Tools to help administer your Facebook Groups

I’m an administrator for an active Facebook group. There’s about a 100 or so of us that regularly post and discuss various issues. As most members live in or have some connection to Silicon Valley, discussions tend to center around startup/technology issues.

Despite regular calls to try other group discussion solutions, we’ve never moved on. Facebook Groups, while underpowered in many ways, has the key advantage that they’re on, well, Facebook. Facebook is the common dominator of online social networks. Almost everyone has an account and visits it at least once in a while. Which is great for helping keep a group active. Asking a new member of the group to add yet another social network to their online browsing routine seems like too big of hurdle.

So while the group has been a great success, the almost complete lack of adminstrative and analytics tools can be frustrating. So recently I’ve started a project to work around this. I’ve written two paired tools. The first, facebook-export handles connecting to Facebook’s API and downloading member and posts information. The second, facebook-analyze, provides several simple tools to help you understand and administer your groups.

Hopefully this is helpful to some of you. For installation and usage instructions, see the Github repo. Feedback and pull requests welcome.