At its Communities Summit last week, Facebook has announced many new tools to help Group Admins better manage their communities.
It’s hard to believe that Facebook Groups were launched ten years ago already. In this time, they have become a significant feature on the social network, primarily as Facebook concentrates on building communities around specific interests.
Facebook Groups are especially crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic as people can’t meet physically as often.
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There are currently over 1.8 billion people using Groups each month, taking part in tens of millions of active communities on the platform “where people come together to talk about their interests, learn new things, be entertained, and make connections.”
To help communities connect more effectively, Facebook has announced new tools and programs for Group Admins.
New Tools to Help Admins Manage Facebook Groups More Efficiently
Admin Assist: Admins can set rules so that Facebook can help them moderate posts in their groups. For example, they can decline specific posts with certain keywords, or those that come from people who haven’t been in the group very long, or whose posts have been reported in the past.
New Topics: Admins can organize their content by topic with hashtags and pin a topic to the top of the group to highlight it for everyone.
Branded Content for Public Groups: Admins can now use the Brand Collabs Manager to make money from their Public groups by connecting with brands looking to promote their products and services.
Community Management Certification: Admins can take an online course on how to build, grow, and support their communities through a set curriculum and exam.
New Ways to Help Facebook Group Admins Engage with their Community
Chats: Create and join real-time conversations within a group.
Prompts: Start conversations with a new type of collaborative post where you can share photos about a specific topic and swipe through everyone’s responses.
Q&A: Admins can host text-based question-and-answer sessions that are easy for the community to participate in.
Customize your profile in groups: Change the way you show up in different groups by setting a custom profile photo and sharing info relevant to each community.
Discover and Join Conversations in Public Groups
Facebook is also starting to test new ways for people to discover specific conversations in Public groups on and off its platform. For example, users may see Related Discussions in News Feed when another user posts a link or reshares a post on Facebook.
This is meant to allow them to discover what other groups are saying about the same content.
The Groups tab will show posts from Public groups that are related to their interests, as well as popular posts in Public groups that are recommended to them.
Users may also start seeing Public group conversations outside of Facebook itself – for example, when searching the web for something.
When Facebook starts testing this feature within the next few months, Group Admins will be able to include their groups in the new Public groups experience. As part of the opt-in process, admins can turn on post-approvals for their group.