Facebook Messenger Rooms Now Available for Groups and Events
In the last few months, the tech sector has been hustling to meet rapidly evolving communication and connectivity needs. Enter Messenger Rooms: Facebook’s Zoom-esque video chat feature. While this has been available to most users for about a week, Facebook is now rolling it out for groups and events, giving you a more intimate option for audience engagement than Facebook Live.
How Messenger Rooms Works for Groups
From the Groups composer, there is an option to create a Messenger Room that is open to group members and those with a link. The process of creating the Room is the same as when you make one personally: you select the room activity, who is invited, and the start time. The process is simple and intuitive.
Group admins will have the option to allow Messenger Rooms or not, so if you aren’t excited about this feature, don’t worry; just toggle it off and forget about it. However, if you do allow Rooms, know that you will need to decide who can create them. Facebook allows for admins and members to start Rooms within a group unless you switch this to “admin only.”
A word of warning: If you don’t have posts approvals on, Messenger Rooms defaults to letting anyone in the group start a Room. If you aren’t a fan of this idea, be sure to switch to admin only, ASAP.
In addition to giving you the option to limit who can start a Room, Facebook will also allow admins to remove rooms. According to Facebook’s post announcing the launch of Messenger Rooms for groups: “To help admins keep their communities safe, admins will have the ability to delete any video chat room.”
How Messenger Rooms Works for Events
When creating a new event, instead of listing a physical location, you mark it as an “online event” and set it to private. With these two settings in place, the option for starting a Messenger Room to host the event becomes available. According to Facebook: “This allows people to invite friends, family, classmates, and colleagues to hang out with anyone from anywhere through easy to share and join video chat links.”
What This Means for You
In essence, you now have a more direct and intimate way to connect and interact with your audience, all without needing to meet up in person. Through link sharing, you can involve those outside your current base and expand your reach while your chats with an already-involved following allow for better communication than comments or Facebook Live videos. And thanks to its integration with events, you can also drum up greater interest in everything from product launches to flash sales.
Of course, like any new tool, Messenger Rooms has a few kinks to work out. But if you are looking to keep your following engaged, it is one you want in your toolbox.