How do you get people in a facebook group to participate in a discussion?

I’m a member of a number of groups, so I can give at least my input into the situation.

When you are a part of many groups (I join most of the ones that I think are funny, like “How was my hiding spot, on a scale of 1 to Bin Laden?”), you get a lot of junk on your news feed. A lot of groups post advertisements and music videos often, so I usually scroll over any posts from any groups out of habit, and don’t even notice them.

There are a few groups that I have learned post more interesting content (mostly local groups, like radio stations) that I actually pay attention to, but for the most part I ignore posts from “I don’t care if it’s 4AM, I don’t consider it tomorrow until i wake up.” and “Thanks phone, for being strong everytime i dropped you.” without even consciously realizing that they were there.

I’d say just get more members and keep trying to start up discussions. Like I said, I’ve started to notice which groups post interesting questions and topics, so I think eventually people will begin to respond, when they realize you aren’t posting advertisements and senseless questions like “Whats your favorite color?”.

Writing skill. Obviously your discussion is not intriguing.

i think if they are interested in the topic,they will get involved or if they have a story or experience to share.

I wondered if maybe they would post something if the page was private, because right now it´s public. The questions posted so far are: What do you miss the most from the US? (we all live in another country) and another one is: Why are you here? The discussion poster places her answer, and a second admin posts her answer too. So if they write more eloquently, do you think that would help?

You may need to gain more group members. You will get a lot more feedback as one member answering will show up on many members’ homepages, causing a chain reaction.

i have a coupleof facebook friends who often generate discussion, and here’s what i noticed. first, they themselves are very open about their passions, they post on things they care about. second, they ask questions, such as “what do you think?” third, they respond to what people post (on their pages and on their friends’ pages).

clearly they spend a lot of time on facebook, because their responses are timely. sometimes the discussions are realtime. doing this requires notifications. on my mac, i had software that i customized to show a badge from certain people and also a chrome extensions that let me go quickly to a goven friend’s page.

so i’d say a combination of being very involved oneself and keeping an eye in realtime on others’ involvement.

and of course, more discussion comes from ten friends than two. last thing: they don’t have (m)any things littering their stream like farmville or whatever, so people don’t tune it out andso are more likely to read their posts to begin with.

hopethis helps.

Interesting… It´s possible that we do need more members, as we currently only have a few dozen members. So we´ll work on that.
We´ll also take the “What do you think?” suggestion into account as well and think of some topic that may generate discussion.