WhatsApp Groups vs. WhatsApp Communities
Meta has a brand-new addition to WhatsApp – WhatsApp Communities.
What is it? What does it do? Why have they added this feature to WhatsApp? Truth be told, we had no idea what the purpose of this feature was at first. But it’s actually pretty useful.
As we all know, a WhatsApp Group Chat is a feature where you can chat to multiple people all in one place. Within this group people can arrange events, plan a night out or just have group discussions. Basically, a WhatsApp group is a simple and quick way of staying in touch with our loved ones. These groups do however have a user limit of 256.
WhatsApp Groups are useful for professional or social purposes. For businesses, WhatsApp Groups can be used in marketing campaigns, keeping in touch with different teams within a business or keeping in touch with big clients. For socializing, WhatsApp Groups make is easier to plan parties, lunches or even just to keep in touch with friends.
WhatsApp Groups can have restrictions applied so that only admins can send messages or invite new users. Users can join with a link, a QR code or through a manual invite. These groups make it possible for WhatsApp Group Calls (in our experience, these are so much fun!)
But enough of what we do know. Let’s chat about WhatsApp’s newest feature – WhatsApp Communities. This feature is expected to make the WhatsApp Group experience better. It allows for multiple groups to be added into one space without having to manually select each user. At first, we didn’t get why this would be necessary, but let us explain why it’s a cool feature.
Think of yourself as a parent. You have a child in Grade 1C and you only get updates for class 1C. But now, you need to get updates for the entire Grade 1 as well. To make life easier for everyone, an admin from the school can create a WhatsApp community with all the different Grade 1 classes without having to manually select each parent (which would take forever, ain’t nobody got time for that!). Now, updates can be sent through on the community without having to keep up with thousands of messages.
This feature is not only useful for schools, but for neighbourhood groups and for big businesses as well! Within WhatsApp Communities, you can enable sub-groups, multiple threads, announcement channels and more. Soon, even 32-person video calling will be possible. So it’s like Zoom, but on WhatsApp.
And there you have it – that’s the difference between WhatsApp Group Chats and WhatsApp Communities! Basically, unless you have A LOT of people to communicate with simultaneously, just stick to WhatsApp Groups.
Written by: Billie and Code