Written by Jonas Klit Nielsen
In this high speed evolution environment there was no doubt that it was time for Facebook groups to get a facelift. But is this the right one?
In the beginning of this week, Facebook started to implement the new changes to groups and they’ve probably already changed all 45 million groups by now.
The new layout looks a lot like the page layout with a news stream – actually they almost look exactly alike. You can see the comparison further down in this post.
So what’s the difference? First of all, from now on you can’t, as administrator or officer, broadcast to the member’s feed from your group. You can post as yourself in the stream on the page, not as the group. However, what you post to a group can appear in other people’s news feeds, if you are friends with the person and if the person is a member of the group.
On their blog Knot on Facebook, under the title: Giving Groups a Stronger Voice, the Facebook crew explains the why and what behind the new groups:
‘First, we revamped the design for Groups so that they look similar to other parts of the site such as profiles and Pages. This means that groups will now have a Wall that summarizes all the recent activities of people within the group and a Publisher that enables members to share their content.
Second, group activities, which previously only appeared in the group, will now be delivered to your News Feed. To ensure that you get the most interesting and relevant content from groups you’ve joined, you only will see stories when one of your friends posts within a group rather than when all members post. For example, you now will see a story when your friend uploads photos from a recent party at your high school alumni group or when one of your friends posts a message on the Wall of your pick-up soccer group saying that there is a special game this week.
Interacting with Groups will become easier since you can follow the links to the content directly from the News Feed stories or make comments on these stories directly from your home page. You can choose to see only group-related stories on your home page by sorting by Groups from the filters on the left-hand side.
Keep in mind that while Groups and Pages now look the same, they still serve different purposes. Groups are for fostering member-to-member collaboration, while Pages remain the best way to broadcast messages to your fans if you are a business, organization, public figure or other entity.’ Read the rest of the blog here.
It will be interesting to see if groups can become a collaboration tool. The examples mentioned above seem – well interesting. But I think that a whole lot of groups will lose their members in the next couple of months. Groups have become something that everybody can create, and we just join because; what’s the harm? If you look at what groups you have joined and see them start becoming somewhat alive in your news feed through your friends, you’ll probably be happy that it’s not just group members in general ;) How long will you be part of that “1 million for the sake of reaching 1 million” group or the “You know you are from xxx, when…”
One last thing, if you are the administrator or officer of a group; go take at look at it. It might look a bit funny right now and might need you to move around and do some cleaning.
This is how a Facebook group looked in the good old days:
This is how the same Group looks now.
And this is how a Page looks like.
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