MUMBAI: Groups are spaces where you can share things with people who care about them the most. With Groups, we make it easy for you to build a space for important groups of people in your life—your family, your soccer team, your book club and bring like-minded people together to learn, support or rally around a common bond or interest. All you have to do to get started is to create a group, add friends and start sharing. Members can comment and like posts, so it’s easy to discuss anything with just the people you want. Whether it’s a road trip, a bachelor party, or your concert bucket list, groups make it easy to coordinate with friends near and far and lets you communicate in one searchable space.
Today, more than 1 billion people use Facebook Groups every month and we’ve seen it grow because people use Groups in many different ways. Last year, people in tens of millions of Facebook Groups left more than 100 billion comments in Groups and there were more than 250 billion likes on Group posts. In India, over 80M people use Groups each month to stay in touch with family, collaborate on projects, plan trips and offer support to friends. We work to keep Groups the best way for people to communicate, collaborate, and plan.
Over the past year we’ve invested a lot on this product. We recently introduced Groups Discover, a new feature where you can browse groups by category and get recommendations based on your friends, location and interests. Discover offers 25 different categories such as parenting, sports, food, buy & sell, networking, animals & pets, hobby & leisure, support & comfort and travel. Each topic page highlights the top suggested Groups based on popularity and who you may already know that’s a member. Additionally, we have been working to tweak the Groups experience to make it easier for people to do the things in Groups that they want. For example:
• You now have the ability to reply directly to specific comments on a post in Groups so people can navigate comments more easily and have deeper conversations.
• You can more easily drag and drop-in files if you’d like to share more information within your group.
• When you create a new group, we suggest different types of groups you might be building in order to help streamline the process for you.
Groups is continuing to grow, and continues to be a huge priority for us. We’ve seen it become so big because it’s a flexible tool that helps people share and communicate in a very diverse range of ways. Groups is being used in really interesting and meaningful ways – from a group of women in India coming together to crochet the world’s largest blanket to women of Indian heritage in the US connecting to share their children’s lunchbox recipes! Give it a try and create a few groups of your own at http://www.facebook.com/groups.
