About once a week, if not more, I find myself typing these words or something similar on Facebook: “I just PM’d you, check your ‘Other’ inbox.” Or, “sorry, I’m on mobile, I can’t get to the ‘Other’ inbox right now.” Or sometimes, just “bump.”
If any of these phrases sound familiar, you’re probably also a member of several Facebook Groups like I am.
Over the years, Facebook’s Groups product has evolved beyond being a private place for a few friends to chat outside of a traditional Facebook post and comment thread scenario. Instead, today’s Facebook Groups section is a busy, semi-public area on Facebook’s network which resembles a Facebook-flavored Craigslist competitor…or a Meetup competitor…or a Nextdoor competitor, depending on your use case. Here, users are busy selling on virtual yard sales, networking around topics of interest (health, parenting, politics, hobbies, etc.), helping each other find work, chatting with neighbors, and more.
According to data shared on Facebook’s homepage, the Groups product, launched back in fall 2004, has over 500 million users. Third-party sources claim there are hundreds of millions of Groups on Facebook, and these communities continue to grow.
Being involved with Facebook Groups sometimes feels like you’re on a whole different social network. In Groups, Facebook users are establishing connections with people outside of their personal “social graph” of friends, family and colleagues, and are more broadly connecting with the community at large, whether that’s others in their own neighborhood, with people city-wide, or with those who share your same beliefs or interests.
Having largely ignored Facebook Groups for some time outside of a few one-off use cases, I became a more active participant this year after some gentle prompting from Facebook in the sidebar of my neighborhood’s group. The “Suggested Groups” module that Facebook rolled out last fall on mobile recommended other groups I might like – and noted which of my friends had already joined. I finally took note of this section and started joining more and more groups.
As of today, I regularly follow over half a dozen local “yard sale”-type groups where members are offering up everything from secondhand clothes and kids’ toys to furniture, appliances and even vehicles. I’m a member of a few special interest groups focused around who am I outside of work (e.g., a parent, a bargain hunter, etc.) as well as subjects I like to track, if not actively discuss.
To stay on top of the most recent posts in all these groups, you have to click on each of them individually from the Facebook sidebar navigation on either web or mobile, and then scroll through the new activity, which is like scrolling through a News Feed.
The problem with participating in Facebook Groups today is that it can be time-consuming and frustrating to do so. After you join, say, around a half-dozen groups or more, you stop being able to keep up. It would be like trying to track all of Craigslist by clicking around each section daily. There’s so much happening, that you become reliant on Facebook’s News Feed algorithm to surface the posts from your favorite groups for you.
Unfortunately, that’s a bad idea. By the time Facebook has determined a post in a group to be buzzy enough to interest you, it’s often information that arrives too late. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve kicked myself for missing a great deal on a piece of furniture or other item that was quickly snatched up on a local yard sale group, or saw a post about a local community event pop up after the event had already wrapped.
In many cases, Group activity is something you want to more actively watch – especially if it’s related to something timely – like information about new job openings, good deals or sales, a neighbor’s report of criminal activity a few doors down, a big wreck that’s causing road closures or re-routing traffic, and more.
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