 2018 and have seen us grow from a fledgling DTC challenger to a genuine hybrid retail brand.

Community has been at the heart of Sneak from the beginning. In this article I'll walk you through exactly how we built our Facebook community, and help you work out whether it's the right path for your brand.

Who is Sneak Energy?

Sneak Energy is a UK-based energy drink brand that launched in 2018. We make sugar-free energy drink powders and cans, electrolyte hydration formulas, focus blends, and high-protein meal replacement shakes.

The products come as powders that you mix yourself, with 25+ flavours and loads of shakers to choose from. Those shakers have become a collectible in their own right, with customers trading, swapping, and showing off their collections online. That collector culture is what made community such a natural fit for us from the very beginning.

Why Sneak started a Facebook community

We founded the Sneak Facebook group back in 2020. At the time, our options for building a space we could moderate ourselves were quite limited (this was before the days of Instagram Broadcast Channels and WhatsApp Communities). But that didn't matter, because there was already a growing movement happening in our brand's Facebook comment sections.

We noticed customers sharing their Sneak collections, arranging shaker swaps, and speculating about future drops. It felt genuinely organic, and we realised there was a real opportunity to own that engagement, foster it, and encourage it. It also gave us the opportunity to give our die-hard customers something back in return: their own exclusive space with real perks attached.

Is a Facebook community right for your brand?

Facebook might not feel like the obvious choice in 2026, but don't write it off. With over three billion monthly active users, it remains one of the biggest gathering places on the internet, and its group functionality is still one of the best tools available for building a moderated brand community. For us, it's never stopped being the right home for our audience.

That said, the platform is only part of the equation. The more important question is whether a Facebook community is right for your brand at all.

For Sneak, a few things made it an obvious fit. A lot of our brand appeal has always been built around exclusivity and being in the know, so a private Facebook group felt most in keeping with that attitude. Our customers weren't casual consumers; they were enthusiasts with a collectors mindset, and a closed community fed into that naturally.

Before you start, ask yourself:

• Are your customers already talking about your brand online without any prompting?
• Does your brand have a natural sense of exclusivity or belonging that a community could amplify?
• Do you have something genuinely valuable to offer members — early access, exclusive products, a say in brand decisions?
• Do you have the resources to maintain and moderate it properly?

If the answer to most of those is yes, a Facebook community is worth exploring. If you're starting from scratch with no organic engagement and nothing exclusive to offer, it's going to be a harder road.

How to build a thriving Facebook community for your brand

If you think Facebook is the right community space for your brand, here are some steps I recommend taking to kick things off. 

Step 1: Spot the community that's already there

The best brand communities start from something that's already happening organically.

As I mentioned, before we launched the Sneak group, our customers were already gathering in our comment sections.

So before you set anything up, look at where your customers are already showing up. Are they tagging you in posts? Leaving detailed comments? Creating content around your products unprompted? That organic energy is your starting point.

Step 2: Choose whether to go public or keep it private 

Once you've decided a Facebook community is right for your brand, you need to decide whether to go private or public.

For Sneak, private was the obvious choice. It feeds into the exclusivity of the brand and gives members a sense that they're part of something not everyone has access to.

The downside is that so much of our most exciting brand activity happens behind closed doors. We put a lot of effort into our community activations and sometimes I do wish they could travel further than just the group itself.

A public group is more discoverable and lets your best content reach a wider audience. But it's harder to create a genuine sense of belonging when anyone can walk in.

Step 3: Give people a reason to join

You need to give people a reason to join your community. For Sneak, the main reason is early access.

Each month we run a limited edition drop with new flavours and associated merch. The biggest sell of the community is that members get in first, so they have a better chance of securing limited items before they sell out. 

Beyond early access, we've run initiatives like the Vault Vote—giving members the chance to vote on a previously discontinued flavour to come back permanently—and community-only flavour and merch drops.

Step 4: Set your rules and moderation approach

Keep your rules simple and your moderation light. We have three rules:

• Keep things friendly: We think this is pretty self-explanatory, and is relatively easy to enforce.
• Take order queries to the CS team: Sensitive information shouldn't be shared in a public forum, and one person raising an issue can quickly snowball if other members are experiencing similar issues. Nothing gets resolved in a Facebook group, it needs to go to customer service.
• Keep buy, sell, and swap posts to the dedicated thread: This avoids the group becoming a catalogue of sales posts.

Beyond that, we're deliberately flexible, including when it comes to negative feedback. We allow it because it gives us valuable opportunities to learn from our customers and to show we're taking what they say seriously. We just make sure it doesn't overspill and become toxic. We don't want an echo chamber.

We also have a team of excellent community moderators engaging with members daily and flagging anything that needs a response from the brand.

Step 5: Drive your early membership

Getting your first few thousand members is the hardest part. For us, dedicated social posts and email campaigns got us to our first 10,000–15,000 members. After that, growth became more passive.

Now the community is featured in email flows to customers who place repeat orders. It's pinned in our social bios for anyone exploring the brand more deeply. And whenever we do a limited edition launch, joining the community is how you get early access.

Step 6: Keep members coming back

Getting people to join is one thing. Keeping them engaged is another.

The key for us is making sure there's always something worth coming back for. That means consistent exclusive drops, community initiatives that give members a genuine stake in the brand, and moderators who are in there every day making members feel seen and heard.

We've had a dedicated community department for six years now. The shift that made the biggest difference was thinking community-first rather than trying to retrofit that mindset into a brand already geared towards acquisition. The community is simultaneously a brand and retention function which is a necessity, not a luxury.

Step 7: Measure your ROI

Attribution is notoriously difficult in the community, and Meta isn't particularly forthcoming with customer data. But by creating an early access window exclusively for community members at the start of each limited edition launch, we can directly attribute how much of that day's revenue came from the group.

For many launches, community members account for as much as 50% of the day's revenue in that first hour alone.

Step 8: Let it take on a life of its own

Our members have started arranging their own meetups without any involvement from us. They gather for activities, head for drinks, and form friendships that exist completely independently of the group. Sneak brought them together, but it wasn't the only reason they stayed.

Members make Sneak part of their identity. There are dozens of Sneak tattoos out there. We've received wedding invites from members. People spot strangers with a Sneak shaker or hoodie out in the real world and go to strike up a conversation.

To me, that's one of the biggest and best testimonials we could ever receive as a brand community. 

What other channels are worth exploring for community building?

Facebook isn't the only place our community lives. We also run a Discord server, which allows for a completely different kind of activation.

In the past we've done treasure hunts, choose-your-own-adventure stories, created a virtual arcade, and staged a research malfunction at the SNEAK R&D Lab. There's a lot more room for creativity on Discord, which fits with our brand ethos. For brands with an audience that wants to go deeper, it's well worth exploring alongside Facebook.

Launch your community with great content

Want to see what a thriving brand community looks like in action? Follow Lauren on LinkedIn or head over to the Sneak website for links to their communities.

And if you're thinking about building your own, remember that a great community runs on great content. Think product imagery for exclusive drops, campaign photography and merch shots. It all adds up fast. Keeping it all organised across your team is where a lot of brands struggle.

That’s why you should try Dash, the digital asset management tool built for growing ecommerce brands. Find, share, and deploy your visual content in seconds, so your community always gets the best version of your brand.

Start a free trial with Dash or book a demo with a member of our team.