If you’ve founded a Facebook Group, you might be tempted to retain control to shape it to your vision. That’s a mistake, says research by Facebook and Carnegie Mellon University. For a successful group, you need to divest power and add more administrators.
Facebook Groups are a great way to meet like-minded people and create a virtual community. But not every group is successful and many go bust as quickly as they start. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon studied half a million Facebook groups over three months. They found that for a thriving group, it needs to extend beyond the founder’s own reach and the founder needs to actively put more people in charge:
Groups were less likely to survive when the founders had more ties to group members, when the founder invited more of the members and when the founders served as the exclusive administrator of the group. These results suggest that founders can be a bottleneck and a potential point of failure if they concentrate too much responsibility in themselves.
The study also noted that you should fill out all the essential information for that group, such as the name, its objectives and photos. It also helps to have more posts that contain multimedia like images or videos.
The Role of Founders in Building Online Groups [via The Next Web]
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