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Johannesburg - Social networking giant Facebook’s move to launch a separate ‘Groups’ application is a response to other fast-growing services such as LinkedIn moving in on its turf, says an expert.
Facebook already has built-in Groups functionality that is used by 700 million people to stay in touch with family, collaborate on work projects, and even offer support to friends.
But on Tuesday night, Facebook launched a separate Groups application for Apple iOS and Android users that intends helping users navigate between groups, join new groups, manage notifications and discover more content.
The social media giant says the “Groups experience” will remain part of the main Facebook app and that it continues to be “deeply integrated” with its news feed.
“People use Facebook Groups every day to stay in touch with family, collaborate on projects, plan trips and offer support to friends,” said Shirley Sun, Facebook’s Product Manager.
“Today, we're introducing a new Facebook Groups app that helps people share faster and more easily with all the groups in their life,” Sun added.
Users who download the app can see all their Facebook Groups in one place. These users can then also start a new group by tapping the ‘Create’ button on the app, track notifications and discover more groups to join, says Facebook in a statement.
Arthur Goldstuck - South African technology expert and managing director for research firm World Wide Worx - told Fin24 that the Groups app is part of Facebook’s evolution.
Goldstuck added that the Groups app could also be a salvo against competitors like LinkedIn, which has developed features that allow networking groups to be created.
LinkedIn's user base, which consists of over 332 million users, is smaller than Facebook's over 1.2 billion active monthly users. But while LinkedIn has a more niche audience of professionals, it has also developed a news feed similar to Facebook.
“Facebook in particular, being the largest of all social networks, is targeted by all the rest in terms of adding functionality that competes with Facebook. It doesn't have much choice but to respond to or preempt these challenges,” Goldstuck told Fin24.
“The more LinkedIn begins to look like Facebook, it appears, the more Facebook will want want LinkedIn is getting. The 'freemium' model of the latter may well be adopted by Facebook for its professional offering,” Goldstuck said.
Goldstuck added that Facebook has become more than just a traditional social network in light of wide acceptance of its pages for brands and businesses.
“The use of the term 'Friends' is probably inaccurate - it should be 'Contacts' or 'Connections', as that better describes most relationships on Facebook.
“Once one sees it in that context, Facebook suddenly becomes as powerful a networking tool as a social tool. From this point of view, a professional offering makes sense,” Goldstuck said.
* Follow @GarethvanZyl on Twitter. For more tech news, follow Fin24tech @Fin24_Tech.
