Facebook to leverage popularity of Groups with Discover

After suggesting potential friends and pages to you, Facebook is extending the service to Groups on their platform, attempting to facilitate interaction between like minded people with Group Discover in India.

After the United States and United Kingdom, Facebook is introducing the Discover feature in India, one of its largest markets worldwide. The company claims to have more than a billion users using the groups feature on its platform all over the world, and Discover was launched to boost the number even further. Indian users constitute approximately 195 million from the 1.71 billion users on Facebook according to data from Statista.com

Aiming to drive more engagement amongst people sharing common interests such as car enthusiasts, or a small business owner who caters to a niche clientele or a family exclusive group, like the persistently exploding and mandatory family groups on WhatsApp we are all familiar with. Anyway, Facebook is all about connecting with friends and family right?

Visible on the left hand side of the Home page, users can pick interests from categories such as Trade, Food, Travel, School and Education and Business among many others. Selecting a category yields a list of groups, based on their popularity or volume of member or whether your friends are a part of any.

Groups can be kept open or closed, or even secret if the group creator wishes to do so. People appreciate privacy when sharing their thoughts and opinions, and Groups offers a safe space for people to do so. The administrators can also decide who to add or remove from the Group, and this one crucial aspect differentiates Groups from Pages on Facebook.

As the company puts it on Facebook Tips, “While Pages were designed to be the official profiles for entities, such as celebrities, brands or businesses, Facebook Groups are the place for small group communication and for people to share their common interests and express their opinion. Groups allow people to come together around a common cause, issue or activity to organize, express objectives, discuss issues, post photos and share related content.”

Taking into account the number of people using Groups is a testament to how important the often overlooked feature is, and yet managed to find a billion takers. Facebook pushing to make Groups even more popular shows they have some eventful changes coming to Groups in future.