Problems with Facebook revisited

Back in November I wrote a post saying that, on its own, Facebook is no good for promoting events. Irritatingly I have an example of one of the problems I mentioned.

The next Birmingham Social Media Cafe event is tomorrow, Friday 27 February. There’s a BSMC Facebook group and now would be a good time to send out a reminder of the event to its members. However, if you try to go to that group you see:

We’ve no idea why this has happened, how long it will be unavailabe or whether it’ll come back at all. There certainly hasn’t been any breach of any terms of usage. If the group is deleted permanently there’s really nothing we can do except start over again.

As I said before, Facebook’s a great tool for organising events and spreading info but (and this goes for all 3rd party website apps/services) if you’re in for the long haul then it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. In the case of the BSMC there’s a (new!) mailing list and the website to help get information about the event out.