Summary
- WhatsApp has expanded to include Channels and Communities for mass communication, similar to Discord and Slack.
- Users can now organize events in Communities, allowing for coordinated virtual meetings and simplified event management.
- More features, like allowing participation in the Announcements channel, are also on the way for WhatsApp Communities.
An expansion from small-scale individual and group messaging got WhatsApp well past the billion-user milestone, but under Meta leadership, the brand has been working on expanding its appeal in a direction which Discord and Telegram has already forayed — mass communication. WhatsApp’s Channels for one-to-many messaging and Communities for harboring topical group chats have been reasonably successful. Now, Meta is enhancing their abilities with additions like the ability to organize events in communities.
What is WhatsApp Communities and how do I use it?
Organize all your WhatsApp Groups in one place with Communities
WhatsApp introduced Communities as a tool to encourage people with shared interests to collect sporadic groups under one umbrella called a Community, just the way Discord has channels within servers and Slack offers Channels within Workspaces. Besides suitable admin tools and an Announcements channel where only community administrators can post messages, the new addition didn’t offer much in the way of standout features. That’s changing now because Meta just made Community events official.
Coordinated virtual event management, simplified
We caught wind of WhatsApp’s plans for announcing the events feature last month, alongside a few other changes to help communities unlock their true potential. Starting with events, Meta says any community member can create an event and other participants can confirm attendance in advance, so everyone in the group would know who plans to attend, much like Google Meet invitations sent out via email. Events will show up on the group information page, and attendees will be notified when it’s about to begin.
Using events, WhatsApp is giving users a convenient way to coordinate virtual meetings to celebrate events or just discuss topics of common interest. Moreover, conventional groups will also benefit from this addition, although the rollout is starting with groups within communities.
Next, the announcement channel in your community will soon lose its admin-only exclusivity, and you will be allowed to participate and send messages on that channel too. However, replies to announcements will be threaded underneath the original admin post and minimized by default. Other community members won’t be notified of these texts either. Meta says more community features are around the corner, so we should hear more in the coming months. Meanwhile, these updates should reach users through a server-side switch or an app update soon.
