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That ‘big bad bald man in black’ Mitch Joel has been pondering the value or otherwise of Facebook ‘groups’.
As always from Mitch, a great ‘thought-piece’, and the comment from Phil Barrett nails for me what irks about FB’s groups:
The #1 problem with facebook groups is that updates are not part of your newsfeed - there is no call to action to send or remind people to go back to the group for new content.
I’m subscribed to 30 groups - only about 4 have recent content.
Solution? We need RSS feeds so that people know when to re-engage a group.
It’s ironic that the platform is so robust in driving you back to your own profile through email and SMS alerts - yet there is so much untapped potential in groups
Yet to me ‘groups’ are where the networking opportunities (aka ‘gold’) lies. If FB can organise to have groups appear in your events list then they will add phenomenal power to your marketing efforts within the FB community.
I’m sure that someone, somewhere is asking Facebook to sort this; let’s hope they do so soon.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the kind words Lee.
Phil certainly did nail it, and I followed up in a comment about other irritants.
As the Admin for the site, I am never notified when people join the group and, on my Profile Page, I can’t list the the Groups I Admin (bleh).
Granted, I don’t think Facebook was ready for all of this Group action, and I’m sure it will get better.
The true spirit of the post was, as your title suggests, that the Facebook Groups are pure gold… and I’d like to start leveraging it sooner than later.
Agree Lee, there are some great opportunities out there, but I am thinking of culling back my groups so that I can try to keep up-to-date with it all - just no time to trawl through them all but some wonderful networks of people with great ideas!
I agree … the Groups add a whole new dimension to Facebook. Finding a way to tap into the rich community side of things will be a reason for companies to open the door to Facebook — and this is where groups come into play.
Facebook groups need to have at least the same easy to use functionality as personal profiles. Whether it is adding rich content like video, audio or photo links to a comment, creating a library of books on a relevant subject (with cover pictures!), or just letting the author focus on the content and the argument, rather than think around how to get it up there! I’d love to put half the content from my personal profile up on the group I created - brands2music - if I could make it look anything as effective!