Facebook is making public groups easier to join and discover by surfacing relevant discussions in users’ news feeds.
When this test begins in a few months, users will see related Facebook Group discussions in their news feed when someone posts a link or re-shares a post.
Related group discussions in the News Feed.
The ‘Groups’ tab will be updated to surface content from public groups that are related to users’ interests.
Also in the Groups tab, users can find and quickly join recommended groups that are relevant to them.
However, users will be able to engage with public group content without actually joining the groups themselves.
Redesigned ‘Groups’ tab.
Facebook Group admins will be able to chose whether their group should be included in this new public groups experience.
That means groups can remain public while also not having their content surfaced to non-members.
These are just a few of several changes coming to Facebook Groups. Along with expanding the reach of groups, admins are getting new tools to work with.
More Updates to Facebook Groups
The 10-year anniversary of Facebook Groups is on the horizon, the company notes in an announcement.
Over 1.8 billion people now use Facebook Groups every month, where they engage in tens of millions of active communities.
To make it easier and more efficient to manage these communities, Facebook is rolling out new tools for admins.
“Admins are at the heart of every community, whether they are Public or Private. In fact, there are more than 70 million people involved in building and running Facebook groups active in the past month.”
Admins are getting access to these new tools for managing groups:
- Admin Assist: Set rules so Facebook can automatically moderate posts in your group for you. For example, you can ban posts with certain words, or prohibit posts from people who haven’t been in the group very long.
- New Topics: Admins can organize content by topic with hashtags and pin a topic to the top of the group to highlight it for everyone.
- Branded Content for Public Groups: Use the Brand Collabs Manager to make money from your Public groups by connecting with brands looking to promote their products and services.
- Community Management Certification: Take an online course on how to build, grow and support your communities through a set curriculum and exam.
Example of the Admin Assist feature.Example of the pinned hashtags feature.
Lastly, Facebook Groups are getting a number of new features to encourage more engagement between members.
These new features are on the way to help spark discussions:
- Chats: Create and join real-time conversations within a group.
- Prompts: Start conversations with a new type of collaborative post where you can share photos about a specific topic and swipe through everyone’s responses.
- Q&A: Admins can host text-based question-and-answer sessions that are easy for the community to participate in.
- Customize your profile in groups: Change the way you show up in different groups by setting a custom profile photo and sharing info that’s relevant to each community.
Example of the Q&A feature.Example of the Prompts feature.
See a preview of these features in the launch video below:
Source: Facebook Newsroom
