Facebook - Building an Internal Community

Facebook provides the opportunity for you to use Groups to form private communities. This is great for companies that may have distributed workers or a growing workforce and wants to have a common area for its team to hang out and engage with one another. Large corporations tend to have private enterprise level communities built for them using a professional community platform. But companies that don�t need a lot of features, or may not have budget for an expensive platform, can turn to Facebook to fill that communications void.

Many corporations have realized that their employees are all on Facebook and already spend a lot of time interacting on the platform. So, instead of forcing them to log in to yet another website, they decide to use Facebook as an internal communications platform for their community.

One of the downsides to using Facebook instead of a private community is that although the Group can be private, you don�t control the data. With that said, heed caution when sharing anything private or proprietary. You don�t control the data and are not privy to decisions that Facebook may make concerning the platform, therefore you wouldn�t want to wake up one day to find out that Facebook decided to make Groups completely public, thus disclosing confidential data that could be detrimental to your company and a benefit to your competition. If you have those needs, you�re best suited to contact one of the many private enterprise-level community platforms.


Using Facebook as a Focus Group
Continuing with the concept of using Facebook as a private community for your company, what about creating a Group as a private focus group for your company, product, or service?

Using a Group, you could invite in a select group of your prospects or customers and use it as a platform to ask for candid feedback, provide demos, and open access to certain groups or individuals within your company or shots of upcoming products or software releases. Again, remember, don�t show anything you�re worried about leaking out. Though, if you�re engaged in any type of blogger or PR relations, that is a risk you always run into when showing early releases of a product or software version.

As Facebook continues to grow at a rapid rate, it becomes one of the most attractive properties on the Internet to form a community. Although the ability to form a community around something such as an interest, hobby, company, or celebrity seems natural, social media, of which Facebook is a major part of, provides us a different type of opportunity.

Source of Information :  Facebook Marketing Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign