Facebook is a behemoth which has on its network a largepercentage of educated Internet-accessing population in every country. In thesecond quarter of 2020, Facebook had over 2.7 billion individuals logging in. Morethan 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups every month and the number ofactive communities range in tens of millions.
Needless to say an organization with so much social cloutmust be in tune with the COVID-19’s effects on the world. Fully appreciating andresponding to the changing scenarios, Facebook unveiled measures to allowgreater participation to online communities via its Groups. These announcementscame in the tenth-anniversary of the launch of Facebook Groups at the FacebookCommunities Summit. This summit was held digitally.
In a promotional video for its mission, Facebook challengesusers to explore who they are, what they are into and let nothing hold themback. Then, they detail how for any and every interest, there is a public groupavailable. But the groups were always available, so what has changed? Thechange is that Facebook will be intelligently recommending related public groupconversations in many different places.
Facebook admitted that the way ahead for the plan is not alllaid out and the company will be experimenting. Some of the locations where therelevant public posts will be are in user’s newsfeed, user’s Groups tab. In addition,Facebook will be attempting to list more of the public group pages off-sitee.g. in search engines like Google.
Now, once some content has been found, the next step wouldbe taking in the information, and if the user has something to contribute, thenrespond to the post. To expedite this, Group admins will be given power toallow people to respond without being a member of the group. And to be fair to newparticipant, the rules will be informed to them before they expend any energyin preparing response.
Some new features to help spark conversations have been developed.These are Chats, Prompts, Q&A, and the ability for the admin to customizetheir profile as viewed in different groups.
To enable such a change, Facebook understands the need toempower Group admins and an array of tools have been created for the same.These features include Admin Assist, New Topics, Branded Content for PublicGroups, and Community Management Certification.
Facebook has not only widened the gates to its onlinecommunities but also made it easier to bump into them in a routine use of theapp. With this timely move when most people are finding more time on theirhands than they can handle, Facebook seems to guaranteeing not only moreconsumption of their users’ attention but also an outlet to people to extinguishtheir time.