Groups and Pages

Facebook, that de facto standard human-organising tool that none of us can seem to be able to shake, has altered one of its fundamental structures, the Facebook Group. It now targets primarily “small groups of friends”, operates slightly differently from the old-style groups, has those absurd notification settings that automatically email people when they’ve been added to the group against their will, requires people to add their friends rather than existing for people to discover and add themselves and all in all seems like a much less powerful tool for organising people.

The new Group structure and the not-quite-as-new Page structure are two potential replacements to the old Groups that we can use to organise people. While the new Groups retain the ability to invite all members to an event, they’re also much less polished than Pages. A Page allows the dissemination of updates whereas Groups are meant to facilitate people posting to each other. Pages represent an organisation whereas Groups represent, well, groups of people.

We’ll be more easily found with a Page, I think. Pages allow for vanity URLs — you can’t have a customised URL like http://facebook.com/warwickatheists that links to a Group. At the bottom of my posters, it would be utterly useless to put facebook.com/groups/2391396481/ because nobody would remember it, whereas as long as people know how to spell ‘Warwick’ and ‘atheists’, they can easily find us. Pages allow us to make status updates that can appear in people’s news feeds, associate ourselves with other pages (such as the AHS’s) and throw a ‘like’ box on the website so everyone can connect in as few clicks as possible.

But is any of that a reasonable substitute for being able to grab users and throw them right into the event itself? I can’t imagine that, even with the low amount of attention an event invitation seems to get (there are far more “awaiting reply” non-responses than RSVPs, amongst attending and not attending members alike), a Page posting an update would get nearly as many.

So I’m going to run both. I’ll run a new Group and a Page for a while. This will allow us to both automatically invite members of the Group while also then posting the event as an update from the Page. It’ll be a bit unwieldy but hopefully the society admins can determine from concurrent use of both systems which one is more effective and more suitable for our uses. Then it’s a simple matter to unpublish the Page (until we have at least 5000 Group members, at which point mass-inviting stops working) or close down the Group and switch to using just one.