New Facebook groups can help business.

The way groups works is you now can go through your list of friends and group them by family, prospects, clients, etc. The potential for business is that you can then communicate in unique ways only with group members. You can communicate via email, chat and even post documents to the group privately.

If you want to promote your seminar or webinar, you can target your customer related contacts group and make sure that only they see the invite via email.

Anyone can opt-out of a group and which will cause some unnecessary spamming but overall I think this could become significant for business.

Companies can create private, customer only groups, and use the platform as a way to share information with this group.

There’s also a group chat function that could make for some interesting business use as well. I think hosting live chats with your groups on Facebook might prove an effective way to create more engagement on the platform.

Brian Solis say, The most interesting aspect of social networks as they exist today is that they’re structured around you. As such, the infrastructure that supports your social graph places your updates and activity at the center of your social graph. While you’re given a elementary controls to select who sees what, the majority of status updates are published for everyone. As you and I know, that’s simply not at all how human interaction works in the real world.

The real life social network is designed designed to facilitate the creation and cultivation of discreet social graphs. The people who populate each and also what we say and do is different across each group.

In other words everyone in our network interacts differently with us. We cannot assume all have the same framework for interaction. Groups helps us place these interactions in specific grouping and post information to only specific groups - creating a more "real connection" set of interaction points.

Groups represents the future of social networking. We can design groups where we communicate, collaborate, and co-create with purpose, whether it’s personally or professionally. But, for the time being, we can do so in a network we can learn, in real-time, how to take control of our online presence and the social graphs we choose to cultivate.