What is the value of a Facebook group?

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At this point in the blog I thought that I would start to evaluate the performance of some of the channels I am trying to utilise. In particular the Facebook groups that are in play here. First there is my Facebook group which i created for the purpose of enabling debate by people who did not wish to comment on the blog or whom wished to get information via Facebook about updates to the blog experiment rather than Twitter. Social Media on the visitors terms, not tied to the blog, RSS, email or Twitter. So how has this performed?
My Own Facebook Group
	Well as you can see my Facebook group has not been that succesful. This does not mean i will give up on it yet :-) There are only 2 members including myself Only content comes from me with the exception of 1 comment
Well what can the reasoning behind this be? Well how have I promoted the group? Firstly I promoted the group through my own Facebook profile. I have also added the information on to the blog where the main content related to the experiment is being held. I have also started very recently (1 minute ago) to publish twits specifically related to the Facebook group.
IF’s Facebook Group IF’s own group as below has a little over 5000 members. Concidently it was about 4800 before my little endeavor started a couple of days ago. Of course I have no way to verify what affect my actions had because I cannot see the historical trend data in any case there has been a moderate increase in numbers there recently.   This has been in the absence of any visible actions by IF on their Facebook group at least. Of course other media may have had an effect. IF are currently utilising television advertising in Finland. So what content is on IF's Group Now?
	Marko wants to get a reward for being the 5000nth member. Then my post and social media experiment.
	Kai is someone complaining about the wait times for customer service Sini is telling her customer satisfaction story of being rescued off the motorway
Interestingly this is all on the first page of the Facebook group mixed in with the usual company communication and PR articles which I won’t bother mention here.
Well what do these examples teach me about Facebook groups? People only find groups when they are actively looking for them. Facebook is not good at making it easy to find groups you may be interested in. Users need to know they exist or at least think they may exist e.g. in the case of a large company’s group. Secondly these people need to have a reason to want to join the group. Joining a group is a way of showing support but is generally passive and if you are not really that interested can potentially bung up your own Facebook home page. This in itself may hold you back from joining. As such the content has to be very interesting to you and you will probably want to have a vested interest in participating or at least following. In the case of small to medium size companies an investigation would almost certainly show that a high proportion of people who are member of a Facebook group either work for or have worked for/with the company in question. They may also be other stakeholders such as shareholders who have a vested interest in following what is happenning with the organisation. Other members are ones who wish to communicate with the company and generally want or expect something. They join the group to win something or because they want to actually place negative information about the company onto the group wall. In my opinion these are the only real group members or the ones that have real value. What is the benefit of a Facebook group to an Organisation? If you are a company therefore you want to get as many members as possible (sorry obviously) but why? Well this depends on the industry but based upon IF’s wall. Simply the organization should be trying to  show how great their customer service is and be showcasing their success stories. The main benefit of which is brand enhancement, allowing customers to get service via Social Media (if they want). If you wish people to be more active then there needs to be content that your stakeholders are interested in. This depends upon your brand and your market but in the Financials and Insurance segment perhaps content that Coca Cola would add to their Facebook group is not the type of content that your group members want. Currently IF have a competition running on their Facebook group to sing their “marketing jingle” and win 100 euro gift coupon. It would be nice to know how successful this has been for IF. Not something I would usually associate with the insurance industry. What are the benefits for Individuals to start groups? Coincidently: In this experiment I have also found a Facebook group (in Finnish sorry). The groups purpose is to try and get people to boycott IF Insurance. This group also has only two members. This group however at this point is not open so you cannot comment without joining which somehow defeats the object of the group. I guess this occurred as a result of yet another facebook update but indicates also that an individuals interest waivers over time and of course this is expected. An individual trying to draw attention to his or her cause will have a limit where they stop believing they can make a difference and give up. This is of course true also in this experiement. Let's see where my own limit is? In the case of a company the company will always have an interest in preserving their brand and presence in social media (unless it is just a fad?) and hence over time the group gains members and content even if the content is only provided by the company itself. Often once you join a group it is quite a rare thing to leave those groups so the overall trend is upwards. That is unless something external (like this experiment) has an affect on individuals desire to participate in the given group. If you consider the boycott  IF group and the performance of my own independent group then it seems clear to me that if you want to cause pain or influence a company then the best place to do it is on their own social media and try and garner support there. It is easy for a company to ignore an independent counter productive kind of group when it is not visible to their stakeholders and the group itself needs to be found by people who are looking for it. Even if this kind of group is found it seems to me that in all likelihood the group has already been discontinued and is not actively managed or promoted. As such to make this experiment more successful and to help show that we as consumers have power anyone who wishes to show support or finds what I am doing interesting please like my comments/posts on IF’s own Facebook Group.