What is a Facebook Group?
A Facebook Group is a feature within Facebook where users can come together to share content, thoughts and opinions. A business may choose to use a Facebook Group to create a space for like-minded individuals to converse. Whether it’s a public or private group, it keeps the conversation separate from those with friends and family on the news feed and, as admin, can be monitored and policed where needed.
Facebook Groups can be utilised by businesses as a platform for:
- Customers to provide feedback and ask questions.
- Local businesses in the community to stay updated on events and common interests.
- Networking opportunities within industries or mutual areas of interest.
- Internal conversations and updates with employees and stakeholders to strengthen communication and build positive employee relationships through involvement.
Reasons to Delete a Facebook Group
There are several reasons why you might feel the need to delete your Facebook Group. This could be down to your personal time limitations or perhaps you don’t feel like it’s being utilised anymore. Your business may have taken a new direction or you’ve found that it’s just not adding any value.
However…
Before you admit defeat and delete a Facebook Group, there are some easy changes you could make to give your Facebook Group a new lease of life. Have you considered adding a new admin to ease the responsibility or encouraging your members to share and engage again? Rather than deleting the Group completely, you may just need to freshen things up! Think of what’s changeable in your Group Settings and see what you can change for a ‘quick win’.
5 Easy Changes:
- Change your Group name and branding to make it super clear what the Group is about and how it’s connected to your Business. As part of this, you could update your description to cover rules and regulations as well as outline talking points to encourage your members.
- Promote your Group to new members. This may be at events, through your Social Media channels or perhaps by encouraging the existing members to invite relevant friends and connections, bringing in new thoughts and insight to the Group. Hopefully, some fresh faces will encourage those long-term members to reengage.
- Link the Group to your Facebook page so that you can engage as your page to strengthen your business connection and relationships. Not only will this get your branding more visible on the page, but you may see your business Facebook Page likes grow too.
- Add a new Admin. As mentioned above, if you’re too busy with your business demands but want to keep the Group going, is there anyone that you can trust to share the responsibility? Possibly a business partner or employee who knows your brand well and the purpose of the Facebook Group.
- Archive your Group. This is almost like putting it ‘on hold’ to come back to at any point. Archived Groups will still contain all threads and content for members to read but won’t show in search results and no new members will be able to join. Unlike deleting, archiving can be reversed if you want to run the Group again.
Still looking to delete your Facebook Group? Okay, here’s how…
Firstly, be considerate and let your Group members know that you are going to delete the group. They may well have some final exchanges to make or need to save some of the previously shared content. You never know, one of your members may wish to take on the responsibility and you could discover your next admin!
Unfortunately, what comes next is quite a manual and time-consuming process if you have a Facebook Group with a large number of members.
Follow the next 4 steps to delete your Facebook Group:
1. Within your news feed, click ‘Groups’ on the left menu and select your Group. If you have several Groups, be careful to ensure you select the correct Group that you want to delete.
2. Click ‘Members’ on the left.
3. Click next to each member’s name and select ‘Remove from Group’ and then ‘Confirm’.
4. Once you’ve removed all of the other members, select ‘Leave Group’ next to your name. Click ‘Leave’ and ‘Delete’.
Make sure you are completely certain that deleting your Facebook Group is the right decision for your business. If you’re not completely certain, consider all of your options or tweaks outlined above, such as archiving, and go from there. It might be worth archiving for a couple of months whilst you make up your mind for certain and, if you realise not having the Facebook Group is right for you, delete it then.
Still stuck? Find out about our Social Media Training here.
