This Blog entry focuses on social media at a local level, rather than UK & Worldwide. The group in question only has 1000 or so members and only 100 are active regularly. I thought I would add it to this site to give you an idea of both ends of the social media scale. My business is located in a market town near the cities of York and Leeds. We have a local Facebook group in our town and it is a very useful forum for business owners such as my Trophy and engraving company. We spend a lot of time promoting independent businesses, the local attractions and 99.9% of the great people that live and work in the area.
Up until a few weeks ago I was an administrator for the group, I was one of seven people who had the very basic task of adding and welcoming people to the group, general housekeeping and keeping an eye out for spam adverts. We also checked on member’s comments and made sure no one was being abused or insulted by other members of the group. Issues had been resolved by the required person replying with ideas or information in answer to the question. Many stories in the local newspaper have come from the comments and postings made from the 1000+ members involved. We even got into communication with somebody at County Council level about the state of the poor repairs on the fairly new bypass that skirts around our town centre.
Sadly a while ago, a political issue was posted and various heated opinions and tangents started off from it. Everyone is entitled to free speech, but sadly the topic went away from the whole idea of ‘promoting our town’. This was the most active the members have been as nearly everyone wanted to give a comment or view. It looked like we needed to close down the group for the sake of people living in the area. Luckily a small group of active members took the group over. They have cleared out the negativeness, deleted the negative comments and also removed the rogue group members who didn’t have our town centre at the heart of their comments. Local level social media can be great at times, but can also risk negativeness if not administered correctly.