Unlocking the power of Facebook Groups for Corporates

Facebook group in an oversight is just another place to share information. You can create your own group of our relatives, friends, and classmates, use it to share news, pictures, videos, group mails, group chats and events or even share your documents. But if you are quite innovative and have insight to look beyond the obvious things, you can find several useful uses of Facebook Groups, whether for an individual or a business or a corporate entity. So since I myself started a Facebook Group for managing my office community, I started to put together a list of innovation stuff you can do utilizing complete capabilities and features of Facebook Groups. Below is the output of my analysis, research and experience with Facebook Groups-

First off, let us go through the basics of Facebook Groups-

Facebook Group Basics-

Facebook Group by default is a closed space and you can make them secret or open. Each group is controlled entirely of its members, though you need to be an admin to control it without any hindrance. Once the members are participating in groups, the most viewed ones will be automatically available on the left side for easier access. For better security you can change your group to secret mode.

When a Facebook Group member posts something to wall, every one in the group will receive a notification regarding that post. Since the information is posted in your own group and is available to your group members you can feel comfortable about your information and about who are going to see that post.

One of the great features of Facebook Group is that all the members in a group do not need to be friends of each other, thus it is very easy to maintain a group and remain focused on the purpose of the Facebook Group. Now that we are talking purpose, lets look below some of the innovative reasons you would want to use Facebook Group for:

Creative use of Facebook Groups:

      1. Create a Office Team Community

If you work in a company like mine, you would have your team mates working across the planet and you would need to collaborate due to various reasons. For such a situation, Facebook Group seems like a perfect fit.

Create a Office group, invite all the members and start collaborating. This is one of the prime purposes I am using my own Facebook Group for.

We are driving a lot of things through our office team Facebook Group, some of which are

- Replacement of monthly newsletter via on-demand updates at Facebook Groups

- Communication related to team changes, new members, new happenings for our company

- Driving innovation in our company through sharing of ideas

- Collaborating on several tasks through sending status updates and tracking action items on Facebook Groups

- Use group chat facility from Facebook Group

- Replacement to E-mail where we send a group mail to all of our group members without missing anyone

      2. Create a Family Facebook group

If you are from a family which was united once and used to eat, play & live together, and for some reason most of the members have moved to different places, again Facebook Group can help you connect to your loved ones. I can relate to this need, since I used to live in a big joint family, and now all the members of my family are living across different continents (Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe). Because of this distance, it becomes very difficult to constantly stay in touch.

So if you want, you can create a Facebook for your family and even include family friends in it. You can use it for a lot of stuff; some from top of my mind are below:

- Share personal photos

- Chat will multiple members of family using group chat feature of Facebook Groups

- Send mass updates on personal news like birth, promotion, transfer etc..

      3. Create a Facebook Group for your interest / passion

If you have a passion, be it games, blogging, photography or even sleeping, you can create a Facebook Group for the same and invite your friends who share this passion. Once you have created your group, you can start sharing your thoughts, ideas or any news related to your interest on the Facebook group and invite other people on Facebook or internet to join your group.

If you put more people in your Facebook Group, something productive would definitely come out. Even if nothing productive comes out, you would be amazed by how many people share the same interest as you.

So these were some of the uses of Facebook Group which I could think of. If you have any thoughts on how else we can use Facebook Group, dont shy away from sharing your thoughts through comments.