The special topic for Week 7 - Facebook Group Discussion Engagements

The special topic for Week 7 is about how to engage discussion in Facebook Group. I have decided to pick two group that is related to my business adventures! The following two online social media group discussion that I participated are:

Business Owners, Entrepreneurs and Start-up. This group is aligned with my current business as I am re-building the business. By joining this group will allow me to learn more resources and skills from others to improve my business.

With this group, I asked a question if anyone has any positive experience using SCORE. SCORE is resource partner of U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) network of retired volunteers and mentoring which provide assistant and help many business owners and entrepreneurs though mentoring, workshops and educational resources to make their business opportunity a success.

Second group that I participated in is Entrepreneur Mindset. This is a group of community for like-minded people. This website provides inspirational information with other entrepreneurs. They provide and share different business methods and ideas. Their posts provide motivational information or ideas. While being asked a similar questions with the first group, I put out more of inspirational and motivational tone.

I waited for answers and either of these two groups, there were no responds with information but "Liked" my comments. Knowing that It will take a while for either groups to respond.  Perhaps my question to specific groups were not emphasized enough.

When I requested to join these groups, it took a while to be 'accepted' or approved  by each of group's administrator. Even though these were public sites, answering questions were necessary in order for the group administrators to screen my answers to make sure that I am the right fit for the group. Each group asked me 3 questions that were related to my professional experience and line of work to which is aligned with the group's topic. I recently discovered that Facebook provides new screening features where groups can screen new members with questionnaires before joining the group. Here is a tool about this features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa-0dht-SdY. This features should help to screen out the spammers and trolls.

After joining these groups, I discovered many of information from these groups were not as resourceful as I expected, and the discussion are not constructively related to Entrepreneurship. I am seeing that the group administrators were not paying any attention to the spammers or troll who joined these groups. Many of these people have been making sale calls or provide invitation to join their business "opportunity" with their own products and services.

The Strength and Weaknesses of Social Media Group Network.

By joining several social media groups do provide enhancement of business brand in the network where others are able to learn about other people's businesses. With these "free" resources and information exchange, I am able to improve my business and become more differentiate by exchanging my business's unique capabilities that other do not have. One of the downfall is that since Facebook's new screening tools and resources should be able to help administrators to screen out spammers and trolls, unfortunately they find ways to join various group for sales opportunities and not be part of the constructive non-sales discussion.