The Benefits of Using Facebook Groups

You are probably connected with multiple sets of people on Facebook that have little in common. For instance, you are friends with your work colleagues, college mates, family members and so on. What you share on Facebook, like a picture or a video, may be interesting to one set of contacts but the other set may just see it as pure noise.

To deal with this problem, Facebook has long had a feature called lists that let you limit the visibility of your status updates to select contacts but the feature never really took off. Now Facebook has come up with an even better solution in the form of Facebook Groups.

With Facebook Groups, you can form multiple smaller networks of people inside Facebook and what you share with one group stays in that group. That means if you share your kids pictures among the “family” group, they won’t show up in your colleagues’ news feed.

Other than private messaging, Groups give you access to some new communication tools in Facebook that were not available available before. Some examples:

1. Interact without logging into Facebook

When you create a group in Facebook, you have the option to assign a unique email address to that group. (Go to Edit Group –> Choose a Group Email Address)

This is so interesting because you now can interact with your Facebook friends using your email client itself without having to log into Facebook.com. If someone posts a picture or a message on the Facebook group, you get an email notification and you can add a comment to that post by simply replying to that email message.

2. Group Chat Many:Many

The regular chat in Facebook is 1:1 but with Groups, all the members of that group can talk to each other simultaneously. For the first time, you can get to chat with people on Facebook who are not your friends but are part of the same group.

3. Wiki meets Facebook

Facebook Groups have a wiki-like feature called “Docs” that group members can use to create text documents with Facebook itself.

These document can be edited by any other group member and Facebook stores a log of every single edit that’s made to the document just like a regular wiki.

4. Send Bulk Email

Let’s say you have a party at home and you want to send an invite to all your Facebook friends. The problem is that Facebook won’t let you send a message to more than 20 friends at a time.

As a workaround, you can create a temporary “secret” group with all your Facebook friends and anything that you now post in this group will be sent to their inboxes as well. As far as I know, there are no limits on the maximum number of people who can be part of your Facebook group.