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.

Top 10 Facebook Applications for Work & Professional uses

While 99% of Facebook's 500+ million users waste part of their days growing virtual crops or committing imaginary crimes, there are several Facebook applications developed to actually improve business productivity. 
I have filtered and screened those applications from the huge application space of Facebook and put together below a list of top 10 such applications:





Design your Facebook Page- 

Pagemodo Pagebuilder is a free tool that lets individuals and businesses design a Facebook page without any arts skills. You can add photos, embed video, change the fonts and text and showcase their products on their Facebook pages, using Pagemodo's templates. Facebook Page making doesn't get easier than this .




Read Write Reviews-

The RatePoint app is for those who have specific products & services to provide and would want to have customer reviews posted on their business fan page. Since most of the customers view reviews online about a particular service, product, or business and make buying decisions based on such reviews rather than advertisements, this application is must have for any business fan page. 



Conducting Polls- 

Several apps can get this work done, but one that stands out is Polldaddy, which is widely used both as a social media marketing and customer engagement strategy. Its simple- 
- Create a poll for your page
- Ask a question
- Provide two to four answers
- And publish / post
Check the results and post them on your page. This social media marketing tool can help you kickstart a new campaign and gives you ideas based on the results.


Collaborate at Work- 

Huddle is a collaboration tool which users can merge on Facebook, allowing businesses and individuals to create secure workspaces, or huddles. Within this huddle, a group can schedule tasks, share files and approve actions. Using Facebook, Huddle users can add team members and update profiles. Whats great is that Huddle also has a BlackBerry and iPhone app for mobile friendly users. The Facebook app is free which is not so for its standalone tool.




Share your ideas and presentations- 

SlideShare enables you to share presentations and documents with their Facebook network (of course you can select whom to share with). Apart from sharing you can edit presentations and even embed YouTube videos into presentations or add audio to create a Webinar. The Slideshare account holders can import existing presentations into Facebook and the application supports all formats including ppt, pps, pptx, odp, pdf, doc, docx, odt, Keynote and iWork pages. 
SlideShare, which has 400,000+ monthly users offers a free, personal account (with ads) and also offers a professional version for $14 a month, a business edition for $36 a month and an enterprise version for $249 per month. Paid versions have no ads and provide additional features such as analytics, buzz tracking and capturing of leads.

Create a E-Store- 

Payvment E-Commerce Storefront facilitates creation of virtual storefronts on Facebook for Free. This is one of the most useful tool which lets e-tailers sell an unlimited number of items and includes built-in and full-featured storefront administrative capabilities. Whats great is that this gets launched in minutes and supports multiple currencies, languages and payment options. No wonder it is used by 400,000+ Facebook users.

Buy / Sell / Rent stuff- 

Marketplace is a online classified ad-space for Facebook, where people can post free ads and search millions of classified ads for used cars, jobs, apartments, real estate, pets, tickets and just about everything. Same as CraigsList, there is no fee for listings, which appear both online and via social media sites, and are seen by millions users monthly. Marketplace's developer company Oodle also offers a business service, Oodle Pro, that features smooth syndication across Oodle, Facebook, MySpace and other websites and analytics that enable companies to measure the effectiveness of listings and social media leads.

Create To-Do List and Maintain Calendars- 

You can keep track of colleagues and maintain your schedule using 30 Boxes calendar utility. Like other applications I have put here, this is also a free Facebook application that allows you to share your schedule with select individuals or even their entire Facebook network. 30 Boxes calendar app also includes simple SMS reminders and an integrated to-do list.






Automate updating of your business page from your Blog or News Site- 

If your business maintains a blog and you would want to constantly update your Facebook business page with the content, then you can add  all-in-one app Social RSS which can be configured to automate updates from any type of RSS feed that creates a post on a business page, on a tab, at the top of the page or on your wall. If you want to keep informed of other blogs in your industry or track trends, even then you will find this Facebook application handy.


Stay in Contact with your network- 

If you are like me then you find it really hard to keep in touch with your contacts due to your busy schedule, then you can use SocialFly Facebook App. Using SocialFly you can create notes about your online contacts, setup reminders to talk to them, and manage your contacts better. From daily reminders to shorthand notes, Socialfly is one of the best way to remember and stay in touch with everyone that matters. And yes, this is also free. Great Facebook app for keeping up with your business contacts.