Social Media Marketing: Another Facebook Change on the Horizon

One of the most difficult obstacles for businesses wading into the social media waters is the ever-shifting nature of the platforms. Whether it’s an entirely new ( and suddenly popular) platform that you must adapt to — or a major change to an existing platform — it seems like nothing is ever static for long in the world of social networks.

Case-in-point is Facebook’s  announcement that it will be changing how its “Group” feature functions. Facebook groups used to be incredibly useful tools for businesses to promote upcoming events or even themselves. With the advent of the Facebook Business Page (or Fan Page;)  it appeared the social network wanted to shift groups to the background in order to monetize and maximize the use of Facebook pages for business.  As the news feed evolved — Groups were kept off of the real-time feed. This handicapped their ability to spread rapidly.

Now Facebook is putting Groups on the newsfeed — though word is they will limit a group’s appearance on the feeds to only those comments or postings that are made by an individual’s friends. This is still a potentially big development. Facebook Fan Pages are great tools — but one thing that always made groups better for getting the word out quickly was the ability of an admin to invite large groups of people to a group. The spread of pages is unfortunately limited to a slower style of virtual-word-of-mouth.  If groups retain this feature while also joining pages and profiles on the newsfeed — it might be well worth the effort to create a group page as well for your business. Actually — it might make sense to create multiple groups to cater to multiple campaigns.

To learn more about the use of Groups vs. Pages and Profiles on Facebook; contact a Houston social media marketing company today. You can also contact me at @SMMJenn on Twitter or by emailing me at jenn@newnectar.com.

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