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.

How to use Facebook as Professional platform

When anybody speaks of Facebook, the first thing that mind relates it to is Social Network or Friends. Hardly 1% of us will have one of the thoughts about Facebook aligned with office or work. But those who know how handy and powerful Facebook is for office and work, will definitely advertise the benefits of this great platform for transforming work environment to a better and enjoyable place.

In fact, there are several Fortune 500 companies which recognize Facebook as a productive space and don't block access to it in their offices for their employees. Fortunately, the company I work for is one of those. So if you are interested to leverage Facebook as a work platform, then read below the top 5 ways to do so:

1. Top 10 Useful Facebook Applications for Professionals

Let us admit! There are over 200,000 applications for Facebook at the time I am writing this, but less than 0.01% are oriented towards business and professional community. Makes sense since Facebook started as a social network and it will take a lot of effort & time to transform or adapt it for sophisticated business or professional uses. But there are some applications available on Facebook which make life of a professional easier. I have filtered and screened those applications from the huge application space of Facebook and put together Top 10 Facebook Applications for Work & Professional uses. Click the above link to read the details.


2. Use of Facebook Groups feature to collaborate and communicate

Facebook launched Groups feature not a very long time back, yet it has caught attention of lot of business groups and professional community. On a personal front, it has already found use in college communities, closed friends networks and even non profit / government organizations. If you are wondering how / why these organizations are using this feature and how you can make use of it, click on the link - Unlocking the power of Facebook Groups.




3. Marketing ourselves as individuals

When it comes to marketing ourselves as individuals, social media is the best possible way to do it. Recruiters have followed up with the social media trend and have also made use of social media to support all their recruiting efforts. One of the research has even shown that most companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find their employees and Facebook is also used extensively by companies to get to know prospective employee better. Companies spend a lot of money whilst putting out job advertisement; social media drives costs down and has more return on investment if used appropriately.

How one can leverage Linkedin for professional purpose is no guess game, but if you are interested to know how you can use Facebook for 'self marketing', then click on the link- Market yourself using Facebook.

4. Create a Facebook Page for your business

If you have a business, and are looking for want to promote it, then dont miss out creating a Facebook Page for your business. Add regular events, tell your customers to like your Facebook page, put it all over your own profile, and do what not. The power of Facebook Pages is such that if you do these things only, you will see your business getting popular at the speed of light. Now if you are interested, there are a lot more things you can do with your Facebook Page, which I have covered in the following link, so click- The power of Facebook Pages for your business.

5. Advertise your brands and products on Facebook

A couple of years back, if you had a brand website or even a product, then one of the best options for advertising it on the internet was Google Search Engine, through Google Adwords. Then Youtube followed the trend but one had to invest time and effort to come up with some sort of viral video clips. But if you want to target niche market, these options were not very useful, and this is where Facebook Network advertising comes into play. 

Facebook is the top social networking portal online and for a very good reason- The number of users on this social site are growing in large numbers, making it the perfect place to advertise your product or service. You are going to benefit tremendously from advertising and marketing in Facebook, even if you have any niche market, from offering business cards online to promoting window blinds to providing even free automotive insurance estimates.  If you want to know how you can use Facebook to advertise your business in a cost effective yet targeted manner, then you should click on the article I have posted right here- Targeted Yet Cost Effective Advertisements through Facebook.