After some real hassles with Facebook, we are converting our ILHM Facebook GROUP to a PAGE.
If you are a member of our Facebook Group, here's what this means for you:
- We'll have a Page instead of a Group. Like the group you can still post messages to the Wall and message boards and connect with other members.
- You'll want to visit our ILHM Facebook Page and click the link to become a "Fan." Once you do, you'll see the Institute logo on the Info tab of your Facebook profile and you'll be listed on the ILHM Page. You will be able to make public posts to the "Wall" on the ILHM Page as well as view and communicate with other ILHM "Fans" (both members and non-members).
- On Friday June 26th we will delete the ILHM Group on Facebook. We will no longer have a private, "members-only" area on Facebook. The ILHM Page is open to everyone--members and non-members of The Institute. (Of course, we will still have our members-only group on Linkedin).
Why are we doing this?
Facebook made it impossible for us to effectively manage our private group. For weeks now, Facebook has been blocking our accounts when we try to send individual messages to individual group members, and has never responded to our or inquires or requests for assistance.
With recent changes in the Facebook platform and policies, Facebook seems to be pushing businesses to use Pages instead of Groups.
As you may know, it is very difficult to get through to an actual human at Facebook support. Our messages sent to Facebook yield either no response whatsoever or generic auto-responses pointing to their help files.
As you can see, their help files are not much help when it comes to understanding why we are being blocked or how to avoid the issue:
It is interesting to note that we were not sending messages with great frequency, nor were we receiving warnings about the rate at which we were sending messages prior to them enacting the blocks on our accounts.
Not being able to communicate with our own members for days is obviously unacceptable. Facebook may want to remove any notion of human contact from it's member experiences, but we do not.
In the past, Facebook would apparently help businesses "convert" their Groups to Pages. We thought they were going to do this for us. In fact my follow-up inquiry yesterday was again met with this auto-response email with these instructions:
We did this and never received a reply or any action from Facebook. So, I did another Google search and found this blog post, which pointed to this Facebook help page, which contained this message:
Obviously this directly contradicts the email that Facebook sent me yesterday. Ah, Facebook!
Hopefully our move to a public Page will eliminate the problems we were having with the private group. It will certainly continue to give you a way to show your interest/affiliation with The Institute and an easy way to connect and interact with others like you.
And of course, there is always our members-only group on Linkedin.
