Facebook groups are online communities available for people to join, allowing them to interact with one another based on a common interest, affiliation or association. Facebook groups may be open to anyone, or joined by invitation only, and allow members to create and contribute to building an online community by promoting, sharing and discussing common topics.

From a sport and physical activity perspective, we’re particularly interested in the role Facebook groups (and online communities) can play in encouraging like-minded people to come together, share, discuss and support one another around a common interest such as trying to improve fitness or physical health.

While Facebook groups are for like-minded people who share a common interest (such as trying to improve fitness or physical health), Facebook pages are more similar to personal Facebook profiles; usually created by businesses or organisations seeking to promote themselves publicly through social media.

Facebook groups are likely to have more of a forum feel with the same prominence given to posts by both group members as those made by admins and usually a healthy discussion thread in each post – which also enjoy a higher priority in the News Feed vs Facebook pages, meaning that reach is more favourable.

Although Facebook pages were once a sure-fire way to gain exposure for your organisation or club; posting updates to your followers as a quick and simple way to convey your message without the need for costly advertising, nowadays, the sheer number of pages vying for attention is overwhelming. On average, Facebook users follow at least 70 pages.

This competition, combined with various algorithm updates that favour posts from friends and family, results in very few of a page’s fans seeing its content. The average reach for a page is currently just six per cent of fans!

Another challenge Facebook pages have faced in recent years is dramatically falling levels of engagement – people simply do not like, comment and share page content to the degree they did previously.

Above all, in a sport and physical activity context, Facebook groups feel like far safer places for users to engage within, therefore, interaction levels are higher than Facebook pages and often result in a more motivated and better supported online community.

Facebook groups have a number of features, most of which are unavailable on pages, which contribute towards enhancing the member experience, and supporting people to be more physically active.

These include:

• Mentorship programme for peer support
• Social learning units which enable you to host a curriculum of training resources in one familiar and easy-to-use platform for free
• The ability to help people learn new things through video or written content in these social learning units (particularly useful for organisations involved in getting people active), and the ability to track progress throughout is invaluable and offers a level of functionality normally associated with purpose-built, paid-for platforms
• Multiple features for video including the ability to upload pre-recorded video, create Facebook Live video for live broadcasting which can also be archived and the new Messenger Rooms which provides a Zoom-like experience for group members
• Post formatting in the form of page mark-up enabling you to prettify your posts with headings, bullets, bold, italics and more
• Topics which enable posts to be organised into categories
• Polls to help you carry out member research as well as aide engagement
• Data capture of new members via a question and answer tool (you can even collect email addresses)
• Options on group visibility enabling groups and their content to be public or private
• A search function that helps members quickly find content
• Pinned posts and announcements for important information

The interactive behaviour from members makes groups a great option for supporting people wanting to become more active. The more motivation, support and encouragement people get, the more likely they are to continue their fitness journey.

Groups can be used to build a community around a given topic, such as getting into running, and then enable easy connections with others. Members are encouraged to perform the activities whilst the group creates inspiration and motivation as well as a support network.

The ability of groups to show other people “like me” enjoying activities through the posts they share are also inspiring:

Peer support is also crucial in helping get people over set backs and frustrations:

Groups also provide a place for members to share their successes:

Group members will also respond to FAQs and even relatively obscure questions that might otherwise bog organisers down: