Meta announced an update to its Facebook group on Monday. This will allow admins to make previously private groups public without compromising the privacy of existing members. The company said that past content will remain private and member lists will continue to be protected after the transition.
Administrators often start a group as private, thinking it will stay small, but find that they can reach a much wider audience if they become more discoverable. This update allows Facebook groups to expand their reach without having to create a public group from scratch or make members’ past posts public.
Meta said that changes to a group’s privacy can be made from Facebook’s settings page. When an admin changes the status of a private group to public, all other admins are notified of the change and have a three-day grace period to review and cancel the change if they don’t all agree.
After the update, all past group content, including posts, comments, and reactions, will be visible only to admins and moderators, as well as members who were in the group before the conversion. The member list is also protected and only visible to administrators and moderators.
Members will also be notified of the change and again the first time they post or comment in a newly published group.
Once you convert it to public, new posts, comments, and reactions will be visible to everyone, even people who don’t use Facebook, just like any other public group. This makes it easier for your Facebook content to be indexed by search engines like Google, and helps these groups appear in search results for related queries.
If an admin decides that making a group public is not appropriate, they can make the group private again.
