Hello there!
Welcome to our latest edition of the Facebook group features sneak peek.
Im going to share with you 8 new Facebook group features and 4 group updates that were rolled out in the months of June and July 2021.
3 features that will help grow your Facebook group
2 features that enable tighter moderation
1 feature that gives more power to admins and moderators
1 feature that helps admins acknowledge members efforts
1 feature that changes how you interact in the group
Lets dive into them right away!
In case you missed out the previous edition of Facebook group features, you can check them out below
Latest Facebook Group Features April + May 2021
Facebook Group Features Update February + March 2021
New Facebook Group Features January 2021
Grow your Facebook group
1. Grow Group feature
We all know growing a community is hard and it requires a lot of patience and effort.
To ease things, Facebook has introduced a new feature called Grow Group.
It increases the visibility of your group and suggests it to those people who might be interested to join.
When you click on it, you will be able to set your preferences like age, gender identity, location, and even add any other groups in your niche.
Based on this information, Facebook will suggest your group to relevant people.
Puja Anand Pandey, the admin of Mommies Schooling [Learning with fun] added her preferences when she came across this feature, and saw her community get approximately 2.5K more members in just 20 days.
2. Preview of group posts available for potential members
You can now choose to turn on a preview of your group posts by clicking on Who can preview before joining under Membership in your group settings.
When you do that, people who have been invited to your community will come across your group posts in their news feed.
It will give them a glimpse into the type of conversations happening in your community and help them make a decision whether or not they want to join your group.
3. Related Discussions
In an effort to increase the visibility of public groups, Facebook has started suggesting relevant groups to people based on their conversations in the groups theyre a part of.
For instance, a woman whos a part of a general community commented how she liked a painting, she came across similar discussions happening in other public groups on her newsfeed.
Tighter Moderation
1. Delete recent activity while blocking members
Now if you decide to block a member whos creating ruckus in your community, Facebook gives you two additional options [which I feel are pretty amazing]
- Delete their recent activity including posts, comments, reactions
- Block that members all future new accounts from your group
This feature saves ample time and effort as you dont have to individually go to every post or comment done by this person, and delete it separately.
Additionally, it protects your group from future spamming by that member or others of his/her like.
2. View Member summary
You dont have to keep a track of member activity anymore because Facebook does it for you!
Admins and moderators of a community can go to member profiles and click on View member summary to see all of their recent posts and comments.
This makes it extremely easy for admins and moderators to find a particular post done by a member
More power to Admins and Moderators
1. Slow down comments
With this new and interesting feature, admins and moderators can easily slow down the comments for a specific post in their groups. They just need to click on the three dots on the post and select slow down comments.
When comments are slowed down for a post, each person can only post one comment every five minutes, says Facebook.
The social media behemoth came up with this feature in an attempt to ease out comment wars that happen in the community and tackle any ongoing heated discussions and debates.
I believe it gives people time to think rather than acting impulsively purely out of their emotions.
Jyoti Aggarwal, the admin of Maa2Mom Motherhood Parenting and Beyond says
It might help when we want a post to slow down when something else is on priority.
Other use cases shared by Monique Renee, another power admin from our community,
- This feature can help divert members attention to other posts [and not keep it restricted to just one] in a super active group
- It prevents members from getting blocked due to over commenting
- When used in contests or live sessions, it allows everyone to participate
When I questioned if members would be willing to come back to comment on that post, Monique told-
Members do come back to interact on posts as long as they are aware that this option is turned on.
Acknowledge members efforts
1. Invite members to become group experts
Facebook now allows you to invite members [who you feel contribute meaningfully in the group and spark valuable discussions] as group experts.
Youll get a notification like the one below when Facebook makes this feature available for your community.
Head over to the members section and click on the Add Experts button. A list of members will appear. Choose the ones youd like to make an expert.
When you do, an invite is sent to the respective members and they can choose to / not to become an expert.
After they accept the invite, a group expert badge will be displayed next to their name.
This will highlight their expertise and knowledge in the community, and fellow members will look up to their help and suggestions even more.
New way to interact in the group
1. Default Post feature
When you head over to your group settings, youll be able to see the default post feature under Manage Discussion.
It allows you to change the default settings for the write post section of your Facebook group.
In addition to write something, you now see a few other options to choose from. Those can be: choose a photo, what are you selling, create a job, or ask for prayers.
You can choose any of these options depending on what suits best for your Facebook group.
For instance, if you have a travel community or a photography community per say, you can select the choose a photo option as default.
We can see these options under the default post feature in our community.
Since none of them are suitable enough for our group as we discuss growth, engagement, and monetization of FB groups , wed stick to write something only.
Moving on to
Facebook group updates June & July 2021
1. Sort Comments
Now choose how youd like to see the comments on all your group posts most recent comments, all comments, or suggested default.
Go to your group settings, and youll be able to see the sort by option under Manage Discussion.
Please note that although this setting will apply by default to all your group posts, members will still be able to change the order of comments when they view a given post.
2. Announcements appear in a swipeable cards format
Your group announcements now appear in a swipeable cards format.
You can easily scroll through the top announcement posts in just a flick!
This feature has been rolled out in a few groups as of now. For others, its a waiting game.
Theres nothing you can do at your end to receive new updates in your groups, except making sure your Facebook app is running on the latest version.
3. Sales format available for posts
Since buying and selling on Facebook groups has become a common phenomena, the social media giant has come up with this new update where posts are automatically turned into sales posts whenever a member lists any product.
As far as I could gather, its because Facebook wants more and more people to try their marketplace.
However, admins in our Facebook group shared how their non-listing posts [contest posts, welcome posts] were being converted to sales posts due to this.
Fortunately, Facebook looked into it and now one can turn off the sales format for posts that are not about listings.
To do this, you need to click on the three dots given on the post, and select Turn off sale option.
4. Only 100 people can be tagged in a welcome post
As per Facebooks latest update, you can now tag only 100 members in a welcome post.
While this has minimal to almost no impact on small-sized communities, it has impacted large communities massively who see 100 people joining every single day.
If you too admin a large community and have been facing issues with this update lately, the only thing you can do is
Start welcoming new members every single day.
Firstly, because it makes things easier for you. And secondly, this update is a bit glitchy atm.
A few admins in our community complained that they could still see 300 new members to welcome after they welcomed 100 out of them.
So, welcoming new members everyday seems to be a wise choice currently.
If you dont want to do that, another thing you can try out is Create a welcome post, keep the first 100 in your post, copy the remaining 200 tagged member names and paste them in the comments.
This way you will be able to welcome all the new members in a single post.
Thats all with the Facebook group changes for June and July 2021.
Dont stress out if you dont see any of these features in your group. Facebook will sooner or later make them available for your community.
Till then, make the most of what you have.
And in case you have any queries or would like to seek suggestions from other admins, join our community Growth and Monetisation for Facebook Group Admins, and post them in there.
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