New Facebook Group Features Announced Today

Believe it or not, it is 10 years ago that Facebook has launched Facebook Groups.

Today in the Facebook Communities Summit - opened up to the wider public - Facebook presented new features that they will launch for Facebook Groups. Some are for private and others are for public groups.

Before they went into details Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, mentioned that there are 70 million Facebook Group administrators out there today, making sure that the groups stay a safe environment to share.

Safe and communication is at the heart of what Facebook is providing, so a lot of these features help exactly with safety and enhancing communication in the groups.

Features that were announced today are:

Admin Assist

Admin assist is a feature that helps adims to run and better administer their groups. The example that they gave was that if you run a parenting group, you might want to silence new members so that they can only read but not post for 30 days. 

New Topics

With new topics admins can easily pick up hashtags in the group and put other messages and posts 'underneath' these hashtags, so link them to these hashtags. Being a group admin myself, I know that tags are quite important to surf groups and staying on top.

Brand Collabs Manager

Brand Collabs Manager - now available also for public groups - allows admins to partner with brands to refinance their groups. So I assume that in future it is easier to monetize groups. Which makes absolutely sense, because if you put all the sweat and tears into building a group you might want to live off the group at some point. Pretty much like an Instagram influencer can do today, but of course in a much more solid way, as in groups you often share much more deeper and wider content as you do on Instagram.

Chats

A feature that they had introduce in the past but then took offline again was 'Chats', a functionality to chat between members in a group. Interesting feature to increase the dwell time in groups I think. And with Facebook owning What's App and Facebook Messenger, they obviously know a thing or two about chats. Great ad on.

Q&A's

With Q&A's you have a feature where you can stack different cards, and each card is carrying one question and obviously one answer. You can pin that to the top of your group so that newly added people can get their initial questions answered right away.

Prompts

Prompts is an easy way to collect posts and messages under one topic, like 'Sunday BBQ', so that you can then swipe through all those posts. This actually reminds me of a feature similar in Instagram where you stack several story postings under one topic.

Customize Your Profile in Groups

In case you did not know, you have a profile page in a Facebook Group as a group member. So now you can customize this profile page to make it more fit to the group. This is of course a great feature for gaming groups, dog & cat groups or fitness groups I guess.

As a lot of these above mentioned features are for private groups, the following one is for public groups as Facebook of course wants to harness the power of groups as virtual campfires where people come together:

They have a functionality that pushes content from public group into private Facebook streams when Facebook thinks that this content is relevant for you. Quite need to increase - again - communication & dwell time.

With all these new features Facebook Groups will even be more of water-coolers in our digital world. Being a group admin myself, part of the club of 70 million, I have to say I welcome these features and I am very curious when and how they roll these features out. Unfortunately they have not said anything about when and how they are going to launch these features.

See you on the inside of Pioneers Decoding Digital.

Take care, 

Sebastian 

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