WhatsApp has recently launched a ‘community’ feature that allows its users to club up to 50 WhatsApp groups together, forming a community. According to WhatsApp, users can add up to 50 groups in addition to the announcement group and 5,000 members to a community announcement group. The features include in-chat polls, 32-person video calling feature and groups with up to 1024 users.
Communities on WhatsApp will enable people to bring together separate groups under one umbrella with a structure that works for them. That way people can receive updates sent to the entire Community and easily organize smaller discussion groups on what matters to them. Communities will also contain powerful new tools for admins, including announcement messages that are sent to everyone and control over which groups can be included.
Communities are inherently private, which is why the Mark Zuckerberg-led management continues to protect messages with end-to-end encryption. This security technology has truly never been more necessary to protect people’s privacy and safety. Close knit groups — schools, colleges, clubs, NGOs, members of a religious congregation, even businesses — very much want and need to be able to have secure and private conversations without WhatsApp monitoring their every word.
The new features include emoji reactions and the ability to have groups that include up to 512 people. Another major upgrade is the ability to send files up to 2GB in size, up from the previous limit of 100MB. The company hopes these new features will foster more WhatsApp-based online communities, and bring some nice quality-of-life improvements.
WhatsApp is also trying to differentiate itself from its competitors by leveraging the Community feature. While other apps are building chats for hundreds of thousands of people, WhatsApp is choosing to focus on supporting the groups that are part of our daily lives. It is early days for Communities on WhatsApp and building the new features to support them will be a major focus of WhatsApp for the year to come.
The new feature may initially draw some comparisons with Facebook Groups, as they both support things like sub-groups, file sharing, admin functionality and more. But while Facebook Groups are often used by disconnected strangers who share a common interest, WhatsApp Communities are meant to be used by members who may already be connected in the real world. Unlike Facebook, WhatsApp is phone number-based, meaning people joining these discussion groups already have some familiarity with one another, as they may have exchanged phone numbers or at least have shared their number with a group admin. However, the phone numbers will be hidden from the wider Community and only made visible to admins and others in the same sub-groups as you.
This is meant to balance users’ demand for privacy with the need to allow fellow group members to reach you. For instance, you may not personally know every parent in your child’s school class, but you are likely to be comfortable interacting with them in a private group setting that may exist as a sub-group of the entire school’s Community.
In addition, unlike Facebook Groups, which can be discoverable on the platform, WhatsApp Communities are hidden. There will not be a search and discovery feature available — you have to be invited to join.
Here is how you can create community on WhatsApp
- Click on the Community Tab on your app or WhatsApp
- Enter the community name, description, and profile photo. Please note that the community name should not be more than 24 characters. Your description should provide members an idea of what your community is about.
- Click the green arrow icon to add existing groups or create a new group. You can also create new groups to add under one community or add existing groups.
- After adding the groups to the click the green check mark icon.
