Mark Zuckerberg, the prolific Facebook CEO just held a community summit to discuss certain important changes being brought about in Facebook groups. Streamed live on Facebook, he began the summit by mentioning some of the groups he ran including a Civilization gaming group with just 52 members. The idea was to explain that he understood the pain Group Admins go through and to that effect, announced some improvements to Facebook Groups.
Mark Zuckerberg announced numerous improvements to Groups at Chicago Summit.
Among the several announcements made was that Facebook is closer to reaching 2 billion users, a step up from the 1.9 billion or so users it had declared back during its annual F8 conference. Mark declared Facebook’s mission of bringing people together is not done yet and communities play a vital role in that endeavor. To that effect, he updated Facebook’s mission statement as:
To give the people, power to build a community to bring the world closer together.
Zuckerberg expressed his concern over the declining community membership and announced several tools to make community moderation simpler. Some of these that will make it out in the next couple of weeks include:
- Group Insights to show which times of the day group members are most active in to increase engagement
- Membership Request Filters like Gender, Age and Location to easily sift through the myriad of joining requests
- The ability to remove bad actors from the group along with all their activity with the click of a button
Earlier, Mark said that about 100 million Facebook users are members of a meaningful community. He said they’ve been making efforts with AI to improve group suggestions and have succeeded in getting an additional 50 million users to join the groups with their goal being to get 1 billion people to be a part of meaningful communities. He also singled out several group admins who were making efforts to maintain some very important groups related to parenting and adopted kids. All the major announcements drew great applause from the Chicago crowd that had assembled at the event.
Group Insights will give additional details about groups helping members better manage them
Facebook clearly seems to have doubled down on their efforts to make groups and communities engaging what with several tweaks being made to them in the last few months as well. If it succeeds in making groups popular, it could open up new levels of targeted advertising for Facebook. Regardless, if the crowd response is anything to go by, Facebook’s popularity continues to soars with a certain section of the audience.
