Day 5. Facebook groups. Social Media for birders
Facebook groups. Everyone use them, but few people engage.
Take control of your Facebook groups now! What are your top 20 Facebook groups?
Sorry for the delay in this post….I have enjoyed family holiday in Colombia…and while most of this text was ready for quite some time, I only found time to post it today. You shall receive much more frequent posts in the series the coming days. In the last installment we talked about sharing on Facebook and prior to that about Facebook Pages. Check out these posts, where the comment section is still open for you to take part in the discussion.
Today, we shall look at Facebook groups. Are they useful?
Do you recognize this?
You get a group request. You accept. And for a few days there is some activity. But very soon there is hardly any activity and less interesting discussions. Or the group is spammed with off topic items from annoying self-promoters. Very soon you notice that all the groups on birds you have signed up to contain exactly the same links, the same videos and the same photos.
Part of the problem is that most Facebook users have signed up to too many groups, which makes it impossible to follow the groups whenever there are uploads and changes. The other major problem is that the owners/admin of the groups often allow off-topic and self promoting garbage.
Take control of your favorite Facebook groups.
Here is the strategy to take control over your groups.
- Ignore most group requests you get. In fact I just ignored 147 group invitations.
- Limit to 20 groups maximum at one time. That way when you open the Facebook Groups link you can see all the updates that have occurred in groups at the same time.
- If you admin a group, be merciless I deleting off topic and spam posts. Also take time to write the poster. Often the “offence” is not done on purpose, just that the offender may not be on top on good practices on Facebook or has not understood the purpose of the group. For example if someone posts a Heron on a Shorebird group, group owner would naturally erase it, but the poster may be a newbie on birding, and not yet grasped that with the term “shorebird” we only include Stints, Plovers and Sandpipers, etc and that Heron in spite being found at the water edge in shallow water do not count as Shorebirds. Not sending a note explaining this, would be quite arrogant and scare off a novice birder.
- Complain on the group wall or directly to the owner of the group when you see irrelevant stuff.
- Post regularly on each group you belong to. If there is no activity it is partly your fault.
Start a group.
The advantage of the group compared to Pages is that you may send group messages directly to the members of the group. This feature is often miss-used by the administrator. Only use this function when there are specific very important announcements to be made.
It is easy to start a group and then send invitations to join to your friends. If your friends like the group, you shall see that they also invite their friends and soon it can become viral.
Birders Facebook groups Top 20.
In order to kick extra live in the best Facebook groups for birders I thought it would be a good exercise to let the readers decide which are the best groups. You name the top 10 groups you belong to ranking them 1-10. I shall collect the results and put them into a spread sheet and add up the scores with 10 points for number one, 9 points for number 2, 8 points for number 3 etc. I hope to get at least 30 lists from which I will compile a top 20 list posted in the next blog post.
This will both stimulate more people to check out these groups as well as participating. It will also be a timeless promotion for the same groups as they will appear on a top 20 list on a searchable blog which is indexed by search engines. Also make sure that they are groups and not pages.
Come back to this post in a couple of days to see what the best groups for birders are.
Homework
- Delete groups that are inactive or excessively spammy
- Write the admin and complain about spammy content
- Don’t forget. Let me know in the comments below which are your 10 favorite groups about birding on Facebook. Results shall be posted here.
- Nurish the groups you like. I am sure you have some photo or link you can share.
- Last post’s survey was not working. I have changed to a doodle survey. It is full of google ads (not mine of course, but which finance the free service from Doodle), but it is free. Is birding your job or your business?
If you still have not signed up for the workshop, which will give you an email notice when there is a new post, please do so below. Set up a folder in your mail program to which you import each delivery to have it handy for future reference. I promise the next deliveries will be more frequent.
