How to use Community Chats in Your Group | Facebook Community

One of the many joys of community building is connecting with people just like you — those who share your interests and want to foster connections around them. Fostering those conversations is what Groups is all about, and now, those discussions can happen in real time. Community Chats seamlessly blends Facebook Groups and Messenger, providing a way to stay connected with your group and build deeper relationships.

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Why Community Chats?

While posting and commenting in Groups is a tried-and-true way to get the conversation started, Community Chats has the potential to unlock so much more — instead of waiting for comments to accrue under a post, dive directly into the topic at hand and get real-time responses from your group members.

Chats are great when you need to coordinate or plan around a specific event, talk about topics that perhaps don’t apply to the entire community, or just have a fun place for members to socialize with one another.

This is what chats is all about:

connecting people to each other instantly

How to Start A Chat

Starting a chat is super simple — you can make it happen either straight from your group or right in Messenger. Just click “Create chat” at the bottom of the group menu to get the discussion started.

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Now your group will be able to start a conversation in the chat, it’s time to get talking.

Deciding chat topics

So you’ve created your first chat. Great job! Now you have the power to turn some of your active posts into real-time conversations — or go off-topic and chat about literally anything! You can choose something that is intricately linked to your group’s original theme, or completely unrelated. Now’s the time to let inspiration run free.

For Vanessa Y. of Women Who Surf, it’s all about listening to her members’ distinct needs and letting them take the lead.

“Women sharing anything and everything that has to do with surfing that involves us being women,” she says.

Women Who Surf is more than just a group of athletes, but a community of women who uplift each other on and off the waves, and they’ve found chats to be the perfect tool to stay connected.

We help each other in every aspect, whether that’s travel, surfing retreats, advice on wetsuits, etc. says Vanessa, I’ve seen the group do amazing things together, just as far as the women connecting.

Or why not ask the members specifically what topics they’d like to discuss? That’s what Laura S. did, the admin of Ghosting survivors, a support group for people who have been “ghosted” by potential romantic partners in the dating scene. “We made a poll asking what kind of chats our members wanted,” says Laura. “With chats, we thought that they could get an answer in real time.”

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Promoting the chat

Community Chats brings the communication and networking power of a group chat directly to your Group. With a click of a button, admins can invite participants or members can join the chat themselves. A post will then be created in the Group, which can be promoted via a pinned post or announcements so that all members can find the chat quickly and easily.

Aaron S. runs Team soapstone, a comedy club that operates exclusively in the Metaverse, a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you. Under the moniker The Unemployed Alcoholic, Aaron hosts comedians from all over the world via Facebook.

“We use a pinned post that walks people through the process of joining chats,” says Aaron about introducing chats to Team soapstone. “We have all our active chats linked in there. We feature the post in a good spot on the main group page, so when people log in, there it is.”

When you create a chat, or afterwards in the chat’s detail page, you can choose to directly invite members individually or in groups. You can even invite your most engaged members via a pre-batched selection — that way you can be sure the group’s biggest supporters will have the opportunity to join in the discussion.

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Kicking off the chat

Now that everything’s been set up, it’s time to kick off the discussion. You might want to start with a clear call to action, like “Join us!” or “Be a part of the conversation.” Explicitly calling out the chat’s topic can also be useful, enticing users to engage in the discussion.

Another interesting starter is to ask a question in the chat announcement, for example “What topics would you like to see us discuss in the Group?” could also be just the thing to kickstart the conversation.

If you’re a community of pop culture fans like MediaVerse+, a good kick-off could be discussing your passion for film.

For us, trailers are a really great way to kickstart the conversation on chats, says group admin Max T.

“People love talking about them — they love to dissect every single frame and analyze everything. And of course, memes are very popular in our chats as well.” Who doesn’t love a good meme?

For her cooking group Black Girls Culinary, Davicia H. went the extra mile and started a chat for every day of the week. Her members love sharing recipes and talking about their favorite foods, so she created specific spaces for each foodie passion.

I just went in and made a group chat for each theme day that we have, Davicia says. We have ‘Meatless Mondays’, ‘Taco Tuesdays’, ‘Wellness Wednesdays’, ‘Thirsty Thursdays’, ‘Fish Fry Fridays’, ‘Sheet Pan Saturdays’ and ‘Soulful Sundays’. Each day we just talk about those topics and post our pictures, ask about recipes and things like that.

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Managing notifications and moderating the chats

Most admins know how to deal with moderating their community and staying on top of their notifications, but as your members will be responding in real time, managing chats can be a little different than usual. You can always check your notifications in the chat inbox on Facebook or Messenger, where you’ll find all your active chats. They are also manageable from the Admin dashboard, so you have control over just how engaged you are with the Chat.

As a blockbuster movie fan, spoilers are Max’s natural enemy. To keep the MediaVerse+ chats spoiler free, he uses Admin Assist to trigger buzzwords.

We trigger certain keywords to block certain posts that are coming through which is a good thing when it’s coming to the admins and moderators that are approving the posts. It keeps us from being spoiled, he explains.

“Admin Assist automatically [stops posts from sending] that have keywords regarding specific shows or movies. We only set it up when we know there’s a premiere coming and not everybody is going to be able to see it at the same time. So if someone were to accidentally spoil a show, it would automatically decline the message.”

Moderating content is of the utmost importance when it comes to chats: we want to keep them safe spaces for members to thrive. As always, you can use Admin Assist when moderating to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible. Here are a few useful ways Admin Assist can help you out:

• Stop messages from sending by setting content alerts and other criteria

• Remove messages, if reported by a certain number of people

• Suspend person, if a certain number of their messages are removed in a certain period of time

But that’s not all — admins and moderators can take additional steps to make sure their group’s rules are being followed, for example:

• Admins and moderators can permanently delete any message in a group’s Chat. The member who originated the deleted content will no longer be able to access it on Facebook and Messenger.

• Admins can create an “Admins & Moderators” Chats for moderation purposes. Only current admins and moderators of a group would be able to participate. Any new admins and moderators would be added automatically.

Davicia from Black Girls Culinary also makes use of Admin Assist to give her and her admins a break from checking every single post for infractions:

Admin Assist has been so helpful, because we don’t have to spend as much time going through each post and chat. We don’t have to cut out comments and things like that. We can focus more on the content that the group really wants. Our number one rule is: keep it cute or keep it mute.

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Real-time connections are just a click away

No more waiting around to see what your members think about a topic, or trying to wrangle ideas and content from multiple users at once across different posts — with Community Chats, your community building happens all in one place, and in real time. If you’re looking for a way to foster deeper connections with your members, now is the time to explore all the options Chats has to give.

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