Facebook Groups

Roughly a 3 minute read by Tom Scott



What is it?

We wrote recently about Facebook launching a new stand-alone app called Facebook Rooms, and with barely enough time to let our keyboard cool down, Zuckerberg’s developers have struck again!

This time it’s in the form of Facebook Groups, and it does exactly what you think. The app allows you to organise, create and manage your groups. So now we have Messenger, Rooms and Groups all available on their own platforms (not forgetting Facebook Pages Manager for us social media types!). Facebook is slowly but surely taking over your mobile home screen real estate; and it’s very much on purpose.

How is it?

As you would expect from Facebook, the app is very slick; it has a really satisfying shhhh type noise with every action you make (it’s the little things). The home screen shows all of the groups you are currently a member of, displayed as circular thumbnails. From here you can::

  • Create new groups
  • Search for a specific group
  • View all your notifications from your groups
  • Discover new groups to be a part of
  • Turn off the shhhhh noise (but you won’t want to do that, trust me)

How can it/ will it be used?

Starting with the obvious, it will be great for any users who have a large amount of groups to manage - it make’s for a quicker, easier and far more satisfying experience. We can see it being picked up as an alternative to WhatsApp or iMessenger groups, especially when it comes to collaboratively organising holidays, parties or large scale functions.

For brands it represents an interesting opportunity, similar to Rooms in many ways. We see an opportunity to really embrace brand advocates here and invite them to be a part of a secret circle. The obvious tactic would be to create a sense of fear of missing out for members who want the latest news, offers etc but know they can only get it by being selected to be a member of this group. Similarly groups could be created for new product launches, to build some excitement without clogging up the main brand feed and turning some consumers off; you would only have an audience that has told you they want to know, so it’s a win-win. As far as we can tell the app isn't affected by the Facebook algorithm so content would always be delivered to members.

We look forward to seeing how this develops.