How do you use topics in Facebook groups?

Facebook Groups provide businesses, including healthcare providers, with a vehicle for creating communities within their social media environment where followers, customers or patients can connect with others who have shared interests or experiences. (More on getting started with Facebook Groups here.)

If you build a successful group, with lots of activity, some organization may be in order to keep the group useful for all users. One way of doing so is to use “Topics” to organize posts within the group.

To create Topics, click on Manage Group in the left-column menu, then choose Topics for Posts. You will have the ability to create and save multiple Topics. For example, a family care clinic that hosts a Facebook Group for patients managing high blood pressure might create topics that include “Low-Salt/Salt-Free Cooking & Recipes” or “Exercise Inspiration.” A credit union group might have topics such as “Talking About Money With Kids” or “Improving Credit Scores.”

Once you have created the topics, as group administrator, you can retroactively apply up to 5 topic designations to already-published posts within the group (even if they were posted by other group members). The topics will also appear as an option for all new posts added to the group, allowing members to designate what topic their post matches.

By using topics, you make your Facebook Groups even more user friendly and helpful, building a stronger relationship and community for your followers. Learn more about creating and using groups in our quick guide: Using Facebook Groups To Improve Patient Relationships.

Are you looking for a better way to organize your Facebook Group posts? Did you know, you can use Facebook Group topics.

On this episode of Social Snacks, you will learn how to use Facebook Group topics.

This way you can better organize conversations in your Facebook Group, make it easier for members to find important posts, help other group members, and stay engaged with your Facebook Group members!

Why should you use Group Topics?

If you’ve ever used Facebook Groups, you know how frustrating it can be to find past conversations.

While you can search Facebook Groups, it doesn’t always return results even though you know there are group posts on a particular topic.

With the ablity to group topics in your Facebook Group, this helps fix Facebook Group search and makes it a lot easier for your group admin or members to easily find posts.

To begin using Facebook Group topics, here's a short 5-minute video tutorial that shows you how they work, how you can add group posts to Facebook Group topics and how to get notified about specific discussion topics in a Facebook Group.

 Transcription Services by GMR Transcription

1. Creating a Group topic

In order to add group posts to a discussion topic, you can click the dropdown on a post and select “add a new topic.”

Alternately, if you’ve already created any Group topics, you can select from those in the same dropdown menu as well.

Note: If you want to add a post to multiple group topics at once, you can select “show all” from the dropdown menu and quickly assign a post to another discussion topic or create a new one.

2. Organizing group topics

Once you’ve assigned a post to a Facebook Group topic, they will appear in the discussion topics section at the top of your group timeline.

Your posts will also show which topics they have been assigned to.

3. Removing Facebook Group Topics

If you want to remove Group Topics from a post, you can click on the discussion topic at the top of your group timeline and remove an individual post from that topic.

When you do this, if there are no longer any posts in a particular topic, the topic will be removed from the discussion topics area.

Getting notified about new group topics

Another useful feature for topics in your Facebook Group is that you can get notified about individual topics.

To turn notifications on for a particular group topic, simply click into the topic and then click on “get notifications.”

To turn notifications off, click the button again.

If you run your own group, this can be very useful if you have a topic setup for unanswered questions.

You can add new posts to a group topic as they come in and get notified when someone responds to them.

Once they have been completed, you or a group moderator can move them to an archived topic that you create.

How to edit Group Topics

Here are instructions on editing your group topics after you have created them.
 

Using Group Topics On Mobile

One curious omission for group discussion topics is that they are only available from the desktop right now.

If you want to use them on mobile, you’ll have to request the desktop version of Facebook from your mobile device.

Over to you

Facebook Group topics are a fast and efficient way to better organize your group posts.

Not only can they make it easy for group admins to keep on-top of unanswered posts, but members can also quickly find new content on a particular topic they are interested in.

Having worked with Group Topics, we find that you should keep the number of topics to a minimum. Otherwise you might overwhelm your audience.

What has been your experience with group discussion topics?

Share how many group topics you are using and let us know if you have any questions about them that we didn’t cover on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below.

About The Author

Christian Karasiewicz Founder, Social Chefs Founder and CEO of Social Chefs, a digital marketing agency. I host two shows, #SocialChatter, the industries longest running social media marketing talk show and Social Snacks, 5 minute or less social media marketing tutorials.

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