Tag Archives: braintree

NEW DATA: The continued rise of Facebook groups in 2025

A chance conversation a few years ago led me to explore Facebook groups and detail. What I found out showed how critically important they are to public sector communicators.

Firstly, why Braintree? Because it’s a useful mix of the urban of the new town built in the 1960s and also the patchwork of rural villages that surround it.

It’s a district of 150,000 and since that first piece of research I’ve gone back in subsequent years to map the role Facebook groups play in the district. That is apart from 2023. I think I was doing other things.

Here’s the 2025 research.

In 2025, the population of Braintree is155,000 people.

Across the district there are 569 Facebook groups across the area. Everything from sports teams, clubs, campaigns, village noticeboards and pet pages.

The overall number sometimes fluctuates. In early years, very small groups with a handful of people were unearthed by Facebook’s search engine. Search now finds the larger and more established groups.

For example, the village of Ashen with 300 residents has just one Facebook group with just over 300 members.

In larger places there are more Facebook groups. So, in Gestingthorpe where more than 400 live there are seven groups including the Gestingthorpe Village Facebook group with 600 members.

In the bright lights of Braintree itself, 48 Facebook groups can be found with almost 200,000 members combined. There are a number of groups from Braintree Hub with 30,000 members, Braintree and Surrounding (Buy and Sell) almost 8,000 with the local history group Braintree as it was with 10,000 members.

Across the whole of Braintree district there are almost 600 groups with a combined membership of more than 825,000.

If you are a nerd about this, all this means that are roughly 5.5 Facebook group memberships per head of population.

Sceptics would reasonably point out that some people who are members of groups don’t live in the area. Maybe they moved away but still want to check in on what’s going on. Maybe their parents live there.

But the figure is sizable enough to be a yardstick of how important Facebook groups are in a community.

The critical significance of Facebook groups

Newspapers and newsrooms are in established decline and they have moved away from the business model which they ran successfully for more than a century.

Advertising has moved online, Reach plc websites have moved away from covering the local area in the frantic search for clicks. Reach’s Black Country Live Facebook page near me may promise Black Country stories but delivers entertainment news and stories from across the UK almost 50 per cent of the time.

There are two main reasons why Facebook groups are significant to public sector communicators.

The first is Ofcom data that shows they are the prime route to find council news in their area.

In other words, Facebook groups are not only where people are but it’s also where people are finding out about what’s going on locally.

The figures here are for local government, but I’d argue police, NHS and fire and rescue will be close behind.

The second reason why Facebook groups are significant is because they are still taking up a big chunk of people’s Facebook timelines.

A couple of weeks ago I used this table published by Meta to show that links from Facebook pages are still not cutting through.

Just 1.3 per cent of people’s timelines are taken up with a page with a link. That’s vanishingly small.

But if you also look at the column to the left you’ll see 14.4 per cent of people’s timelines are from Facebook groups which don’t have links.

That’s a big chunk of attention.

Some Facebook groups are going to be good and some are not.

Navigating all this is why I run ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER workshops.

I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.

Creative commons credit: Marine Parade with commercial vehicles and crowds, 1989 by Robin Webster, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

FACEBOOK DATA: How important are Facebook groups? Membership is booming and there’s new tools

People are joining Facebook groups more in 2021 with an astonishing 79 per cent surge in memberships.

That’s the headline stat of a rolling data project I’ve carried out over the past years to look at how one district is embracing the platform.

In October 2021, in Braintree, Essex there are almost 940,000 individual memberships of Facebook groups in the district – up from 521,000 the year before.

In the week where Mark Zuckerburg announced a raft of new tools for Facebook groups this is further evidence of the vitality and importance of groups on then platform.

What is a Facebook group?

A Facebook group is an online community where people with a shared interest can connect. They can be communities of interest that have come together or they can be geographic communities building themselves a space online. Here, a village, town or housing estate can build their own Facebook group.

The trend for groups mirrors an established trend away from the open market of discussion and towards more private walled gardens.

Facebook’s own data from 2020 would suggest that two thirds of all Facebook users use Facebook groups. That figure is likely to have increased.

Admins of Facebook groups are responsible for content and good order and have long been more influential in their community than the local patch newspaper reporter.

What does the data say?

The trend is upwards as the data shows there are more memberships of groups.

For the past five years I’ve collected data from Braintree in Essex a district of 150,000 39 miles from London. Braintree is a new town largely built in the 1960s top house the overspill from the capital. It has the same problems that face other urban areas.

Surrounding the town is a rural district of small towns and villages with the mix of urban and rural making it an ideal mix to study.

Memberships boom in Braintree

In Braintree, Facebook group membership is booming with the 940,000 memberships set against a backdrop of a population of 147,000. That works out as 6.3 memberships per head of population.

Back in 2017, the number of Facebook group memberships was almost half the current number on just less than half a million.

Groups in Braintree can range from the parish noticeboard of the small village group of Little Bardfield Online with 271 members to the 13,000 who belong to the Braintree Hub.

They can also reflect existing networks such as Steeple Bumstead Badminton Club (47 members) or Rayne Neighbourhood Watch (585 members).

They can be self-organised protest groups, such as the Hatfield Peverel Delay and Repay group set-up with 86 frustrated commuters or Parishes Against Incinerator with more than 5,000 members.

Elsewhere, you don’t have to go far to understand the demise of local newspaper small ads. Braintree Sales (4,400 members) is one of dozens of selling sites where people can sell unwanted bikes, pushchairs or guitars. Jobs in Braintree Essex has more than 5,000 members.

Overall, in 2021 the number of groups also rose – by 219 per cent – to 721 across the district.

Pages rise but find it harder to cut through

The study also found that the number of pages had also risen but the 14 per cent increase to 1,128 lags in pace behind groups in the same area.

Facebook data also shows that less page content is being shown in people’s timelines than groups or updates from friends and family. Just 14.3 per cent of your timeline is from pages while 19.3 per cent is from groups and 57 per cent from friends and family.

In short, there are more pages chasing fewer organic slots.

New tools and Facebook groups in the metaverse

A further indication of Facebook’s love affair with groups are the increased number of tools being created for the platform.

Over the past 12-months, the creep of groups has increased as content from groups you don’t follow is being slipped into your timeline if it’s relevant to you and if the group is public.

When I post in the Old Football Grounds group I’m in I end up with related content from other groups.

Facebook announced more tools at the Facebook Communities summit in 2021.

Fundraisers, sponsorship, shops, paid sub-groups and other transactional things have been announced.

But beyond that, groups are also part of the metaverse idea. In a nutshell, this is using technology to share experiences.

“Groups and communities are going to be an important part of the [metaverse] vision. When we can’t be together the metaverse will get us closer.”

Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook Communities Summit 2021

Now, what he metaverse is trying to be and could be is up for discussion but again its a sign of direction of travel that groups are part of the plan.

For me, I can see the functionality making it easier to run events online.

To learn how to better engage with Facebook groups sign-up for the ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER programme that shows you this and other skills. More here.

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