I’ve written about Facebook Etiquette before, but after an incident last week that left me and a number of my Facebook friends seriously irritated, I figure a refresher won’t hurt anyone. 🙂

Specifically, I want to talk about the etiquette surrounding adding people to a Facebook Group.

FB Groups are all the rage right now. They have the potential to be filled with highly engaged members that convert into loyal, paying clients. Keyword, here: potential.

Here’s what happened last week:

A Facebook friend (acquaintance, really; I’ve never met her in real life) who runs a business added me to her brand new group without first messaging me or inviting me to make the decision to join for myself. Because I use Facebook as a giant laboratory, I decided to conduct a social (media) experiment.

Normally, I would remove myself from the group and block her from re-adding me. Instead, I decided to see if she would add me again. She did. In the space of about 10 minutes, I was added three times.

This tells me a few things: She hasn’t given a lick of thought as to who this group is for and what members can expect – further solidified by the fact that the group info wasn’t filled out and she hadn’t posted any content yet. Because she hasn’t given this any thought, she’s gone down her entire friends list and added each person.

As people like me removed themselves from the group while she hadn’t finished going through her list, she would add them again – not noticing (or perhaps not caring?) that she had already tried to add them at least once before.

She wound up pissing a lot of people off – enough that a mutual Facebook friend started ranting about being added to FB Groups she has no interest in, with several more people chiming in with comments of their own.

All I can think is, if I were that group owner, I’d be embarrassed to have ticked off so many people. When she was going through her adding spree, at one point she’d added well over 500 people. Last I checked, it currently has just 20 members.

That potential she had for a highly engaged group? Squandered.

Okay, maybe not completely squandered, but she’s got to rebuild some serious Facebook karma with a bunch of her FB friends. There was a far better way for her to have launched her group, so here’s what you can do to avoid committing a serious faux pas and alienating your audience:

photo-montage-556809_12801. Determine Who Your Group is For and Why

This requires some pre-planning. What it really requires is a strategy.

2. Fully Set Up Your Group

By this I mean, once you’ve pre-planned what your group is all about, who it’s for, what the rules/guidelines are, and what type of content you’ll publish:

  • Upload a banner
  • Fill out the information sections
  • Post some content before anyone has joined, like welcome message inviting folks to introduce themselves

3. Invite People to Join – Let Them Make Their Own Decision

It’s truly Facebook who deserves the brunt of my ire when it comes to how people can become members of groups.

Once upon a time, there used to be a way to invite people to groups without actually adding them. This was either so long ago that I can’t exactly remember when, or it was a beautiful dream that I wish I never woke up from. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it’s the latter, to be honest!

As it stands right now, you can add anyone to a group with just a few taps on your smartphone. From desktop, it requires actually typing in the person’s name first.

In the experiment I conducted, the fourth time the group owner tried to add me, I got a notification saying I’d been invited to the group. I’d love to know how she did this. Seriously. I have looked everywhere I can think of, but haven’t been able to figure it out.

If you, dear reader, know how to do this, please tell me!

In the meantime, here are my 3 best recommendations for filling your group with people who actually want to be there and who will be fully engaged:

  • Send personalized FB messages to people you believe would enjoy and benefit from the group, invite them to join and if they say yes, send the link
  • Promote the group in your newsletter
  • Promote the group with a Facebook Ad (this is a new type of ad campaign – pretty cool!)

I wasn’t kidding earlier when I said there’s unlimited potential for Facebook Groups right now. I believe they’re a tool that’s here to stay. But we have a responsibility as business owners to use this tool properly and it to use it for good. That may mean your membership doesn’t grow as fast as you’d like it to, but as with anything… it’s about quality, not quantity. 😉