WhatsApp Communities has launched. Here’s what you need to know!
Researched and written by Nic Latouf, Digital Creative at Hey Creative and co-Founder of Veldskoen.
I’ve been testing WhatsApp Communities to see how brands/startups can use this free tool to grow their businesses. The new features are impressive. You can now video call up to 32 people in a group. Groups can also now hold more members—a little over a thousand. And under the community tab, you can add 50 groups (plus an extra announcement group of 5000 participants). That’s a lot more people than two months ago.
You can now share 2GB files with members. In addition to that, you are also able to run chat polls with group members. Fancy. What I found even more impressive, are the security features available. A phone number verification function + none of the groups or communities you create are discoverable through Whatsapp’s search bar. This is good.
How are communities different to groups? As explained by WhatsApp itself, “Communities like neighborhoods, parents at a school and workplaces can now connect multiple groups together under one umbrella to organize group conversations on WhatsApp.”
This is how that looks:
Image source: Social Media Today
There are multiple angles to using this new free tool to your advantage. One of the ways would be to build a “creator community” of users/ customers to manage and generate user-generated content. Build a loyalty programme and incentivise your creator community to post about your business and manage the community through Whatsapp communities.
I love free tools and I think, because of how central WhatsApp is to our lives, it will be pretty easy to build communities here.
The Future Proof series will help you stay ahead of the trends and changes so you can win.
Read Nic’s previous article Excel + TikTok + Pizazz = $100 000 daily here.
