Earlier this week Social Media Today reported Facebook (Meta) sent a warning to some Facebook group admins: either they maintain their activity or be replaced.
What Are Facebook Groups?
Facebook groups are created for various reasons, and people are invited to become members. Reasons vary, but basically, it’s a shared interest in a particular topic, like barbecuing, movies, or a “how-to”. The group can be public (anyone can see and comment), private, or hidden.
Typically, public groups typically don’t have a Join Group requirement before people can comment on posts. Using the private or hidden method, however, anyone interested must click to Join Group, then admins must approve that request in order for that person to engage.
What’s The Deal?
It’s not a secret that creating a Facebook group is a terrific way to build a pseudo-subscriber base with content only found, seen, and engaged inside a group. Creating a Fgroup is fairly easy; for more on this topic click or tap this link: https://www.facebook.com/help/167970719931213/?helpref=popular_articles
Maintaining a group, on the other hand, isn’t as easy as you might think. People who are Admins (administrators) or Mods (moderators) are usually volunteers. As such, volunteers have limited amounts of time. As a Facebook group grows, so does the time commitment.
There’s quite a bit to moderating a Facebook group, including:
- setting and maintaining rules for the group;
- removing spam or self-promotion comments if it violates the group’s rules;
- manage membership requests;
- approve or decline pending posts.
These are just a few of the duties of Facebook Group Admins or Mods.
It’s not a big deal when the group is small, say, under 500 members. However, when a group grows to 1,000, 10,000, or even 100,000, it gets more difficult and more time-consuming. Groups of these sizes tend to have more than one Admin or Mod.
Before you think there’s not a group the size of 100K members – one of our contractors manages a Facebook group that’s over 400K in membership.
Again — What’s The Deal?
Facebook (Meta) monitors everything on every profile, page, and group. They know when a group isn’t being moderated, but up until this point have tolerated it.
Facebook groups are created with the best intentions but often aren’t managed well due to the Admins’ or Mods’ time constraints. Adding more people to either role may help, but only if those people are actively working an agreed-upon schedule that helps the Facebook group.
The best outcome: Facebook will assign someone within the group to take over either as an Admin or Mod so content, engagement, and membership isn’t lost.
Worst outcome: the group is archived (put to pasture) by Facebook. End of life for that group.
Conclusion
Be strategic about your Facebook groups. You created them for a purpose, probably to bring like-minded people together into a community. Don’t risk losing your community. Moderate your group, or Facebook will.
Check back for more tips & tricks about Facebook and other social media platforms.
Be strategic. Be visible. Be found.
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