Tips for Business: Your Facebook group is not an e-mail list

I’m starting a new rule: if I get more than two bulk messages from a group in the space of a week, I’m leaving the group.

It seems like people are responding to e-mail less and less frequently these days, and it can become very tempting to start using that “message all members” feature in a Facebook group to ping a couple hundred people every time you have a new post or a new quiz or a new thread somewhere you want people to follow.

That’s a great trick for making sure the big stuff gets noticed, but it works because it is not yet over-used. Save it for the stuff that’s really interesting, or when you really need the input (like our topic tables poll).

Now that a business can create pages on Facebook, I think we should create a distinction between how pages and groups are used and approached. It’s not a functionality thing; it’s a hands-on-the-table sort of thing.

When I become a fan of a page in Facebook, I understand that one of the primary reasons the page exists is to promote someone’s brand, or idea, or product, or web page. I’m following them because I’m either interested in or willing to support whatever it is they’re promoting. I’m also giving them permission to put their brand in my newsfeed and to message me with relatively commercial “updates.”

No, that doesn’t mean they can or should spam me, but these messages go into a separate tab in my inbox (Updates), where I can keep them separate from my regular “messages.” I like this system. I want to encourage people to send their promotional updates to my updates tab and personal messages to my messages tab. I think that distinction is good to have.

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