Slightly achey high five 5am club! So over the last year ago we’ve switched from email and texting to Facebook Messenger for most of our communication. This morning I’m talking messaging and tomorrow will be video chat. Nearly everyone has a Facebook account these days which makes it great for getting projects going. Hold up Facebook haters, I hear your concerns; you can use Skype, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp and many others to achieve the same thing.

How do we use it? Facebook calls group chats ‘conversations’. Flights of Helios have one main conversation with all band members. Then we have other conversations for projects like making merchandise or video making which feature a few band members plus collaborators from outside.

So obviously you can use it to chat by text instantly on desktop and mobile for tiny data which is awesome for organising things. People don’t get tempted to spend hours honing an email to perfection which is a terrible time sink; it’s disposable communication. But that’s not all – you can also ping all sorts of other shit between you:

• images! what do you think of this t-shirt design / photo for the website?
• videos and voice memos! check me out playing this new riff in my jimjams
• more uses for text! what do you think of these terrible new lyrics?
• links to pretty much anything! YouTube, Soundcloud, Dropbox…
• fun GIFs! Everyone needs a bit of silliness. We do a lot of psychedelic cats.

So how do I start a Facebook conversation?

• You’ll all need to be friends. On Facebook, that is. IRL is harder sometimes.
• Start a new Facebook message, add everyone to the recipients list, add a nice little one-liner and send it. Your group chat is on!
• Click the cogwheel top-right and rename the conversation to something sensible if you’re planning to use a few different ones.

That’s it, see you tomorrow where we talk video chat! Chris FoH