We’ve found Facebook Groups as a great way to increase interaction with customers in your social media marketing plan. Groups encourage customers to not only share their feedback with you, but also share information with each other. This creates a community out of your user base rather than a simple one way interaction like a standard business page consists of. Recently, Facebook has announced they are making some changes to how invitations will work in Facebook groups that may catch some group administrators off guard though. Before, if a group member invited one of their friends to join your group, that friend was automatically added to the group, getting only a short notification message. This meant that group membership numbers were inflated, with a number of group members who weren’t actually engaging with the group as intended. It also meant some users were less satisfied with their experience of groups, suddenly getting posts in their timeline that they weren’t expecting, and sometimes this created a less than positive interaction among those members. Now, when someone invites their friend to join your group, they’ll need to accept the group invitation first before being added. This creates clarity in the process and hopefully drives a higher satisfaction in the experience all around.

A few things that you’ll see differently as a group administrator:

Updated Group Invitation — As already stated, members will receive an invitation which they will need to accept before being placed in the group. Indications are that if someone has been invited to your group but hasn’t interacted with it yet, they’ll be removed and offered the invitation instead. This is going to reduce group membership numbers for now until those members accept the invitations.

Invited Section — People who’ve been invited to your group but havent accepted yet will now be displayed in the Invited Section. This allows you to see who has pending invitations, as well as give you some clarity on how quickly invited members are accepting. If you’re seeing your invited section stagnating, with invited members never accepting or visiting your group, you can consider some targeted content to encourage follow up from friends who sent the original invitation.

Reminder Notification — In addition to the Invited section, group leaders will now have the capability to send one reminder notification to get invited members to accept the invitation. Partnering this with targeted content will enable you to make this a positive experience for new group members and continue to grow your community in a productive way.

This is a new process from Facebook, and it may take time for you to adjust. But  our social media experts are ready to help you and your business see this change as a growth opportunity. Contact us today to begin crafting a social media content plan, including Facebook Groups, that will help your business grow and succeed.