OR, using Groups effectively on Facebook.
As someone who has covered, spoken and taught courses on social networking, I can tell you this the fastest evolving part of the internet today. Facebook membership is rumored to be over 750 million people, or 20% of all of the business people on the internet today.
During the last few years I have seen mildly ineffective to downright disastrous uses of social networking, and the successful uses are fewer and far between.
Today I would like to focus on one of that success by focusing on a local Facebook group page that grew its membership from 30 to 15,000 and experienced over 40,000 posts in one weeks time.
The group Remember when in Albuquerque… had a simple concept – encourage local Albuquerque’s to share their memories of by gone places, people, and events.
The original idea came from Laura Reynolds, a Realtor in Las Cruces, who came across a Facebook group that allowed people who grew up in Ft. Worth to share memories. Laura suggested to her husband that he start a group about Albuquerque.
Steve started the group, Remember when in Albuquerque and quickly had 30 members. As those members started to tell their friends, and started posting their Albuquerque, memories, growth started to accumulate exponentially, and Steve requested a handful of us help administer (myself included).
I kept track twice a day of the growth of the group:
While the occasional commercial does popup on the group and there has been some sniping about deleted posts, the group has continued to grow as more people share their memories about Albuquerque.
Although many people know that four generations of my family has lived and worked in Albuquerque, many don’t know that I am an Albuquerque history buff and have a large collection of old photos, postcards and books. What better venue to share these? As I shared, others chimed in, and my “friends” counter increased by another 15% or so. (No, I don’t know all of them, but if they love Albuquerque history as much as I do, why would I tell them no?)
The group has received recent coverage from the local to TV new on KRQE as
As well as a front page article in the Albuquerque Journal:
Is this a short term fad, or a long term trend?
For now, I would say long term trend. Although Facebook doesn’t share average time spent on any one group, a common expression from group members is how much fun they’ve had strolling down memory lane, and how much of their day has flown by.
Even after growth in the group stabilized at 15,000 (or so members), the media coverage has exposed the group to new people who are asking to join, creating that ever increasing spiral of increasing exposure, which is truly any marketers dream.
All in all, I’d label this a “sticky” success.