How do I add a featured post to a Facebook group?

Table of Contents Show

• Making Admins’ Lives Easier 🥳
• Bid goodbye to Spammers⚔️
• Improve conversations quality🥰
• Updates to previous FB group features 🚀
• How do I create a featured post on Facebook?
• How do I create a pinned post in a Facebook group?
• Can you pin a post to the top of a Facebook group?
• Is an announcement the same as a pinned post?

During yesterday’s Facebook Communities Summit, Facebook announced several new features to help Facebook Group admins grow and manage their communities.

Facebook Group admins will get the following customization options:

• Easily customize the colors, post backgrounds and fonts that display in groups, along with the emojis members can use to react to content.
• Use feature sets to select preset collections of post formats, badges, admin tools and more that can be turned on for their group with one click, so that communities can engage in the ways they want.
• Suggest preferred formats for members to use when they post in their group. This will appear in a new posting button that stays with members as they browse the group, eliminating the need to scroll back to the top when they’re ready to post.
• Create a unique greeting message and share group rules that new members will automatically receive when they join a group, so they can develop a sense of belonging sooner.

Ability to award members to boost engagement:

• Members will also soon be able to give community awards, like Insightful, Uplifting or Fun, to content that they find valuable. These awards encourage engagement, make the content more visible to members and help demonstrate the group’s content at its best.

Other new features:

• Ability for admins to create subgroups within their groups for specific topics, regions or occasions, that can be managed in one place, so that members can more easily go deeper on what they care about.
• When people want to connect in real-time, they will soon be able to use Community Chats in both Facebook and Messenger, as well as create recurring events when they want to get together more regularly, either virtually or in-person.

Ability to manage groups:

• Admins can pin announcements and choose the order in which they show up in a new Featured section at the top of groups, to ensure their community sees the most important details first.
• We’re updating Admin Assist to give personalized suggestions on criteria to add, provide more information around why Admin Assist declines certain content and make Admin Assist accessible across all platforms with availability on Facebook Lite.
• Community Chats will allow admins to create a chat for the admin and moderator team so that they can better coordinate decisions in real time.

Different ways to earn and raise money:

• Create community fundraisers to raise money for group projects, to offset the costs of running the group or to enable members to show their appreciation for their admins and moderators.
• Sell merchandise they’ve created through a shop in their group, enabling members to show their support and deepen their sense of community.
• Create paid subgroups that members can subscribe to for a fee to gain exclusive access to more content, experiences like coaching or networking or deeper conversations. As part of our broader paid subscription effort across Facebook, this new feature enables admins to sustain their communities while offering more meaningful experiences to their members.

Bringing Groups and Pages together:

• For admins of Facebook Groups, the new experience will allow them to use an official voice when interacting with their community. For admins of Facebook Pages, the new experience will help them build community in a single space for members to participate and engage. Admins of Pages will also be able to take advantage of the moderation tools that Groups have today. This new experience is in early testing over the next year, before it becomes more broadly available.

Source: Facebook

Hey there!👋🏻

I’m super excited to share with you the 7 amazing Facebook group features rolled out in the months of April and May 2021.

• 5 mind-blowing features to make admins’ lives easier
• 1 feature to stay on top of spammers
• 1 feature to facilitate more meaningful interactions in the group

Along with these, I’m also going to shed light on 3 major updates (with regard to previous features) in Facebook groups.

In case you missed out the previous edition of Facebook group features, you can check it out here👇🏻

Facebook Group Features Update – Feb & March 2021

Now, let’s dive into the features right away!

Making Admins’ Lives Easier 🥳

1. ‘Copy link’ option for group posts 

While it has been around for quite some time now, the ‘Copy Link’ option hit many Facebook groups recently, and the admins were thrilled.

Click on the three dots present on the top of a post and you’ll be able to see it.

It is available in both public and private Facebook groups to the:

a. Members – To help them share group posts with fellow members easily for further discussion
b. Admins – To help them share pending posts with their team easily prior to approval

Rinku Shah, the admin of Fitness2Flash, says “The copy link option makes life so much easier.”

2. Button for Admin Activity 

Facebook has introduced a ‘You’ button in groups alongside other functionalities.

When you click on it, you can see all the activities (i.e. posts, comments) done by you in that group.

It’s available for both – admins and members.

3. ‘Undo’ post approvals 

There are times when we accidentally approve/decline a pending post in the group, and wish we could undo it.

Well, Facebook has granted this wish!

Head to your group’s activity log (by selecting the option under ‘Manage Group’ on the left), and you’ll see a list of all the posts and member requests approved/declined by the admin team.

4. Make members group experts

The name of the feature speaks for itself, isn’t it?

It allows admins to choose knowledgeable members as ‘group experts’. When they do, members receive a badge which is displayed next to their name on all groups posts, comments, and even the main profile.

The two main benefits this feature extends are:

a. Members know whom to reach out to whenever they need help on a specific topic
b. Admins no longer are the lone wolves when it comes to helping group members

Things to note:

• Only admins can assign group experts
• Members selected as group experts can choose to accept or decline the role
• Admins can remove members as group experts at anytime
• These are NON moderator titles

Another important thing to know as Lyvia Cardoza, admin of Moms of Mangalore, pointed out that this feature is still in the beta version and seems to be rolled out in groups ‘half baked’.

Hence, only the pop up of making members group experts is available and not the option itself yet. (As shown in the snapshot below)

5. Manage button for Admin tools 

In the Facebook app, you now have a ‘Manage’ button that takes you to the admin tools page that constitutes all actions like review, insights, settings, group support, posts and comments, and activity.

It’s an attempt to make things simple and clear for new admins mostly. Since the button is placed at a focal point of view, one can easily click on it and manage things in the group.

Note: The star button is still present on the top right corner and one can access the admin tools from there too.

Bid goodbye to Spammers⚔️

1. Limit activity for members

The ‘Limit Activity’ feature is the latest addition in a few public and private Facebook groups that helps admins stay on top of spammers.

You get this option when you click on the three dots given against a member’s name in your group.

In the words of Facebook, with this feature:

“You can now limit how frequently a person in your group is able to post or comment. Select the number of posts per day or the number of comments per hour they’ll be limited to.”

Follow these steps to temporarily limit how frequently a member can post / comment in your group👇🏻

Follow these steps to change the activity limits of a member in your group👇🏻

Improve conversations quality🥰

1. Upvote member comments 

If you’ve been a part of Reddit, you probably know what this means!

Let’s just say it’s a huge step by Facebook to improve meaningful interactions in communities.

As Aditya Ahluwalia, the Director of Growth at Convosight pointed out,

“Crowdsourcing comment quality from members and tagging them into helpful new ideas makes the comments for posts way more valuable, and information so easy to consume.”

To put things simply for you,

The upvote feature which recently appeared in some private Facebook groups allows members to vote on the quality of fellow members’ comments.

Tony Trevillion, the admin of On a Budget, says that “99% of my group members use this feature rightly. One time when a row kicked off, they weren’t just leaving angry faces on nasty comments, they were voting down each others’ comments. The comments had no place in the group so once we deleted the comments, the votes went with them – which is good.”

“All the more reason for adding the right members in the community,” adds Rinku Shah, admin of Fitness2Flash.

Updates to previous FB group features 🚀

1. Watch Party removed 

As of 16th April 2021, Facebook has removed Watch Party from communities, i.e. one can no longer create and view watch parties in their groups.

Hoping Facebook treats us with something as awesome as watch party in the future!🤞🏻

Alternatively, you can focus on hosting live videos in your group as they are undoubtedly the future. And the engagement they get is massive!

Check out this BLOGwhere we have explained the A to Z of going live in your FB groups.

For those of you who don’t know about watch party-

It is nothing but live sharing of pre-recorded videos by an admin in their group. Members can interact with each other and watch the video in real-time, creating a shared video experience.

For instance, a group member went live, but only a few members joined him/her. The admin can save that live video and create a watch party of it anytime later. When they do that, group members are notified that the admin is doing a watch party post which they join in super soon. Hence, all those who missed joining the live in the first instance get a chance to watch it again, thereby increasing the group’s engagement.

Samiksha Aggarwal, the admin of Moms Magic Cooking, regrets it saying, “I used to organise watch parties almost everyday. It’s sad that we admins cannot use it anymore.”

2. FB Marketplace logo on group posts 

As per Facebook’s algorithm, if any of your group posts seem salesy, i.e. the members appear to be selling something, Facebook instantly tags that post as ‘buy and sell’ and makes the option of ‘contact seller’ available to them.

If you are wondering if it affects your group quality in the long run, well, it doesn’t. It’s just an automated feature of Facebook which it uses to classify marketplace posts.

However, a few admins reported that it’s appearing on posts that are not buy and sell. (as in the above snapshot). Which certainly means Facebook is working on it and making the algorithm fair enough that it picks relevant posts only.

3. Shift Cover removed

The shift cover feature made collaborating and getting work done (i.e. covering their shifts) from co-workers in the FB group easier. The shift cover templates ensured that final approval on all requests was made. In fact, there was a dedicated tab for shift cover information.

As per the latest revelation, Facebook discarded this feature along with the ‘work’ group type in which it was available, from April 15, 2021.

However, a few admins running parenting, fitness, and groups other than work were able to see this feature in their groups.

Latest Update: Since the ‘work’ type was removed, all those groups (which earlier had group type as work) were automatically converted to ‘general’ category groups by Facebook.

That’s all with this edition of Facebook group features.🙌🏻

We’ll keep you posted for more new features as and when they become available in Facebook groups.

Meanwhile, you can look out for the aforementioned features in your communities. And, please don’t worry if you can’t see them in your groups. Slowly Facebook will roll them out in all groups.😇

Let me know if you have any concerns or would like to add anything further to any of these features in the comments below. Or post in our Facebook group where thousands of power admins are constantly discussing this and so much more.🙂

Creating value in the lives of others with my content, little by little.✨
Working at Convosight, I do more than just wrangle commas. I’m passionate about innovating new ways to create amazingly effective content and sharing it with the right audience.
Check out my latest blogs and feel free to share them!💛

How do I create a featured post on Facebook?

How do I create a pinned post in a Facebook group?

Can you pin a post to the top of a Facebook group?

Is an announcement the same as a pinned post?