Facebook is launching a new feature to allow people to create a group on a page and discuss a specific topic
Facebook in these hours is introducing the new feature dedicated to Groups for themed Pages. Basically, a music band can discuss with its fans, a company can now interact with its consumers and a newspaper can listen to its readers. All this while remaining on the pages of the social.
Basically Facebook has released the new "Groups for Pages" allowing more than 70 million pages to create a community that discusses a common theme, creating exclusive content and proposals to work on. The feature is not entirely new. Facebook had, in fact, started to test it on some users since March. Only now, however, the Chief Product Officer of the social, Chris Cox, announced its final launch. The first to comment on the new feature were the journalists of the Washington Post. The same journalists who have already created a dedicated group called PostThis.
"This is a huge possibility, - they specified from the newspaper - an interaction between journalists and readers that could boost the communication sector". At the moment on the group for the PostThis page will be created one or two discussions per day concerning the most important news events. Users who have joined will be able to exchange opinions not only among themselves but also with journalists and receive real-time updates in case of a developing news story.
Facebook's goal
Facebook with this new feature hopes to change the way people interact on social. The goal of the developers is to increase the number of members of themed groups from the current 100 million to 1 billion. This is a turnaround for the social. For years, in fact, Facebook has pushed users to create groups based on their tastes and geographical location. Now, however, it will be themes and topics of general interest that will unite new ties.
Will it be a success?
There is no shortage of doubts about the feature, however. For example, the comments displayed first are not in chronological order but go by popularity. Also, some experts speculate that in some Pages, excluding those with niche topics, comments with racist, political and populist backgrounds could clog the communication and make the debate function partly useless.