As a studio or school owner, keeping in touch with your staff is very important. Good communication helps to build a great company culture and teamwork. Consistency within your employees is very important. Your staff will have to communicate with you, other staff members, students, and parents on a daily basis.

Facebook is a great space that you can use to organize these conversations effectively. While phone calls and emails are good ways of communicating, Facebook groups keep these conversations in one place. Perhaps you have announcements or general questions that multiple people have asked you. Posting these types of things in a group that all of your staff can see will help keep everybody on the same page in an efficient way.

Facebook can also be a place for your staff to share their experiences, ask for advice, and support their co-workers.  Additionally, it can be a place that you, as the owner, ask the staff questions and let them know that their opinion is valued. There is a central calendar for the groups, a place to share and edit files, a chat option, and an opportunity to poll the members of the group for their opinions. All of these things, along countless others, are topics and reasons that a Facebook group will organize this team of employees.

Creating a group is a very simple process. Keep in mind that you can customize this group to your specifications:  add whomever you want, block whomever you don’t want, and talk about what is important to your group. This post will help you understand the different options for managing the group.

Privacy

There are 3 levels of privacy when creating a group: open, closed, and secret.

Open: Anyone can see the group, who’s in it, and what members post.

Have an open group for anyone to join and jump in on the conversation. This kind of group can be good for marketing purposes and showing your target audience that your company is a good place to do business.

Closed: Anyone can see the group and who’s in it. Only members see posts.

A closed group is searchable and other Facebook users can request to join your group. These groups can be used for keeping a conversation private, but open for others to know about and join.

Secret: Only members see the group, who’s in it, and what members post.

Members

Inviting people to your group can be the tricky part. Say you want to have a group of all your staff, but do not want to be their “Facebook friend.” The best option for that is to create an open group, send an email to your staff with the link to your group. After everybody has entered the group, change the privacy settings and make it secret or closed. The creator of the group is an administrator, so you can make sure none of the other members have access to adding or removing members.

Another option is to see if you are friends with one of your staff members. Then, they can go in and add the other employees to the group. Be aware that after 250 people are in the group, you cannot change the privacy settings.

Make sure that your staff is all on the same page about the group. Talk to them about what kinds of information will be posted here, how often they should check it, and your expectations from them. You can even make a group of other owners so you can all communicate about the industry. Same concept, just different conversations.

Tip: Use the magnifiying glass to search through previous posts and conversations in the group instead of scrolling through them!

Do you use Facebook groups? Are they effective for your business?