Weekly News Insight — New Community Accelerator Program on Facebook
Facebook Introduces New Community Accelerator Program — Help Leaders Utilize Facebook’s Tools
There has been a positive engagement in groups seen on Facebook. Facebook has been working to maximize group engagement for the last couple of years to provide admins and community leaders with more improvised tools that can help with their performance.
And just last week, Facebook introduced the “Community Accelerator” program in an initiative to boost on-platform group activities. The program will provide support and training for community leaders to facilitate growth and help maximize their usage of Facebook tools.
According to Facebook, Community Accelerator is a six-month program that provides training, mentorship, and funding to help them grow their communities. Three months of learning from experts, coaches and a customized curriculum will be provided to selected community leaders to create a plan to grow their community and meet their goals. Through the program, these leaders will spend their three months iterating and executing on their plan with funding and continued support from their network and a dedicated team provided. Up to 80 program participants will be awarded up to a whopping $3 million in total.
As noted, the program is part of Facebook’s initiative to focus on groups. In 2017, Facebook announced that the number of Facebook users engaged in groups each month was more than a billion, with 100 million of them being active participants in “very meaningful” groups as called by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He said, “These are groups that upon joining, quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an important part of our physical support structure.”
With Facebook facing backlash over how its platform was used in the 2016 US Presidential election, it presented an opportunity where focusing on the group would enable a double-down on the engagement growth aspect, and also to highlight the social good of connecting people around specific interests through Facebook.
In 2020, the focus can be seen again with Facebook highlighting the goods of Facebook group connectivity in the recent Super Bowl ads.
Facebook’s effort can be seen to be paying off with more than 400 million people engaged in “very meaningful” groups last year, with its underlying mission of better connecting people around specific causes, and underlining the social good of the platform. Whether the concerns on data usages and political manipulation, etc. outweighs the effort, it is harder to justify. But Facebook seems to be looking at either way.
The new Community Accelerator program is open to communities with leaders who are 18 years of age or older and reside in Brazil, the US, Australia, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, the UK, France, Germany, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt. And they must have existed for more than one year, regardless of online or offline, and have a minimum member size of 5000 primarily online.
Our Take
The Community Accelerator program shows the importance of communities on social networks, as well as how much Facebook values these community leaders. It stands for a rise and a new milestone for influencers on Facebook.
It’s no secret that the private groups of social communities that share the common interests are well received and developed in China. Brands have their official websites that are available to everyone, and meanwhile, run the private groups that only include their VIP guests or people who have excellent purchase history. Such a system could help brands to accurately communicate with the right communities and audiences. By launching this program and developing its social influence, the similar idea of this private group system might possibly appear and get solidated. Let’s look forward and see how it goes!
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