Facebook Strategy

Using Facebook to recruit for your Collective X site is easier said than done. I just recently added a collective x site to my website offerings and the group is slowly starting to grow. My entire business was built off of the Facebook Generation and needless to say it is HARD to get strangers to join the action! The time spent on either site needs to have an ROI associated with it. Watch where you are spending your time.  My facebook page is tattooed with my company name, I have a small group started, the wall feeds are being used effectively and though traffic is generated the amount of actual users is not booming. Despite having 1700 friends on facebook!

Four Ideas for using Facebook to Recruit Group Members

Be Authentic- Most of us are trying to grow our membership but quality over quantity. Be open, be honest and make yourself vulnerable. Then doors will open

Find the Connectors- a college student or recent graduate who has 4400 friends on facebook is either a member of a boy band, celebrity status or know what is going on. Connecting with these individuals directly and wooing them to your cause and group is the key to them inviting their friends.

All politics are local- No matter what your group is or what topic it is directed to, there is a core location that can be called home. The key is to create multiple cores within different communities. Examples: Colleges, Cities, Communities are the obvious definition of local but remember high schools, political issues that are unrelated to your cause, specific products like cars. Then connect the seemingly unconnected to your group.

Partner with existing group officers. Every facebook group was started by someone (the officers). Reach out to them and see how together you can grow each others fan base. Delete “what’s in it for me” from your vocabulary.  Bring others to the facebook dance and they will join you.

My approach is similar to your Shaun, I have used a status tag line on most my other sites (facebook, xing, linkedin, plaxo, etc) that points back to new groups I have set up in CollectiveX to get people I am in contact with to visit and register on my sites here. There has been some limited measure of success.

On a related matter, is there a plan to include status tag lines into the users profiles under CollectiveX ?

I notice that the interest levels start to drop a while after people have registered as unless they participate in the discussions or surveys, they have little much else to do. There are many people registered who may want to update their status line say on a weekly basis to let others know what they are up to, but may not want to do much more. But its small expressions like this that will continue to bring them back on a regular basis, and to keep people involved.

All the majors sites I mentioned above  (facebook, xing, linkedin, plaxo, etc) have included this as they have seen big benefits in this.

Regards, Michael

Michael - Interesting point. For the large public groups who are looking to increase membership I can clearly see the case being made for a status tag line.  However, 80% of our Groupsites are private professional groups that are not looking to be found by the outside world and all of their members have daily reasons to visit the site because they are collaborating on projects and making things happen collectively (we use the phrase "social collaboration" to describe Groupsites as opposed to yet another "social network").  Some of these are Boards, company intranets and project workgroups or committees.

That being said, I think it's worth comparing notes with the rest of the CX team regarding a way to offer a status tag option for those groups who feel they can benefit from it.

Thanks for the input.

Shaun

Shaun, you were looking in the original posting to trying figure out how to migrate social network users from Facebook to CollectiveX. Now you change the baselines to this query and want to move social collaboration users to CollectiveX. What are you asking for here ?

I moved me and other users from Facebook to CollectiveX based on my Status Tag Line use. You have acknowledged you tend to abuse this Facebook feature for the same reasons. When I move the users across, they come here and do not find the same feature. So why move ?

Michael

Michael - The purpose of my initial post was not find a way to duplicate facebook and simply move their users to our platform.  Facebook does a great job at what they do and will continue to be a force in individual-centric social networking.  My focus is getting the attention of those facebook users who are actively involved in groups or are looking to become actively involved in a group. A good example is YAP (Young Association Professionals).  They have been on facebook for a while now but when you go to their facebook group you will find the link to their website http://www.yapstar.org which is a CollectiveX Groupsite.

The over 50 million people who are on facebook are not a "group".  They are a bunch of people using the same platform. When they have reason to form groups to start making things happen, that's when we feel they can and should use CollectiveX as a tool.

Does that make sense?

Point taken Shaun, thanks, still be nice to have a Status Line tag that we can use here though.

The one nice thing I sincerely appreciate about CollectiveX is that it offers a one time sign up with a profile that allows me to connect across many discussion domains, and this is something that will cause me to grow my interaction over time I am sure. 

I agree that there should be some way to convey your 'status' on your profile. We are just starting our groupsite as a company intranet, help site, and as a way to reach out to potential customers. We want to share with our employees, customers, and potential customers day to day activities, as well as provide them with ways to interact with each other- empowering our brand champions. If our brand champions have a way to relate their day to day activities to the group it adds a personal touch to something that otherwise gets bogged down with less personal, (more useful) information. 

Dan - That's a great suggestion. Tweeters of the world take note.  This could work for you.

Shaun