How would you improve usage of Meta (Facebook) Groups?
- Felipe Ribeiro
Before I answer this question, I want to think about the problem that Facebook Groups is solving for its users and the value it offers. Facebook Groups enables people to create communities in the virtual world. And people in a community usually gather together because they share something, whether that’s a cause, sickness, neighborhood, or something else.
There are different metrics that can represent the usage of Facebook groups. I’ve listed a few here:
# of Facebook groups per user
# of meaningful comments / likes per day per Facebook Group
# of users per Facebook Group
And many other ones.
Out of the KPI’s listed above, I’d like to focus on #2 because I think it’s more meaningful than others.
When I think about a Facebook Group user, I consider some of the concerns they might have in commenting or liking a post. One of the concerns can be privacy. They might be concerned that they don’t want to broadcast their ‘comment’ or ‘like’ to everyone in their Facebook Group. Instead, they’d like to share their reaction with only the members of the Facebook Group.
One feature to address this problem could be ability for user to easily chose whether or not their like / comment will appear in newsfeeds. It’s possible for the users to go to their Facebook Profile today and remove a post from newsfeed but many users are not be aware of this functionality. You can remove user anxiety a lot more if you could enable the user to limit the audience of their reaction to the Facebook Group right from the start.
To implement this feature, I would add a little icon on the right left side of the section that shows comments and likes and present the audience. If it’s Facebook logo, it will be Facebook Newsfeed. If it’s the Group logo, it will be just people in the group. User has the option to chose the audience before even submitting their reaction. In the future, you can add more audience groups (e.g. family, close friends, etc) as well. This will allow the person to quickly chose who sees their reaction, making them feel more comfortable with expressing themselves in front of the right audience. And as they get more comfortable with expressing themselves, the number of comments and likes in Facebook Groups will increase.

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