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One of the first indications that Facebook would be the  Meetup of the 2008 election was when the membership of the Facebook group "One Million Strong for Barack" started skyrocketing. Suddenly, everyone in the political world could see how viral Facebook could really be, and how fast you could grow a community.

This group’s visibility also shed light on the true impotency of groups in Facebook - once they hit more than a 1,000 people, the organizer can no longer message to the group. That’s about as useful as a fundraiser with no donation box or a rally with no speaker - just a mob of people who can’t do anything. That didn’t stop people from creating groups, just to get a momentary press hit (note the "1,000,000 Strong against Hillary [Clinton]" group - this was founded by the New Hampshire Republican party and is populated by people who don’t know this), but that was about all they got from it.

That could be changing soon, though.

At the Facebook Political Summit earlier this week, organizers hinted that Facebook would be dropping the prohibition on messaging to groups of more than 1,000 supporters. There were also indications that they’d be looking at other ways to make groups more useful, including news feed integration and message segmentation.

What does this mean for non-profits? First, it means that if these changes are implemented, groups can become more than bumper stickers. Right now, joining a group is momentary statement of support, an action you take when you see something you feel passionate about or amused by, and either case promptly forget. Every week or so, I see another friend cleaning out his or her group list and leaving 10-15 groups at a time to make room for new ones.

It also means that Facebook is seeing the potential for organizating on its platform, and is tired of letting third-party applications get all the action. While applications like Causes and its contemporaries have built a following, direct integration into the platform with no need to install an additional application could reach many more people.

It also means, though, that NPOs should keep an eye on their wallets - at the present, Facebook offers groups that aren’t lobotomized at 1,001 people, but they cost $300,000 for the ability to send out one message every three months to your membership. I could see a scenario where Facebook uses the presidential campaigns as beta testers to see what kind of response more robust groups would receive, then sells the option to non-profits.

It also means, though, that Facebook is listening to their audience. The restriction on groups over 1,000 people, a sort of penalty for success, has long been lamented by the community, as Peter Erickson explains:

Organizing groups of volunteers to manually send out messages to the membership list only resulted in several being abruptly suspended or banned by the anti-spam controls.  We even formed an Obama admin collaboration group, with the goal of being able to mass-message the admins of Obama groups with less than a thousand members (of which there are hundreds on Facebook) who could then mass-message their memberships. 

At the same time that Facebook was receiving mountains of free press for being on the cutting edge of campaigning amid countless articles about the growth of One Million Strong for Barack, Facebook policy was effectively smothering the group’s ability to do much at all.

I can only that Facebook follows up on this by abolishing those blasted fluff stories (in an informal poll of people in the room as I’m writing this, it made the list of Popular Requests in the Beaconfire Network).

Incidentally, it was telling that the summit was attended almost exclusively by Democratic staffers. Will lefty non-profits be similarly more interested in engaging on Facebook? Is it that the demographics are more progressive-leaning, or that liberal groups have a stronger activist presence online? A look at the membership rolls of the political section of the Causes app shows Barack Obama leads the Democrats with 16,553 members of his cause, while the top first tier Republican, Rudy Giuliani, has only 1,872 members of his cause (though, to be fair, Stephen Colbert for President has 8,274 members of his cause, despite not even being a declared candidate). Similarly, "Stop Global Warming" is the second most popular cause on the system, with nearly a million members, while "Stop the Lies of Global Warming" has only about a thousand, though, to be fair, Senator Inhofe should probably count for two or three.

Keep an eye on Groups in the future as a way to build your NPO’s presence online. Facebook’s demographics are ideal  for many non-profits as potential activists and donors, and you just need a good way to reach them. While you still need to create an application to reach them at the moment, soon, the option of a usable group may be just around the corner. And a group supporting that is one I’d definitely join.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Marketing, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.