The first ever Facebook Communities Summit hosted today in Chicago involved hundreds of group admins, where new features were announced by Facebook to support the communities.
The summit was started by Mark Zuckerberg, celebrating the role of the groups in the global community of Facebook. He thanked the admins that lead these groups, which actually evolved and are evolving into societal communities for real.
Zuckerberg went on to announce a new mission for Facebook that is to guide social media in the next decade. The aim is to provide power to the people for building community with the aim to “bring the world closer together.”
A vital part of delivering as per the new mission is to support the group admins, who are recognized as the real community leaders on Facebook. Here are several new features that are to help the admins manage and keep on evolving their respective communities:
- Group Insights: Consistent reports of group admins to Facebook contain their efforts to understand more of what’s going on in groups in order to support the members to the fullest. The feature of Group Insights will help them see real-time metrics around growth, engagement, and membership – as in the number of posts and times members are engaged in.
- Membership request filtering: Another issue the admins face is admitting new members, which is quite tiresome considering all factors. Facebook is coming up with filtering options regarding this, where the admins can sort and filter membership requests based on common categories such as location, gender, and so on.
- Removed member clean-up: To protect the groups from any and every kind of abusage, admins can now remove a member, and every contribution of the member brought on to the respective group (like posts, comments, and other people added) – in one single step.
- Scheduled posts: Group admins, along with the moderators, can now create and schedule posts conveniently at any specific time.
- Group to group linking: Facebook began testing group-to-group linking, allowing the admins of the groups to recommend related or common groups to their members. This is one of the initial efforts of the social media platform provider with the aim to bring communities and sub-communities closer together.
As per recent most global stats, more than 1 billion people use Facebook Groups, and more than 100 million users are members of “meaningful groups”. These “meaningful groups” readily become integral parts of the user experience of Facebook. Social media aims at helping 1 billion people to join meaningful communities such as these.
The Chicago Summit celebrated a few of these groups, which are built around local neighborhoods, shared life experiences, and passions.
Facebook plans to arrange more events to bring group admins and members together, who are settled outside the U.S. Further details to be shared in this context are coming soon.
