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New Facebook Groups Could Be Big for Business

Guest post by: John Jantsch

Article Overview: Facebook rolled out a few unpredicted changes this week with an eye of getting users to communicate with friends in new ways.

New Facebook Groups Could Be Big for Business

Facebook rolled out a few unpredicted changes this week with an eye of getting users to communicate with friends in new ways. Probably the most important announcement was the Facebook groups function. (Not to be confused with the ability to create public Groups on Facebook.) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in the announcement that groups are going to create a fundamental shift in how people use Facebook.

The way groups works is that you now can go through your list of friends and group them - family, work, fantasy football, clients, etc. The reason I think this has some potential for business is that you can then communicate in unique ways only with group members. You can communicate via email, chat and even post documents to the group privately.

Here are some initial ways I see business putting groups to work.

•If you want to promote your after hours work seminar, you can pinpoint your customer related contacts group and make sure that only they see the invite (and here's the big deal) via email. (Of course anyone can opt out of a group and I'm sure we'll see a rise in spammish uses, but I think this could become significant for business.)

•You will see companies create private, customer only groups, and use the platform as a way to share information with this group.

•There's also a group chat function that could make for some interesting business use as well. I think hosting live chats with your groups on Facebook might prove an effective way to create more engagement on the platform.

•This tool will also surely be used by companies as a way to privately share information internally.

Here's how you create a group

1) Go to groups page and create a group (This function is being rolled out to profile pages so you will be able to create one there as well)

2) Name your group and assign it an email address (grab them now as they email names are first come first serve) - after you set up group hit Edit Group to select an email.

3) Select your privacy settings - you probably want to keep what goes on in the group private but do know that any of your friends will be able to see who is in a group

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Article Tags: new ways



Related Forum Posts
Re: On Which Social Media Sites Are You Most Active? - It's great to hear how you're using it Bill - the strength of Groups is discussion so for anybody who wants to primarily use it for discussions you should look at Groups. The limit I believe is 5,000 members. If you want to do anything other than discussions then you definitely want to set up a Page. Good luck everyone!
Re: Twitter vs Facebook - I use Facebook pages for Business and rarely ever use Twitter. I hace lost count of the no. of Hotels that I have visited, regarding their marketing campaigns, that may have 5k Facebook Fans and only 100 followers on Twitter. It is a lot more difficult to engage with people on Twitter and thus harder to gain traction. If you are a business like Nike, then Twitter is great, but if you are an SME, then focus on Facebook or LinkedIn (if you are providing a professional service.) You can always have your Facebook feed directly in to Twitter, so you can have a presence on both, but do the work on one. Also check out ping.fm for managing campaigns - it is a free tool, and a great time saver.
Successes at My Space - [quote:37w3bsp7]do you mind sharing some of your successes with MySpace? [/quote:37w3bsp7] Hi, Evan Actually the successes I was talking about was with the Groups feature - there are soooo many groups there of interest to me, from the fiction to the sciences, that I've joined them all. I don't find Facebook's Groups stuff to be user-friendly at all. I will say that the more I browse, the more I just shake my head at what people do there (as well as on Facebook, of course). Profile pages where the text of everything is illegible, either because they have a dark, illustrated background - which looks nice but makes it impossible to read anything, or because they choose weird colors - one person I saw yesterday used light red text on a dark green background. And when you read their blog entries or even the text on their profiles... it's like they can't put together a coherent sentence, let alone spell any of the words properly. And I don't think they parse other people's writings very well, either... Well..end of rant I'm just annoyed because it's Labor Day weekend and I'm sure everyone's out in the fun and the sun instead of being at home surfing the web [and in particular my site]!
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Facebook and Business - While on the Elevator today I read that MySpace and Facebook are surpassing adult-sites in traffic volumes - just thought that was interesting fact. As far as your business is concerned I think that having a Facebook account is viable as long as you keep it business and the most important thing to increase your traffic would be to link up with people well-known in your business-circle. e.g. if your were in the Marketing Business Circle I would link up with people like Dan Kennedy, Mike Filsame, Yanik Silver etc. People linked up with them will now start pouring into your content.


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