The Future Of Community On Facebook Is Bright

4 KEY CHANGES COMING TO A FACEBOOK GROUP NEAR YOU

Lianne-Carla Savage, Certified Community Manager, was at the recent Facebook Communities Summit and shares her key takeaways on the 4 key changes and developments coming to a Facebook group near you!

1. BUILD THE COMMUNITY YOU WANT AND STRENGTHEN CULTURE

This is all about creating a space that is truly your own and onboarding your members well and includes;

• Visual customizations - custom colours, fonts and reaction emojis

• Feature sets - want a feature that used to be exclusive to a parenting group or a learning group? Now you can!

• Floating action button - this brings an easy way to post along with you, no matter how far down you scroll down the group.

• New member onboarding - set members off on the right foot with a custom intro, highlight your admin team and show new members the rules one last time before they go and play.

• Community awards - this lets members highlight and give props to the comments others have shared.

2. DEEPEN CONNECTIONS

Communities are nothing without the connection and feeling of belonging they create. Here are a few things rolling out in the coming months designed to do just that...

• Subgroups - I spent 2hrs 40mins hosting a live audio room and if there’s one word that came up above all others it was subgroups. This is a feature admins have been wanting for so long.

• Community messaging - Another way to connect and converse with community members.

• Recurring events - Does what it says on the tin. Less hassle for admins, more clarity for members.

• Columns - Designed for those of us who like to create deep quality content. Columns will really help us feature the best of what we do.

• Group experts role - Simple yet effective refinement. This will now allow the area of expertise to be specified.

3. MANAGE YOUR COMMUNITY

Making day to day admin life easier? Yes please!

• “Featured Posts” as announcements - a single pinned post because the option to have multiple announcements. Now they are getting another revamp with featured content cards.

• Notifications for “Group Rule Changes” - Changed the rules but members didn’t realise? Not any more! Rule updates will push out a notification

• Admin Assist updates. – Is getting even better.

• Community Chats - After some work behind the scenes to build out the infrastructure, real-time text, video and audio chats are on the way.

• Community Access for non-Facebook users - I didn’t realise how useful this would be until admins spoke about real world connections who would love to be part of the group without wanting the rest of Facebook. In particular local community message boards stood out.

4. SUSTAIN YOUR COMMUNITY

It’s so great to see the support Facebook is giving towards creating financially sustainable groups. It’s been a pleasure to have the opportunity to lead the way on this by hosting live audio rooms throughout the summit on a range of topics: Financial Sustainability, The Business of Community & The Community Management Certification were (of course!) a few of my favourites.

• Fundraisers - the ability to host fundraisers via communities with space to go deep on the story behind the fundraising AND Facebook not taking a penny from the cause - awesome!

• Shops - Shops within groups is on its way. This means more admins are going to have access to an easy pathway to make sales and create financial sustainability for their community.

• Paid subgroups - For some communities and leaders, paid subgroups are a brilliant option for generating revenue.

Lianne-Carla Savage helps community leaders drive revenue & retention through gamification. She is one of the world’s foremost experts on community-driven marketing and one of a handful of Certified Community Managers globally who have become Meta Certified Lead Trainers through the Meta Trainer Network. Want to know what’s working now to grow, engage and generate revenue through Facebook groups?

Check out The Profitable Communities Masterclass.