Facebook Groups vs. LinkedIn Groups: Which is Right for Your Community?

I use both a Facebook group and a LinkedIn group as community engagement tools. I like them both, but for very different reasons, and what I really wish I could do was combine my favorite features of each and get the best of both worlds.

I have tested different ways to build engagement and conversation with my audience. Last September I started a Q&A forum on Qhub called oneforty Answers where people could submit and answer questions related to Twitter apps and other social media topics. After two months, it wasn’t getting quite the traction I wanted it to, so I focused on a new LinkedIn group.

Here's the group - if you'd like to join the group, here's the link: http://bit.ly/14tlinkedin

Around the same time, I got involved in Facebook’s new groups. They are a far cry from the cheesy groups I used to be invited to in college for purposes like “Hey I lost my cell phone give me all your numbers” or “Hey I need to do this survey for my senior seminar paper….” (Remember those throw-backs? Aw yeah…)

I love the functionality of the new groups so much that recently, with the beta launch SocialBase, I dared to try something different and use a Facebook group to engage our beta testers.

Which do I like better?

Pros of LinkedIn Groups:

• People have a “business mindset” on LinkedIn. No distractions from personal things like on Twitter and Facebook that clutter conversations. That has always been the clearest benefit.
• “Top Influencers This Week” shows you your most engaged community members
• “Follow” functionality: If there is a certain noisy member of the group, community members can “unfollow” that person.
• You can do open groups and your brand name can receive SEO value for conversations involved in the group (could be a good thing if they are relevant to your keywords.) I’ve chosen to keep my group private because I’m nervous about spam.
• Granular admin options. Need to sell your boss or client on using social media? Show how you can customize this group to what is the right fit for your business.

LinkedIn Group Admin options - lots of 'em!

Cons of LinkedIn Groups

• No reporting. There isn’t even so much as a Facebook Insights type of weekly email update that tells me about the number of comments or number of group members so I can gauge the progress or engagement week-by-week.
• Invitations – I have to be connected to someone on LinkedIn in order to invite them. I have to send the invitation, wait for them to accept, then send the group invitation. It’s just a bit of a process.
• No custom URL’s for brands. I’m hacking it with a custom Bit.ly… http://bit.ly/14tLinkedIn
• Discussions are odd: Your comments are limited to 200 characters. It’d be nice to be able to “tag” another community member in a comment the way you can on Facebook, Disqus and Livefyre comments. This would enhance the conversations and drive people back to the group if they got a Tweet or an email update when they were mentioned in a comment.

And now for Facebook…

Pros of Facebook Groups:

• I like that you can tag people in comments – drives a lot more engagement and it makes the discussions much more interactive.
• You can add links, photos, videos, or do a poll with a question – more options than with a LinkedIn group. I share screencasts of SocialBase and it presents then better than they would be presented in a LinkedIn group.
• Chat function would allow you to chat with group members. Haven’t tried this yet but could see this being useful.
• Documents feature lets you collect things like Twitter handles if you are going to make a Twitter list of all the members.
• Integrates with events feature. Again, I haven’t used this but could see this as useful if my group was bigger.
• Better email notifications than LinkedIn. You can reply to discussions right from the email. It also gives you a better preview of the discussions to make you really decide if you want to actually login to Facebook and see the conversation. LinkedIn just tells you there was “an update” or “a discussion” added to the group.  That doesn’t peak my interest much and make me want to return.

Cons of Facebook Groups

• No reporting – No way for me to get a report of number of discussions or group members to track engagement, no feature to show “top influencers” like with LinkedIn.
• I have to add someone as a Facebook friend in order to invite him or her to the group. Obvious creep factor here…
• No custom URLs
• Can’t download a list or group members names or email addresses into an Excel sheet or anything so when using this in conjunction with other marketing activities it’s a little more tedious to track which beta testers have joined the group and who hasn’t.

This is what I want: I wish I could have the technical functionality of a Facebook group within the context of a LinkedIn group.

I’ve gotten more comfortable adding people on Facebook. I won’t add just anybody, but I’ve accepted that I’m out there and online…that it’s just this mix of personal and professional. However, when I have to add someone as a Facebook friend to have them join a Facebook group for my company, I might be violating other people’s boundaries.  Others might not be as easygoing about it. At least if you are adding someone on LinkedIn to join your LinkedIn group, it’s less personal.

It would be helpful if I didn’t have to be Facebook friends with someone to invite them to a Facebook group. Or, maybe Facebook could make it so if someone was a “fan” of our business page I could invite them to our (private) business group (which would be helpful for peeps like me with private betas). It’d also be helpful to have Facebook Insights-type of reporting just to be able to measure progress on group engagement.

However, I love the technical functionality of Facebook groups and wish I could have something like that surrounded by the business environment and mentality of LinkedIn’s site. People want to talk about business-focused things when they login to that site, so for things like B2B software, it’s a golden lead generation and B2B community building opportunity. I think that’s a mind-share thing that LinkedIn has and Facebook doesn’t (plus… why would it want to? They’re doing just fine…) But LinkedIn can change the technicalities of groups.

That’s my take on my my experience with these two types of groups. Are you using either for your communities? What’s your take?

5 Qualities to Look for in a Social Media Hire

I can’t believe it’s been two years since I graduated and that I’m on the other side of the hiring table. I spent most of last Friday digging through dozens of resumes, finally finding a couple of talented folks I wanted to chat with for a social media coordinator/intern position.

It made me think a lot about what social media means to me, who I was when I graduated in 2009 and what I’d look for in an entry-level social media hire, or any social media hire for any level. I’d say I try my best to practice what I preach on these, and here are some qualities that I think are important.

1. Social Media Presence

I’m hiring at the entry-level. It’s important to me that this person has a blog, an active Twitter account and a LinkedIn. I Googled a lot of names and it surprised me how few applicants ranked for their names in the results.

I’m somewhat of a blogging slacker here at Social Rant (busy guest posting and building a startup) but I still rank for Janet Aronica….

Yes, I was signed out of Gmail when I searched this. Let me know if you get different results so I can work on that!

When you have a couple of years of working experience, and if you were applying for a manager/director/specialist level position, it’s probably assumed you have a personal brand. However, if I was a hiring for that level of a position, I’d be more interested in seeing what results the candidate produced for a client or company.

Were you on the account team that ran the social media presence for a hotel? I’d be checking out that hotel’s Facebook page. I’d probably ask how the candidate measured the progress, what went well and what the candidate would do different. What you accomplished for a business would resonate most for me.

As far as your personal blog posts or Twitter followers, I’d check it out to see if you have a demonstrated interest in the space (and not to mention, make sure you weren’t Tweeting anything stupid) If you weren’t blogging every single day of every single week, I’d assume it was because you were too busy kicking butt for your company to be self-promotional.

I should screenshot more Tweets. Because one time, I saw Jason Keath from SocialFresh Tweet something that was pure genius and I wish I could quote him properly right now. He said something to the effect of: “You’ve never even heard of some of the smartest people in this industry because they are too busy getting things done to talk about themselves.” That about sums it up.

2. Phenomenal Writing Skills

Social media involves a lot of content creation and writing. Blogging, Tweeting, and Facebook page status-updating is all writing.

Take a look at Barbie’s Facebook page:

Glamping. That’s right. Glam-camping. A clever writer came up with that status and it’s hilarious.

This is why I want people to have a blog and read blogs. Blogging develops your voice as a writer. A strong writing voice helps you as a community manager or some type of social media person because people are drawn to your content – your blog posts, Tweets, Facebook page statuses, what have you. Reading helps you become a better writer you learn how other people use language.

Disciplines like PR, marketing and journalism tend to be very writing-heavy in their coursework. Not to say that all social media hires have to come from one of these majors, but these majors are more likely to introduce you to this space and bring you to an internship or extracurricular activity where you can build great writing skills.

3. Email Marketing Experience

I think that email is the glue that makes social media stick.

At some point you want this community, these Twitter followers and Facebook people, to come to your website and make a purchase. (Or come to your store, or download an app, or sign up for your event… whatever a conversion is for you.) Email is a way to re-engage them and keep them coming back. It comes down to making money as some point.

Like I’ve said before, social CRM is an exploding market, with recent investment for Sprout Social and aquisition for JitterJam and Bantam Live. Sure, there are sexier marketing tools than email. Q4 codes are sexy. So is location-based marketing.  But look: (only) 4% of Americans use location based services. Every single Facebook fan or Twitter follower has an email address. They couldn’t login otherwise!

We have tools that are attempting to connect email marketing and social media marketing. Why aren’t we aggressively looking for social media marketers to facilitate that strategy?

I’d love to see social media be taken seriously and tie itself to the actually business/sales process.  A marketing channel like email is a way to do it. This is probably trickier for an entry-level person to get experience in other than maybe using email (Mailchimp is free for a small list of subscribers) to promote an on-campus event or at an internship. However I think as social media marketers we should understand how email works.

4. Metrics-Driven Mentality

I’m trying to grow each day to be a more data-driven marketer. Numbers don’t lie, they unify teams and they motivate people.

Not many people know what to measure in social media. Also, not many people have time to dig into the analytics tools, understand the graphs and derive actionable insights. If you take initiative at your internship or job in this area, people will love you.

If you’re looking for a social media coordinator or internship gig somewhere, position yourself as a metrics-driven individual by running some metrics on your own Twitter account with one of the dozens of free analytics tools out there and do a blog post about it. Even if what you are doing is very basic measurement, you are demonstrating a working knowledge of what it’d take to move the needle. You’ll learn the more advanced analytics like share of voice or sentiment when you work with a real client.

While I’m on the metrics point, knowing SEO won’t hurt you either. Google Analytics is a free tool. Install it on your blog. Read the Tutorials. Learn and have fun. It’s addictive!

5. Coachable

“Coachability” isn’t a quality unique to social media, it’s just a quality of good employees. You want someone who can take feedback and who will grow in their position.

I love this post from the fabulous Early Stager blog that explains this concept of being “coachable.”

When you’re at Stage 1, you don’t know what you don’t know, but you think you’re doing awesome. (Some people aren’t coachable. They don’t take feedback and they never leave Stage 1.) You want 2′s and 3′s: people who know there are things they don’t know, so they are open to your feedback and want to learn. That’s how they get to Stage 4, where they’re ready for you to delegate. 2′s and 3′s grow with your company.

A good way to look for the “coachable” factor in the hiring process is by assigning a project during the hiring process. (I’m assigning a blog post and a Twitter metrics project to a few select candidates.) Then, you give feedback and see if they’ll change it. That’s what my friend Jason did to hire me and I’d say I’m one of those “open to feedback” types.

So there you have it. The five things I think you should look for in a social media hire. What other things would you look for?