WhatsApp Communities Get New Features for Topic-Based Engagement and Discovery

WhatsApp is heavily upgrading its group chat feature, making it more of a social network than a messenger. In April, WhatsApp by Meta announced its group chat upgrade that changed the experience, and now it’s finally there. The “Communities” update makes it easier for admins to create special places for related groups, so there are larger rooms for related conversations.

Each Community will have a description and a menu of sub-groups, so it’s easier to navigate within it. Communities are searchable, so one can join a community even without the direct link just by finding it in the built-in search. While direct messaging is now slowly winning over public sharing as the method of spreading content, this may open a new era… which somehow reminds us of the past.

Communities will make WhatsApp a replacement for forums, the integral part of communication on the Internet back in the 2010s (if you haven’t been there, Reddit is today’s best version of it). Now, a community can easily become a sort of forum, with group chats on any subtopic. For example, if there is a certain number of Peter Jackson fans on WhatsApp, they can create an umbrella community that will host group chats on Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, King Kong, Creepers, and other movies by the famous director, as well as discussions like “your favorite Jackson movie” and “what the movies got wrong in Tolkien’s books”.

There is an incredible wealth of ways community can be used for both socializing and business. For example, a store can create a group chat for each group of products or even on separate products in its community. It will be easier to administer them all and apply the same rules, as well as send notifications to all the chats in the community and pin messages when the rules change, a new product line appears, or the store takes a day off.

Have you already received the update with the Communities feature? Are you going to use the Communities frequently? Join existing ones, or create your own? Tell us what you think about it in the comments!