InDesignSecrets readers: Check out our new Facebook Group!

Anne-Marie Concepcion

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Since so many of our InDesignSecrets readers are active on Facebook, we recently decided to set up a “home away from home” there in the form of an open, public Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/indesignsecrets/. We hope you’ll join in the fun with us there!

In a public Facebook group, like in an online forum, anyone can read what other people have posted, but to write your own post or comment on someone else’s, you need to join first. It’s easy to do, just click the big Join Group button underneath the cover image.

We still have our InDesignSecrets Facebook Page; which is a different beast, meant more for one-to-many (us to you all) kinds of posts and announcements. Facebook groups, on the other hand, are focused on interests or communities, members drive most of the content (with the quiet help of an admin and moderators in the background) and the content is many-to-many.

A couple tips

By default, you’ll be notified every time someone posts to the InDesignSecrets group (“All Posts”). You can reduce how often you get notified by choosing a different option from the menu to the right of the Join button.

If you click the “…More” button in the same area (to the right of the Share button), you’ll get an option to add the Group’s page to your Shortcuts, which appear in the left sidebar whenever you’re in Facebook. That makes it really easy to find the InDesign Secrets group the next time you want to ask a question.

Soft launch to official announcement

Our group has been running for a couple weeks now in a soft-launch kind of way while we figured things out. As I write this, we do have a bunch of members there already, and it’s been working well.

The admins for the group are me, David, Mike, and Erica (Gamet); and we’ll be there to help answer questions and keep things relevant. In case you were wondering,  this doesn’t change a thing about our lively InDesignSecrets forums, those are great! And our Private Member forum will remain a benefit for our premium members. The Facebook group is just another way for us to help each other out.

There are other special-interest Facebook groups for InDesign users like Jean-Claude Tremblay’s The Treasures of GREP, and one that I admin with Rick Johnson and Koby Johnson, eprdctn (Ebook Production forum), a Facebook version of the Twitter #eprdctn community. I’m sure that we’ll be cross-linking to each other’s groups, and others we find, to help each other find the answers to the InDesign questions they’re asking.

I look forward to seeing you all in our new Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/indesignsecrets/!