Facebook Groups will soon feel more like thriving communities

Facebook has introduced new features for groups that should make them better than ever. The work was inspired by a Communities Summit event the company held for the first time ever in Chicago earlier this year.

Here’s all that’s coming as a result:

• Welcome Posts: For admins, welcoming new members and making them feel supported is critical to building community. To help them introduce new members to the group, admins can now write a welcome post that will automatically tag new joiners.
• Badges: We also heard that members want ways to easily identify group leaders and other members. That’s why we’ve also introduced badges for group admins, moderators and new members.
• Member profiles: Many people also tell us they often get to know other group members by reading their group posts and visiting their profiles. To help make this easier, we’re introducing a new feature called member profiles. Now, when group members click on another person’s name they will be directed to a group-specific profile, based on publicly-available information like things they may share in common and a feed of that person’s activity in the group.
• New controls: Finally, many admins spend hours each week making sure their Facebook groups stay supportive and safe, so we’ve built new features to help group admins grow and manage their communities. We’ve expanded the Group Insights tool to include helpful personalized tips, like scheduling posts at times when members are most engaged. We’ve also heard that conversations in even the most supportive groups can sometimes get heated, so we’ve created more tools for admins to manage members that might have forgotten group rules of conduct. Admins can now temporarily turn off a member’s ability to comment and post, and remove members who violate their community’s rules from multiple groups they manage in a single click.

Furthermore, Facebook wants to encourage the leaders of some of Facebook’s most meaningful group types — including local city and neighborhood groups, pregnancy and parenting groups, animal and pet groups, and occupation-focused groups — to keep interactions, conversations, and feedbacks about running Facebook groups.

As such, they’ve cheekily invited those leaders to a Facebook group to keep all of that going. The result will hopefully be even more insight into groups and their needs, which should, in turn, make for a robust tool as time goes on.

via Facebook