Facebook is a behemoth which has on its network a large percentage of educated Internet-accessing population in every country. In the second quarter of 2020, Facebook had over 2.7 billion individuals logging in. More than 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups every month and the number of active communities range in tens of millions.
Needless to say an organization with so much social clout
must be in tune with the COVID-19’s effects on the world. Fully appreciating and
responding to the changing scenarios, Facebook unveiled measures to allow
greater participation to online communities via its Groups. These announcements
came in the tenth-anniversary of the launch of Facebook Groups at the Facebook
Communities Summit. This summit was held digitally.
In a promotional video for its mission, Facebook challenges users to explore who they are, what they are into and let nothing hold them back. Then, they detail how for any and every interest, there is a public group available. But the groups were always available, so what has changed? The change is that Facebook will be intelligently recommending related public group conversations in many different places.
Facebook admitted that the way ahead for the plan is not all laid out and the company will be experimenting. Some of the locations where the relevant 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-site e.g. in search engines like Google.
Now, once some content has been found, the next step would be taking in the information, and if the user has something to contribute, then respond to the post. To expedite this, Group admins will be given power to allow people to respond without being a member of the group. And to be fair to new participant, the rules will be informed to them before they expend any energy in 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 customize their profile as viewed in different groups.
To enable such a change, Facebook understands the need to empower Group admins and an array of tools have been created for the same. These features include Admin Assist, New Topics, Branded Content for Public Groups, and Community Management Certification.
Facebook has not only widened the gates to its online
communities but also made it easier to bump into them in a routine use of the
app. With this timely move when most people are finding more time on their
hands than they can handle, Facebook seems to guaranteeing not only more
consumption of their users’ attention but also an outlet to people to extinguish
their time.