Facebook Launches Groups App

Every month, over 700 million people use Facebook Groups. However, the mobile experience for the groups is not very user-friendly making them not very accessible from the main app. Facebook is launching a standalone Groups app this month. The app will feature a revamped and more effective notification control and a section for Groups discovery. Users would not be compelled to use the app as the Groups section will still remain on the main app and users will not be fast-switched to the app from the main app.

Yahoo and Google have been known to engage into fierce competition in order to dominate on group email lists. However, the market lacks active users and content-rich social feed groups. Facebook is trying to bank of that market gap with Facebook Groups. With the Groups app, a rising number of people could organize their lives and projects into sections. This also goes along the same line with the enterprise product “Facebook At Work” that the social media giant is prototyping. With this new product Facebook would be competing with the likes of Yammer or Slack.

This new Groups app launched for iOS and Android could be beneficial to page admins to further engage into communication with communities and customers. This could help in speeding up the consumption experience as it targets specific groups or cliques such as study groups, interest groups and support networks. The new app is quick and could potentially encourage more private sharing aside from the main News Feed. The Groups app has a timely launch considering that many organizations would be focusing on targeting mobile users in 2015.