For the past ten years I've moderated online communities in numerous platforms including Facebook, Ning, Yammer, O365 Groups and Teams, Edmodo and Google Groups. Facebook is the platform that has had the most success in retaining engaged members.
If you are an innovative educator who values building community and meaningful connections among peers, it is likely you have had experience moderating groups. A successful moderator spends time analyzing their group, and in the past year, Facebook has made this a lot easier to do. Now, rather than having to hire an outside company, Facebook gives you the tools you need.
Group insights allow you to do things like:
- Understand how members engage within your group
- See who is the most active
- Discover which posts are the most popular
Here is what you'll find when you look at group insights.
Overview
The first screen you will see provides an overview of group members, indicates top contributors, and gives stats on posts, comments, and reactions. You can dig deeper into each metric.
Growth Details
When you click on "New Members" you can see the total number of members as well as those who were approved, declined, and blocked during the past month.
You can also see how many members in your group are active.
Engagement Details
Top Posts
When you select engagement details you can see the top posts. If you have a very active group with many posts, this is a great place to go to prioritize where you focus your attention. Reviewing this can give you great insight into the topics and issues that are important to your members.
[Why I'm Not Leaving Facebook & You Shouldn't Either]
Popular Days, Times, and Scheduling Posts
You can see which days and times members are most active. This is useful information if you plan to schedule posts with which you want members to see and engage.
More Member Details
Age, gender, location
More member details provides demographic information such as age, gender, and location.
Top Contributors
You can also see who your top contributors are so you can give them a shout out, honor, or recognition.
While for the past decade Facebook has been focusing on "Making the world more open and connected," they are changing course. Mainly because that focus had a fundamental flaw: it didn’t push for any specific positive outcome from more connection.
This past year, during their community summit in Chicago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a new mission statement, to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Groups are the resource to do just that and group insights are among the management tools to allow this to happen effectively.
Lisa Nielsen writes for and speaks to audiences across the globe about learning innovatively and is frequently covered by local and national media for her views on “Passion (not data) Driven Learning,” "Thinking Outside the Ban" to harness the power of technology for learning, and using the power of social media to provide a voice to educators and students. Ms. Nielsen has worked for more than a decade in various capacities to support learning in real and innovative ways that will prepare students for success. In addition to her award-winning blog, The Innovative Educator, Ms. Nielsen’s writing is featured in places such as Huffington Post, Tech & Learning, ISTE Connects, ASCD Wholechild, MindShift, Leading & Learning, The Unplugged Mom, and is the author the book Teaching Generation Text.
