Last week Mark Zuckerberg announced that he’s changing the mission of Facebook to focus more on connecting communities people. As part of that new mission, Facebook will be investing in their platforms which help to bring people together. What does that really mean? If you have a Facebook Groups page, you’re about to get a few upgrades! First, let me go over again the difference between the Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages options that clubs can make when setting up their Facebook page.
Facebook Group vs Facebook Pages: What’s the Difference?
Most of us have a personal Facebook page. This is where you can post status updates, pictures and share content with your friends. The “standard” personal page cannot be used for non-personal content. In fact, Facebook will permanently shut down your page if you use it for anything other than personal reasons.Facebook has instead created 2 ways that groups and organizations can have a Facebook
Pages are for brands, businesses, and organizations to create a presence on Facebook, whereas profiles represent individual people. Anyone with an account can create a Page or help manage one, if they’ve been given a role on the Page like admin or editor. People who like a Page and their friends can get updates in News Feed. Other benefits? A custom call-to-action button, admins post as the organization rather than themselves, Facebook ad functionality, and you can connect it with other apps to expand its functionality.
Groups provide a space to communicate about shared interests with certain people. You can create a group for anything — your family reunion, your after-work sports team, your alumni club! The benefits? Members of the group can post and share content, all members of the group can be invited to Facebook events, and admins can customize the group’s privacy settings depending on who you want to be able to join and see the group.
1 Facebook Pages
2 Facebook Groups
Upcoming Changes to Facebook Groups
As a result of the research the Facebook teams have been doing, they’ve decided to add new features to the Groups platform to help admins grow and manage their groups. Those features include:
- Scheduled posts: This is the ability to schedule your posts for a certain day and time. (Welcome, to the world of scheduled posts, y’all! You will LOVE this feature!)
- Group Insights: This is similar to the Pages features which enables admins to see “real-time metrics around growth, engagement and membership — such as the number of posts and times that members are most engaged.” These can help you know which posts are resonating with their members and help to determine more and better ways to get members to interact in their group.
- Membership request filtering: as many of you who have Groups already know, responding to membership requests can be time-consuming but it’s a necessity to keep the bots and trolls out (sigh)! Facebook has enhanced this so you can sort and filter the requests and accept or decline them all at once.
- Removed member clean-up: This is a pretty cool feature. Did a bot accidentally slip into your group and now they’re posting garbage? You can remove that person along with all their content, posts and any other creepy folks they invited in!
- Group to group linking: This is something new that Facebook is trying. It allows a group to link to another group to share content and build greater communities. I’ve already seen this feature rolled out in some of the Pages I manage (you can connect a Group to a Page). There may be some opportunities for clubs that have a Group and Page to connect them so they bridge the communities but I haven’t tried it out yet. Let me know if that works though.
3 Our Communities Summit and New Tools for Group Admins
You can read more these new features and Facebook’s new mission here. The article doesn’t say when these features will be rolled out but plan for them to arrive on your Groups page sometime this summer.
These are exciting new features which will enhance your Facebook Groups experience. I’d love to hear about other ways that you’re engaging your members through your Groups page.
The Alumni Club Ambassador 