After hosting company’s first-ever Facebook Communities Summit in Chicago in June with hundreds of Facebook group admins, the social network has been proactively building new tools and programmes to grow and manage their communities.
The company has announced new tools for admins and members including welcome posts, badges and member profiles.
To introduce new members to the group, admins can now write a welcome post that will automatically tag new joiners. There are times when we join a group but do not know anything about the group leaders and to easily identify them and other members, Facebook has introduced badges for group admins, moderators and new members.
The social network is also 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.
The Group Insights tool is now been expanded to include helpful personalised tips, like scheduling posts at times when members are most engaged. And as conversation in supportive groups can sometimes get heated, Facebook has created more tools for admins to manage members to effectively maintain the social conduct among the members. 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.
To help meaningful groups such as neighbourhood groups, pregnancy and parenting groups, animal and pet groups, and occupation-focused groups, Facebook is exploring new programmes to help these group leaders meet up in person and keep the connection going.
We’ll be announcing more about these new programs soon, the company said.
Supportive groups such as Physician Moms Group (PMG) and Show Me Your Stethoscope rallied help in times of crisis, deploying first-response services and donations in the walk of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and raising over $15,000 to send food to first-responders following the Las Vegas shooting.
Another group Mendleton which has over 40,000 active duty and veteran Marines. Through dialogue and camaraderie within their group, members worked to provide support for servicemen and have prevented more than 100 suicides to date. They’ve also started a non-profit called the Mendleton Foundation, committed to ending military suicide.
