originally posted on www.stopthinksocial.com on October 17th 2010
Earlier this month Facebook made a number of announcements about new features on the site. One of these was the launch of what they are calling New Facebook Groups. Facebook has always had groups, however the important difference with New Facebook Groups is the ability to create enclosed communities where you can share content, collaborate, and have conversations with a restricted number of people.
Watch this official video from Facebook for an overview of New Facebook Groups:
Over the last two weeks I’ve been getting my hands dirty with some New Facebook Groups. Here are some examples:
- I recently was invited to join a community of bloggers who help each other promote their content and initiatives. At the time of joining the community, members were using email as a way of forwarding requests for promoting their material. While this was working well within a small group, by the time I became a member it was clear that something else was needed. The timing of the New Facebook Groups was perfect, and for the last 2 weeks we been using them as a way of communicating our requests to each other
- I’m chairman of a Residents’ Association, and I’ve always been looking for new ways to communicate with residents. Earlier this week I setup a New Facebook Group for the residents. Within 24 hours we had 14 members and already have had some interesting discussions.
NEW FACEBOOK GROUPS - TOP 5 TIPS
Based on my recent experience I wanted to share with you my top 5 tips about the New Facebook Groups:
- Private Chat Area
Each Group has the ability for all online members to participate in a real-time chat. If after your discussion there are some key points relevant for all members, I’d advise to copy and paste the key points into a ‘group document’, for those people who weren’t online at the time - Open Communities
A lot of focus has been on the fact that New Facebook Groups are all about enclosed communities. Don’t forget you can create an open group as well, in which the content and member list is made public - Documents
By using the documents feature it allows you to create content collaboratively among group members, and gives you much more than the standard wall posts that were available in the old groups - Notifications
By default when a New Facebook Group is created it has email notifications turned on. This means that members will receive email updates for all activity in the group. These email notifications can be turned off either at the group level, by a group admin, or each member can modify their own group email notifications - Opting Out
At the moment New Facebook Groups is an opt-out experience. This means that you can’t prevent people adding you to groups, you must remove yourself from these groups manually. A lot of Facebook users have complained about being added to lots of groups they don’t want to be part of. However Facebook seem happy with the fact that you can only be added by people in your Friend Network. For this reason you should chose your friends wisely on Facebook
Have you been using the New Facebook Groups over the last few weeks? If so I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts and tips? Let me know via the comments.
