Facebook has announced several new enhancements for the Groups feature aimed at helping users engage more deeply and making management of Groups an easier job for admins. One of these is an obvious attempt to combat fake news — admins will soon be able to sift out flagged posts in Groups. Perhaps the most significant and easily noticeable change in this feature dump is the addition of Reels to Groups.
Community members can share now videos related to the topic of the Group to engage and interact on a deeper level. “Imagine people in a makeup-obsessed group sharing their latest techniques and beauty finds with fellow members,” notes Facebook in its blog post.
Next up is another tool that lets you share a public Facebook event for your community to your Instagram story, allowing you to showcase your community more broadly.
Facebook is also letting users add more information to their Group profile to “foster community relationships and connect with other members.” An About Me section will let you highlight information you want to share with your community while a new optional indicator will let others know if you’re open to messaging.
New “About me” section in Facebook Groups
On the admin side of things, Facebook is testing the ability for group admins and moderators to create view-only chats to send one-way communications to all of their members, without having to go through the pains of moderation.
There are also new tools that’ll help drive community engagement – admins can highlight top contributing members. These members can earn points by taking on active roles with a set of responsibilities or by receiving reactions and comments on posts. But perhaps the most important tool is the one that’ll allow admins to automatically move posts flagged as being false/misleading to pending posts so that they can review/delete them. Some admins of eligible groups will also gain the ability to use additional context and allow some content that’ll otherwise get flagged by Facebook.
Flagged posts in Groups will get sifted out automatically
The company has also started a Community Accelerator Program, providing community leaders with four months of training, mentorship, and funding to “help them deepen their community’s impact through Meta technologies.”
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