Facebook's Dramatic Group Changes

Many of you might have seen or been witness to the changes in Facebook Groups recently. Facebook changed their policy on how group owners get users to join the group. In the past users could join the group by themselves or be invited by a friend to the group, but the user if and when they joined. Now group owners have a new option to auto-join their friends to the group without any review or approval from the friend. In addition it posts an update to the friends account, for all to see, that they joined the group. The problems this can cause quickly came to light when a friend of Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg, auto-joined him to a rather unsavory group and the press noticed it before he did.

What's this mean for your Facebook business group or page?
You can join every single one of your friends without approval, but they may not like it and even consider it SPAM. That type of action will reflect back on the business and the brand. If this auto-join feature stays in place a best practice policy may need to be created. Business owners may want to avoid using this feature and allow users to join as they please instead. This also has the potential of being a new way of advertising to users, since a user in a group will now get the group messages. I could see advertisers targeting users with large followings to create a group, invite all their friends, hit them with advertising, and get paid for their effort. It's not much different than renting a mail list. At one time a list of names and address' from a company renting it out could be worthwhile. Today the lists are full of bad data and the practice of renting lists has decreased due to diminishing results and poor quality of lists. Imagine if Oprah auto-joined all her friends to her new "Diet Coke" group and users were flooded with promotions and offers. Not everyone would unfriend her, but if it continued they certainly would, and thus the same result as mailing list rentals...abuse of the list of names equals poor quality names and diminished results.

A positive way to take advantage of this feature is to
Use it for email or other sign-up forms. The form could add a checkbox that says "I wish to join the Facebook Group to keep up-to-date on news and special promotions". Add a space for their Facebook name and you can use it to add them on yourself, with their consent and approval. This is similar to opting-in to a newsletter and could be effective at growing a business' group following very quickly.

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