Facebook Groups Features
At its Facebook Communities Summit today, the social networking giant announced a series of updates and new tools for managing Facebook Groups, including tools designed to help admins better develop the group’s culture, as well as several other new additions like subgroups and subscription-based paid subgroups, real-time chat for moderators, support for community fundraisers and more.
Among the new features is a suite of tools for Facebook Group admins that will help those who run online communities customize their group in various ways — from the look-and-feel to greeting messages and more. These features can help to better differentiate one group from another and help to set the tone for the group and its culture, Facebook believes.
With the new tools, admins will be able to change the group’s colors, post backgrounds and fonts that appear in the group, and the emoji that members use to react to its content. They’ll also be able to use feature sets to select from preset collections of posts, formats, badges, admin tools and more that they can then enable for their group with a click to customize the group further. Admins could add multiple feature sets designed around what their group is about (e.g. “parenting”) or what sort of functionality it may offer (e.g. “questions and advice,” “real-time connections,” “learning,” etc.).
Another addition will be a new greeting message where admins can share the group rules with new members.
Facebook today also teased an upcoming feature called “community awards” that it plans to broadly roll out soon.
In terms of group functionality, admins will now be able to pin announcements to a new Featured section at the top of their groups and take advantage of an update to the moderation aid, Admin Assist.
Another set of newly announced tools are designed to help group members better connect with one another and, in some cases, generate revenue.
Groups will also be able to create recurring events if the group regularly meets virtually or in-person.
Facebook says it will also begin testing a new “subgroups” feature that will allow members to split off for specific topics, regions or occasions.
Another interesting aspect to this test is that Facebook will permit groups to create paid subgroups that group members can subscribe to for a fee in order to access exclusive content or experiences. During the tests, admins will receive the earnings from the subscriptions minus the app store fees and applicable taxes, but Facebook says it won’t take a cut of the revenue at this time.
Facebook Groups will be able to host community fundraisers as well, to raise money for group projects, to pay hosts for their time managing the group or anything else admins and members want to support financially.
“Groups and communities on Facebook are going to be an important part of this vision. Nothing beats being together. But when we can’t be together in person, the metaverse will help get us even closer to feeling that sense of an in-person connection,”
Facebook Groups Features
