Tech giant Facebook is bringing monetisation features into yet another part of its service — groups. The social network is testing new tools that allow group admins to make money, with new shopping, fundraising and subscription features, reports Engadget.
The company announced the updates at its annual Communities Summit event where it said the new features will help people who run groups "sustain" the communities they have built. With the changes, Facebook is giving group admins three ways to monetise their communities. The first two, community shops and fundraisers, mirror features elsewhere on the platform. Community shops is an extension of Facebook's existing feature and allows group admins to sell themed merchandise or other goods. Likewise, fundraisers will enable admins to crowdfund specific projects or otherwise "offset the costs of running the group".
But the third feature is entirely new — paid subgroups. Subgroups are essentially smaller groups-within-a-group where members pay a monthly fee to participate. While Facebook is also allowing group admins to set up free subgroups, the paid version of the feature is the company's latest effort to create subscription-based products, the report said.
Elsewhere, Facebook has been hyping subscriptions as a way for creators to make money, either via newsletters or fan subscriptions for streamers. In the context of groups, subscriptions are meant to enable access to exclusive or specialised content like "coaching or networking or deeper conversations".
In addition to the new monetisation features, Facebook announced several other updates for groups, including new customisation features that allow admins to change background colours, font styles and other aspects of the way groups look, community chats to make it easier for admins and group moderators to reach each other. A new "featured" section was also introduced so that group admins can pin content that stays at the top of the group. Facebook also plans to start testing a new set of features that will streamline the groups and Pages experience for admins who manage both a group and a corresponding page.
