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Facebook launched a new feature for Messenger and Facebook groups called Community Chats, Metas CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced via a Facebook post. The goal is to expand the chat experience to more Facebook Groups, so the feature allows you to browse chats organized by announcements, topics, events and more. That way, you can connect with your group members on a deeper level, not just via comments and posts.
The new Community Chats, previewed earlier this year as “Community chat channels,” also resemble social collaboration platforms like Slack, Teams, and Zoom’s upcoming Team Chat. Yes, Meta finding inspiration from other apps isn’t exactly news. However, the social media mogul is still unsuccessfully trying to replicate TikTok with its Instagram Reels.
Still, the chats seem to have some cool features, it doesn’t stop at texting. They offer support for audio channels as well, including up to 30 members. People can also turn on their cameras and present.
A new feature will begin testing in the “coming weeks”. Facebook will test a feature called Community Chat within Messenger, which will allow you to create a Facebook group for your casual group chat. Not all groups can access Chats now since the feature is currently only available for certain channels, but Meta says more groups will have the feature soon.
How Does It Work?
It’s on the group admins to choose from several options to help their community connect. The admins can start chats around specific topics, event chats for outings or meetups, broadcast chats for admins to announce group-wide updates or admin-only chats for collaboration with other admins. They can also create audio channels and allow group members to share live commentary.
Once in the audio channel, participants can also enable video. An example Facebook gave involves a chemistry class group. Admins of the group can create audio channels for study groups for chemistry students during finals season, and participants can turn on video for live tutoring during finals.
Admins also got a suite of tools that will help them manage both chat and audio experiences: blocking, muting or suspending group members, and removing members or messages, as well as Admin Assist. The latter allows admins to s
Administrators will be able to use a variety of tools to keep their communities well-maintained, including auto-moderation features that can boot members who post illegal content. They can set custom criteria that will automatically suspend users and remove reported messages, or even stop some violating videos from being sent.
So, Why Is This Beneficial?
You can start a conversation in Groups by posting and commenting, but Community Chats offers a much more effective way. Instead of waiting for comments to accumulate under a post, you can dive right into the topic right then and there and receive real-time responses from your group members.
