I started the UK True Crime Facebook Group around five years ago. At first, it was fun. I personally knew most people and it was a great place to chat and share true crime content. Once it got to about 3,000 people it became a little more trying and I had to ask for volunteers to help manage the group. Today, we have over 91,000 members in our vibrant community which has posed many challenges as we have grown.
Today, I thought I would share the my Top insights from managing a True Crime Facebook Group.
1, Strong Admins
In total, around eight people have worked on my group free of charge as admin support. It is a thankless task in many ways. Every single person I have worked with has been excellent, putting in countless hours and diffusing many an argument. The community can’t function without them.
If you are starting a Facebook Group, find some amazing Admins from day one. You won’t regret it.
2, Approve New Posts.
Change your settings so that a member of the Admin Team has to approve each new post.
My advice is to just do it. Honestly, it is absolutely the right thing to do and saves you deleting lots of dire posts and also being shut down by Facebook for infringing their rules on quality.
3, Group Quality.
As you know, Facebook have been clamping down on hate speech and other issues. For a crime group where lots of the conversation is around murder and violence this is an utter nightmare and we have received numerous warnings from Facebook that the group is about to be removed. This isn’t an idle threat as many other crime groups have been given the boot.
Our Admins are very careful about approving any memes and any posts on serial killers as these seem to trigger the Facebook police. But however careful we are, Facebook do sometimes remove the most innocent posts and never reverse their decisions: an example is where one poster wrote about ‘hitting the nail on the head’ and this was removed for threat of violence.
4, Arguments.
Some people argue about the most trivial thing, much more so than in real life. Often we just remove these posts, but it can get very personal very quickly and there are numerous times we have had to remove people from the group as they have checked out the profile of the other person and then gone back at them with some very personal insults, or even started sending direct messages. Sad, huh.
Most people in our group are a delight. A small minority really aren’t.
5, Genuine Approval Anger
Recently, with the Lucy Letby trial concluding, maybe 35 people tried to post the same link. We clearly don’t want to share the same content numerous times, so deleted most of these posts. For some, it is as if we had shot Bambi. It amazes me when we are constantly accused of having a personal agenda against some people – but it happens all the time.
For the record, we don’t have an agenda against you, we are just trying to run our community as well as possible.
6, Beware Experts
A Facebook Group is about discussion, right. But when others don’t agree with certain experts this can cause problems as some of these so-called experts don’t like it at all that what they say isn’t just accepted.
I maybe get two direct mails a month from an expert complaining that others are questioning them.
I love experts in our community as they can add so much. But it can be tricky….
7, Threats
My absolute pet hate is the people who post about someone convicted of a crime with words such as, “I wish I could be in a room with them alone for 10 minutes”.
As well as being more than just a bit pathetic, this is also threatening violence which, as grown-ups, we know is never the answer – there are always better solutions.
This weird macho posturing is beyond me.
8, Promoting Products
In true crime there are loads of authors, podcasters, YouTubers and other content creators trying to promote their content. Over 99% of these posts are deleted.
I take the view that in my Facebook Group the members don’t want to be bombarded with self-promotion as they are there for true crime content. It is a community and unless you are very active in this community, we allow no self-promotion.
Again, it doesn’t always go down well but I think only twice someone has used that line that I always smirk when I hear: ‘Don’t you know who I am’,
9, Spammers
The people who spam my group are usually promoting the Telegram messaging service by posting their nonsense all over often sensitive posts. I don’t quite see the strategy here and can’t believe they have even gained one member from the thousands of spams.
It is such a pain waking up in the morning and seeing a spammer may have commented 30+ times on all recent posts.
Delete and Remove.
10, My Role
I am very active in the group on a variety of discussions in the community and I have a very lively private chat with the Admin Team, where we discuss individual posts and any issues.
I try not to self-promote my own stuff too much in the group, but by far the most important thing I have learnt is not to express strong views.
Fortunately, I don’t have strong views on most things and am willing to be persuaded, but where I have put my own views forward, for example, my belief that we send way too many people to prison, it never ends well.
It is hard to make objective decisions for the group when trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade others to my point of view.
So nowadays I post a variety of content to spark discussion, but I try my very best to stay classy and stay neutral!
I really enjoy the Facebook Group and through it I have learnt so much and made some amazing friends.
It is a huge part of my life, but also for me and the Admin Team, as I hope you can see from what I have written above, it takes up a lot of time and also involves some tricky calls.
If you haven’t joined us yet, why don’t you head over now and join the conversation?
I wish you didn’t have to deal with all this extra stuff. Your doing a great job and I really appreciate your time and effort
Great blog post Adam, but sadly I feel that those who would benefit most from this insight won’t actually read it! You and your team do a great and underrated job.