Building community is core to Facebook’s mission in bringing the world closer together, and while community has made its way into every corner of the app, Groups continue to be the central place where people go to do more together.
In fact, most people on Facebook are members of at least 15 active groups, and there are more than 100 million group joins every day.
Today, we’re hosting the Facebook Communities Summit for the sixth year, announcing a number of changes to help people engage more deeply around the things they care about, strengthen community culture, and make it easier for admins to manage their groups.
New Ways to Engage More Deeply With Your Communities
As people come to Facebook to discover content and communities, we’re adding more ways to connect over shared interests.
- Reels in Groups let you express your voice in your communities through creative and immersive videos. With Reels now in Groups, community members can share information, tell stories and connect on a deeper level. Imagine people in a makeup-obsessed group sharing their latest techniques and beauty finds with fellow members. Group admins and members can also add creative elements such as audio, text overlay and filters on top of their videos before sharing to bring their stories to life.
- The ability to share a public Facebook event for your community to your Instagram story. Whether you’re a group admin hosting a meet-up to celebrate a community milestone, or a group member sharing your passion with friends, this feature can help you showcase your community more broadly.
- We’re testing updates to your Group profile to make it easier to foster community relationships and connect with other members. With these new updates you can:
- Customize the information in your About Me section to highlight information you want to share with your community. This can help both admins and members learn more about one another and create content that best reflects the group’s interests.
- Add an indicator to your profile if you’re open to messaging. This can help other like-minded members know that you’re willing to connect over shared interests.
Earlier this year, we announced that admins can begin to create channels as a way to connect with their groups in smaller, more casual settings. For example, Community Chats, which lets people connect in real time around the topics they care about via text, audio and video, is now available in more than 140 countries globally. Black Girls Culinary, a Facebook group where people share their latest recipes, uses Community Chats to create chat channels for a topic like Meatless Mondays and audio channels to talk through cooking tips in real time. They can also seamlessly add an event chat to Group events, allowing people to discuss events before, during, and after they take place. We’re also 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 actively maintain or respond to messages in the chat, so they can stay up-to-date on important group information. Admins and moderators can also use an admin-only chat for in-the-moment collaboration.
Admin-Curated Experiences to Build Culture
Admins have new tools to help them effectively manage and drive their group’s culture forward in engaging, useful and responsible ways:
- Community Contributions: We’re testing a new way for admins to highlight top contributing members, who can earn points by taking on an active role with a set of responsibilities in the community or for receiving reactions and comments on posts. For example, gaming communities can identify helpful tips that other members share about new features, games and characters. By accruing points, top contributing members will earn badges to feature on their group profiles, making it easier for admins to select members for roles.
- Socializer: We’re testing a new role for admins to recognize active members who help others feel welcomed, connected and motivated to contribute in a community. For instance, Socializers in music festival communities can be recognized for sharing their festival experiences and motivating others to do the same by sharing photos and videos.
- Admin Assist: We’re sharing new updates on this feature, which helps admins efficiently moderate their groups by automatically taking action based on specific criteria they set:
- New treatments for false information: To help ensure content is more reliable for the broader community, group admins can automatically move posts containing information rated as false by third-party fact-checkers (whether the posts are identified as containing false information before or after being posted in their group) to pending posts so that the admins can review the posts before deleting them. Learn more about our third-party fact-checking program here.
- Daily Digest: Group admins can easily review how Admin Assist helps them manage their community with a new daily summary of actions taken in a community based on the criteria admins have set.
- Flagged by Facebook: As we shared in our recent Community Standards Enforcement Report, we’re testing an extension within Flagged by Facebook that gives some admins of eligible groups the ability to use additional context and allow some content that might otherwise be flagged for removal as bullying and harassment. We use a variety of criteria to define a group’s eligibility for this feature, including that the group admin must not have been the admin of a group we’ve previously removed. Through this test, an admin for a group of fish tank enthusiasts could allow a flagged comment that called a fish “fatty,” which was not intended to be offensive. We still require groups to follow our policies and will remove violating content that’s reported to us.
Community Accelerator Program
The 2022 Community Accelerator Program provides community leaders with four months of training, mentorship and funding to help them deepen their community’s impact through Meta technologies. Today, we’re announcing this year’s selected participants from around the globe.