Facebook Tests New ‘Community Awards’ to Encourage Engagement in Groups

Fb’s attempting out one other strategy to enhance constructive contributions in teams, with a brand new function referred to as ‘Community Awards’ now in reside testing.

As per this screenshot, posted by app researcher Radu Oncescu (and shared by Matt Navarra), Fb’s Group Awards will allow group admins to present awards to ‘excellent group feedback’.

The brand new prompts are additionally being proven beneath group posts.

The concept is that by rewarding extra partaking, extra useful interactions, you can encourage particular person customers to work together extra usually, whereas the awards may even spotlight to different group members what sorts of feedback you need to see, which may assist to enhance total interplay.

Fb’s tried comparable group engagement markers up to now, with ‘High Fan’ and different badge varieties to acknowledge key contributors.

Final yr, Fb additionally added a brand new ‘Group Professional’ designation, offering one other strategy to spotlight energetic members, whereas additionally offering a way to fight misinformation, by displaying that this particular person is very educated of their particular subject.

Group Awards aligns with each of those earlier additions, and as Fb works to make its app a extra constructive, welcoming surroundings, it might be one other device to assist mannequin splendid behaviors, and enhance interactions within the app.

Which might be an even bigger downside than it appears. As famous within the latest ‘Fb Recordsdata’ collection from The Wall Avenue Journal, The Social Community has been making numerous adjustments to handle an total decline in consumer exercise, which some imagine is because of the inherent division attributable to political content material within the app.

Whether or not that’s notion or truth, the influence is basically the identical – and as Fb seems to be to reverse the circulate of customers away from time spent in its app, it’s been making numerous adjustments to raised facilitate extra constructive dialogue, whereas limiting the impacts of angst-inducing content material.

Which is what usually drives engagement, and subsequently attain – but when Fb can use instruments like Group Awards to re-align consumer behaviors, and shift issues again in the direction of extra constructive interplay, that might assist it get issues again on observe.

If, in fact, Fb actually desires to do this. One other doable cause for growing division on Fb is that it does certainly drive extra engagement, which makes Fb’s numbers look higher, and retains its shareholders completely happy. It’s arduous to know what really dictates Zuck and Co.’s strategy on this respect, nevertheless it does look like Fb is on an unsustainable trajectory if it could’t shift issues again right into a extra constructive mild, whereas the success of TikTok additionally factors to the demand for extra joyful, entertaining content material, freed from accusations and deception.

Fb hasn’t shared its precise engagement information for a while, regarding the time every consumer spends within the app, however based mostly on new options like this, it’s secure to imagine that it’s nonetheless working to handle the famous declines.

We’ve requested Fb if there’s any information obtainable on the Group Awards take a look at, and we’ll replace this publish if/once we hear again.