By Update 2 – 11/2/2021: Facebook notified all of our current public groups today that they will be forced to be internationally public on November 9th, 2021. Most clients are opting to take their groups private instead of being bombarded by accounts from outside of their geographic region.
Update: Our team has uncovered a nasty loophole in public Facebook Groups settings that once discovered by foreign political operatives, scammers, and spammers could render all attempts at moderating a group futile. Because FB is forcing public group admins to accept all applications for membership, this loophole will allow people in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other places to exert immense influence over other countries and there is little anyone but Facebook developers can do to stop it. We have no way of transmitting this information to Facebook as the only executive receptive to such information left the company recently.
About a year ago Facebook announced they would be changing up the public settings for Groups. They claimed this change would increase the reach for Groups while making it easier to manage your Groups.
They lied.
In reality the new changes appear to be for solely one reason – to make Groups look more popular than they really are.
You’ve probably seen the horrifically bad advertisements running on video streaming services and broadcast TV for Facebook Groups like the one that makes it sound like astrology is a science where crystals can heal you. Well, this change appears designed to make Groups like this one and others appear to be more popular by inflating their membership counts.
Let me explain.
Prior to this change for public Groups the admin of a public Group was given the ability to monitor incoming membership requests and deny those that didn’t fit. As Group admins managing hundreds of thousands of members on behalf of clients this gave us the ability to keep spammers and scammers at bay and to easily keep geographically focused Groups limited to people who lived or had interests in a geographic region. While simultaneously giving us the benefit of our content being shareable and visible across Facebook. We could even allow members to automatically join a public Group if Facebook was confident they really lived in or near the area they claimed.
The new changes appear to abolish this setting (at least for new public Groups and possibly soon for legacy public Groups) only allowing the admins of a Group to limit the Participation of members NOT the joining of members. This means that any public Group is now by default an International Group.
Public Group admins should expect a massive surge in joins from people outside of their target city, region, or country; and that many of these will be from new accounts created by spammers, scammers, and foreign political operatives to appear like they live in your target region.
Because of this fact, you can expect your public Group to lose reach over time as more and more uninterested foreign profiles or fake profiles join your Group. When these accounts join they do so with the sole intention of spamming your Group for their own gain, if you setup the “Participation” rules properly you can still filter these posts out to avoid the harm to your Group. However, because the News Feed and other parts of Facebook determine the popularity of a piece of content based on how many of the first Group members to see the content react to it or engage with it, the reach for your Group posts will diminish. This is especially important if your Group has ANY geographic limitation (i.e. language, city happenings, regional sports, etc….). Public Group admins are about to become overrun by spammers and scammers from foreign countries and the tools Facebook is providing will do little to offset both the onslaught of spam and the drastic reduction in reach that is likely soon to follow.
We have actually seen this issue on Facebook before. About a decade ago Facebook removed the ability for posts on Pages to be geographically targeted and instead decided they would all by default become international. This meant if a bunch of people from Nepal followed the page for a dentist in Dallas then posts by the dentist were now to be shown to the Nepal followers by default instead of her being able to target the posts to just Dallas area followers (FYI: you can boost a post to a geographic region). The net result was a drastic loss of reach of local businesses that had purchased page followers or likes in the past which are typically from foreign countries and forcing brands to either build out international pages for each country or turn their one page into a global singularity with all languages. Of course the real net result was a rise in advertising revenue for Facebook as page reach suffered dramatically.
The only solution to this problem is for Group admins to make their Groups private, but this causes another problem. Posts in private Groups are not visible across Facebook. Which means if one of your members shares a post from your private Group, no one will be able to see what it is across the platform. This causes a secondary problem for those brands with a large Page following as prior to this change you could create a public Group with membership questions and share posts from your members to your Page for a much wider reach driving surges in membership applications. The biggest driver here was/is a meme shared by a member in your public Group and then you share the link to that meme on your big Page which drives hundreds of new membership requests. Changing your Group setting to private would mean that the meme would not be displayed nor would the poster’s caption, only the Group’s cover photo, which is highly unlikely to get any reactions or engagements, meaning low reach and dismal membership requests.
Embed 1 – Shown above is an embedded Facebook Post from a Facebook Page we manage promoting a Facebook Group created by that Page that we also manage. This post reached 34,838 people, recieved 816 reactions, and racked up 102 shares. The post drove over 650 new membership requests to the Group.
Facebook has made this tactic impossible now unless you agree to turn your Group(s) into internationally public Groups and accept that while in the short-term your Group might peform well, the long-term prospects are likely far more grim as your reach is canabilized by fake profiles and uninterested foreign users.
My guess tells me that Facebook will offer a helping hand for this looming problem in the form of some advertising solution like they did with Page post boosting so long ago.
Do you have thoughts on Facebook’s new changes to Groups? Let us know in the comments below.
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