The social media giant – Facebook, popularly known by the name Meta now, recently hosted its sixth annual Facebook Communities Summit 2022.
This much-awaited virtual event brought internal experts and group administrators together to discuss the new features, tools, and updates.
Maria Smith, VP of Communities at Facebook, unveiled all the exciting new features for Facebook groups that Meta plans to roll out in the coming months. We’ve explained each of them in this article.
According to Meta, these new updates and features will help group admins boost engagement opportunities and entice new members.
In addition, they announced the participants for Facebook’s Community Accelerator Program.
For those who don’t know – Facebook Community Accelerator is an initiative to help group admins advance their leadership skills and utilize Facebook tools to strengthen their community’s impact.
Here’s a sneak peek into the features that were announced in the Communities Summit:
- Four notable features that’ll encourage member participation
- Three helpful features that will help manage your community better
- Four new features that’ll strengthen your community’s culture
Without further ado, let’s understand about them in detail:
😍Encourage Member Participation
1. Reels
After an overwhelming response on Instagram, Facebook has started to roll out reels in communities.
This exciting feature allows community members to share information, tell stories, and connect with others on a deeper level with creative videos.
Members can now unleash their inner creativity and bring their stories to life with creative elements in reels like audio, text overlay, and filters.
Source: Facebook
Learn more – Everything you should know about using FB group reels
2. Community Contributions
As the name suggests, this new feature will let admins highlight and reward the most contributing members of the community.
When they do, the selected members will get points and badges that they can further feature in their respective group profiles.
Source: Adweek
3. Socializer Role
Facebook is testing a new socializer role for admins to recognize active members who help others feel welcome, connected, and motivated to contribute to a community.
This will let you assign a member as a socializer based on their positive contributions to the group.
For instance, Socializers in beauty communities can be recognized by sharing beauty tips and encouraging group members to do the same by sharing pictures and videos.
4. Share Facebook community events to Instagram
Whether it is to celebrate a community milestone or something else, whatever exciting event you plan to host in your Facebook group, you will soon be able to share its details on your Instagram story.
This will certainly help spread the word about your event and community, ensuring maximum attendance.
👥Foster deeper connections
1. Updates to Group Profile
Your group profile should reflect who you are, right?
Going forward, you’ll be able to customize the information in the “about me” section in your group profile and highlight the details you want to share with your community.
Plus, you’ll be able to add an “open to messaging” indicator to your profile so that like-minded members know you’d like to connect further.
2. Channels
Facebook launched the “channels” feature, where admins can connect with their group members in smaller, more casual settings.
It allows members to have in-depth conversations about their interests and pain points. You can interact with members via text, audio, and video channels.
This feature is now available in more than 140 countries globally and Facebook has started to roll it out in groups, so keep a lookout for this one!
Check out this blog from our Facebook group features edition to learn more about this interactive feature.
3. Event Chats
Whenever you host an event, the group members will now get an opportunity to discuss things before, during, and after the event with the new event chat feature.
🙌🏻Manage your community better
1. Create “View-Only” chats
This feature will allow admins to send one-way communication to all the group members without having to actively maintain or respond to chats individually.
This will ensure group members get notified of all the announcements timely and stay up-to-date with all the important information.
2. New treatment for false information
You can automatically move posts containing information marked as ‘false’ by third-party fact-checkers to the pending posts section and review them before deleting.
This helps build trust and credibility in the content shared within the group.
3. Daily Digest
Managing a group is certainly not a cakewalk. However, this new feature does make things easier!
The new daily digest feature under Admin Assist will give admins a daily summary of the actions taken in their community according to the set criteria.
This would help you save time, protect your community, and accomplish more with automated actions.
Source: Facebook
4. Flagged by Facebook
Facebook is testing an extension within Flagged by Facebook that allows admins of eligible groups to use additional context and allow certain content that was accidentally get flagged by Facebook for bullying and harassment.
That’s all about the latest updates and features announced in the Facebook Communities Summit Keynote 2022. 🙌🏻
Which feature are you excited about the most? Share it in the comments below or you can also reach out to me in our Facebook group, where thousands of community admins are constantly discussing this and so much more about Facebook group features, engagement, monetization, and more.
Creating value in the lives of others with my content, little by little.✨
Working at Convosight, I do more than just wrangle commas. I’m passionate about innovating new ways to create super valuable and actionable content about Communities and Community Marketing at large, and sharing it with the right audience.
I also happen to manage a global community of power admins on Facebook, and that’s where most of my learnings come from.
Do check out my latest blogs and feel free to share them! 💛