This week Meta held the “Facebook Communities Summit”, announcing new tools for Facebook groups with the aim of increasing the potential of communities. As communities on the platform continue to evolve, Facebook wants to make collaboration between people easier and more fun, as well as always putting the safety of members first.
The news of Facebook groups
Among the novelties of Facebook for groups we find tools that allow you to customize your community ad hoc. Administrators will be able to:
- Easily customize i colors, post backgrounds and fonts that appear in groups, along with emojis that members can use to react to content.
- Use selectable presets with posts, badges and more that can be activated for the group with one click.
- Suggest to the members of the preferred formats to use when posting something to the group. There will be a new fixed button on the screen, to publish a post without having to go back to the top of the page.
- Create a welcome message and share the rules of the group– New members will automatically receive the message when they join a group, so they can quickly develop a sense of belonging.
- Members will soon also be able to award community prizes. These awards encourage engagement, make content more visible to members, and help better demonstrate group content.
Photo credits: Facebook.
The platform then realized that keeping a single main feed within groups can be chaotic. It is therefore testing the ability of being able to create various subgroups within a group, divided by specific topics or occasions, to immediately find the contents of interest. Again to deepen the connections between members, it will be possible to use the “Community chat” both on Facebook and Messenger, as well as creating events to meet virtually or in person.
The tools dedicated to administrators to better manage communities
Photo credits: Facebook.
New tools will be introduced to help administrators a manage Facebook groups more easily:
- It will be possible pin the ads and choose the order in which they appear in a new “Featured” section at the top of groups to ensure their community sees the most important details first.
- It will be updated Admin Assist to provide personalized recommendations on the moderation criteria to add. The reasons why Admin Assist refuses certain content will be explored and the tool will also be available on Facebook Lite.
- Community chats will allow administrators to create a chat for the team of administrators and moderators so they can better coordinate decisions in real time.
The platform is also testing the possibility of, again for administrators, create fundraisers for group projects, offset community management costs or show support to administrators and moderators. Administrators will also be able to sell the merchandise they have created for the community through a shop within the group.
Administrators in the future will be able to create paid subgroups which members can subscribe to for a fee to gain exclusive access to more content; experiences such as coaching or networking or more in-depth conversations.
Some communities use both groups and pages to connect with people. The platform is therefore introducing a new experience for consumers who brings together the best of Pages and Groups in one place. Page administrators will also be able to take advantage of the moderation tools available to groups today. This new experience will be in testing over the course of the next year, before it becomes more widely available.