The creation of Facebook user groups has gone down by 20%. What will you do?

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The creation of Facebook user groups has gone down by 20%. What will you do?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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honestDS · Answer 1 · 2020-11-28T15:38:20+0000

The first thing I would do is to get a better clarification of this Facebook execution question, starting with:

1. Gone by 20%, since when? This is important to differentiate an anamoly or gradual change in user behavior.

2. Has it gone down at the start of the week or is it compared to a longer time period (for e.g. year on year basis)

3. Are there any other relevant metrics which are down with it such as group engagment/ activity amongst users?

Each answer to part 2 will help direct the conversation to a new branch

-- If metrics have been down since past one week, i.e. shorter time period:

We can safely assume this is an anamoly in pattern. For this purpose, we will look in to the following:

1. Can we divide the users in to various segements/groups - for e.g. can we identify the groups where it is low - is it uniform across all user group or not. An example of user groups can be:

a. Dividing users by app/website

b. Users across various geographic regions

c. iOS vs Android users

2. Once a user group is identified, we look in to the following for that particular group:

a. Was there a version roll out which didn't work out? Or similarly a roll out which removes bots, leading to overall reduction in group creation [lesser fake groups]

b. Has there been any sort of outage? such as app outage or error out when a user tried to create a group

c. A new feature which requires users to enter a captcha [helps with fake users] when creating a group

d. Are there any other metric such as friends request / user engagment metric effected too?

3. In case no group is identified:

a. Was there a global update which caused the outage?

b. Was there a version roll out which didn't work out? Or similarly a roll out which removes bots, leading to overall reduction in group creation [lesser fake groups]

c. Has there been any sort of outage? such as app outage or error out when a user tried to create a group

d. A new feature which requires users to enter a captcha [helps with fake users] when creating a group

e. Is there a mega event happening which is effecting overall user engagement to be effected too? Such as election going on where users are more interesting in news sharing or facebook watch rather than creating new groups?

-- In case we are comparing this to year on year, i.e. a long time period:

a. Was there a new feature roll out in the past which removes fake users, thus reducing the creation of fake content?

b. What was the absolute number of groups last year vs this year >> with an increase in total number, the %age creation would definitely go down [ as the denominator is greater]

c. Was there a new feature that requires extra authentication to create a group?

d. Were any other acitivies associated with groups being decreased/ increased too?

Tushar · Answer 2 · 2021-06-13T23:01:46+0000

I want to first validate my understanding of Fb groups.

Groups are essentially a topic that could be private or public. Both businesses and individuals can create groups with a goal of discussing common interests. Does that sound good? IVR: Yes

Clarify:

Was this 20% decrease a sudden one or gradual? IVR: Gradual
- Gradual means over a month, quarter or year. IVR: assume quarterly
- I am assuming this is the first time we have come to know about the decrease? IVR: Yes
Is it fair to assume that it is across all platforms (web/app) IVR: Yes
Any information abt specific geography or user group impacted IVR: No
Any info abt other metrics that have gone down. IVR: None

So there is 20% decrease across all platforms for creations of FB groups compared to the previous quarter. As FB groups is a mature feature with high absolute nos., I deem this drop to be really high.

Approach: My approach here would be first to define FB mission and how groups fits into it, and then dive into external and internal factors that may have caused this. Once I find the root cause, I would list remediation steps. Does that sound good? IVR: lets directly go into the factors

Factors:

INTERNAL:

Dashboard Metric: I would see if there has been any change the way we measure the metric has changed. Work with data partner to double check the source of truth for dashboard report
Absolute no: I would see if there is a decrease a absolute nos. as well. It could be that due to other factors, there was high no. of group creations last quarter which is driving the metric down
A/B testing: Any form of A/B testing by other teams that is impacting this. Could be that it was not considered as a counter metric when trying to increase no. of ads annoying people
UI changes/placement: same reason as A/B testing
Other metrics: check if any change in new signups and MAU/QAU. Could be that new users also decreased or existing users churned squeezing the top funnel
Latency/performance: Check if there is drop in intent as well. If not, means users are trying to create but due to latency are dropping
New limits introduced: Any change in capping the no. of groups a user can create
Marketing campaign: any change in promotions or policies that creator wont be incentivised
- policies such as certain topics/words wont be allowed and thus the request wont be approved

EXTERNAL:

Seasonality: would compare it to last year as well. could be festivals such as lent when many people don't use internet. Unlikely because it would cause a drop in many metrics
Regulation: Government cracking down on group admins/creators pushing people away from creating new ones.
Competition: new features/promotions on reddit or internal (Instagram) for creating groups that are attracting users. New entrant in the space that launch last quarter
OEM: App store / play store / browser updates making the UI incompatible - could be found by looking patterns at each OS/browser level (countrywise)
Third party: language translation API from third party not working. Unlikely because it would have resulted in many complaints and we could have found the issue earlier
Privacy/BAD PR: unlikely as it would have caused sudden drop
Global event: some calamity resulting in people spending less time on Fb. Unlikely as it would have caused drop in all other metrics.

Assuming that the absolute no. of the groups created per user did not decrease but the total no. decreased. This indicates that no. of users signing up have gradually decreased

I will work with PM of FB app and work towards reversing the signup decrease:

-mitigating gov concerns

-new privacy features

-influences

-marketing promotions, inbound/outbound advertising

-partnerships with OEM's

Thank you. Please provide feedback (I am getting stuck when it's a gradual decrease)

Rafa · Answer 3 · 2021-09-09T19:01:08+0000

Structure

I will make sure that I understand the group product and the process of creating a group and ask for clarification questions; I will explore the potential factors for the drop; I will ask for additional data and then provide one or a few hypotheses.

The Product

Facebook’s mission is to make the world closer and make tools for building communities. Groups is one of the main features for communities to interact; therefore, drop-in group creations may be an emergency. In groups, group members can interact with each other (in some groups, the interactions are moderated by admins).

The users who create the groups are called admins; Any user can create a group.

Clarification Questions (responses)

Are we talking about the number of groups created or the number of users who create a group? (number of groups created)
Is the decrease in the number of clicks on “Create” or in successful group creations? (Clicks on Create; There is no change in % of completion)
During which period we experienced a drop? (In the last two weeks)
Did the drop occur suddenly (a day or a few days) or overtime? (a steady decrease of 20% on average for every day in the last two weeks)
Do we know when it started? (Between Sunday\Monday last week)
Are we experiencing a significant drop or increase in other features or generally WAU? (No)
Did we experience such a drop in the past? What were the reasons? (Vary)

Factors

Internal Factors (responses)

Did we launch something? (No)
What A\B tests are currently running, were there any changes? (1- Changing the location of the marketplace in the left navigation. 2 - Making posts wider. 3 - Language on the terms of use page.)
Were there changes in privacy or policy (Yes an A\B test)
Were there changes in the way we track creation events (internal \ external)? (No)
Are we experiencing a relative decrease in engagement inside of groups? E.g., average posts\comments\reactions (No)
Did we change the button’s location, color, or anything around it, e.g., the background color, other items around it, something that might be more eye-catching? (Location)

External Factors (responses)

Did one of our competitors launched a feature or changed a policy? (No)
Were there any regulation changes? (No)
Is there some significant event (holiday, sports events, elections,..)? (A big storm on the east coast)
Was there something in social media or news? (The storm)

General Factors (responses)

Is it worldwide or only a specific region? (US)
Is it for the app or the web? (Desktop)
Can we segment it with some other demographic dimension? (No)
Can we segment it by devices or operating systems? (No)

Hypothesis

The A\B test around the location of the Marketplace button could affect the clicks on the groups’ button – need to check the test groups size and correlation with the drop.
The storm may affect the creation of some kind of groups, for example: around a specific event, e.g., sports, live show, community,.. – need to check:
1. if there is a drop in the creation of a particular type of groups
2. Did we experience such a drop in previous storms?

Devashish Verma · Answer 4 · 2022-07-21T08:04:54+0000

Clarifying Questions
1. When we say user groups has gone down what does it indicate → does it mean only creation of new groups gone down but engagement and other other metrics remained same
2. Is this drop in line with user base drop– no , we havnt seen any dip in new or existing users
3. Whether this is a gradual drop or instant drop – been seeing for last few weeks
4. Whether this drop is specific to geography or region → No
5. Whether this is specific to device type → No
6. Whether there is any issue with the analytical suit i.e data accuracy etc -> No
7. Any bad press about facebook recently —especially around privacy in groups → No
8. Any competitor group feature launch which is getting widespread publicity and because of the users are quitting and moving to competition for group feature –Not that we are aware of
9. Has there been any recent release aligned with the drop -No
This indicates that there are no external factors driving this dip. I will dig deeper into more intrinsic causes
1. Have we seen this for any user groups i.e across millennials, mid age, etc → no
2. Now getting into a bit of experience → facebook group allows users to create closed groups . Users who create the group can add/invite the people
  1. People added in the group can post , comment , like and chat
  2. Groups compete with facebook other feature i.e newsfeed
  3. Many people may not be aware of groups if they haven’t been part of it before.
3. Have we made any change in the way group is created i.e position of button, colour etc →No
4. Have we added any new criteria to create groups → you should a fb users for sometime etc →no
5. Have we set up new limit for groups –No
6. Have we implemented new algorithm for user feed → yes we have implemented a new algorithm which allows publishers to push advertisement in their feeds. This has resulted in lower views for group contents and thereby impacting the creation of new groups

Nitnan · Answer 5 · 2022-07-15T10:03:02+0000

How to tackle this Facebook execution question -

Clarifying Questions:

Has this been gradual or a sudden decrease?

Product Undestanding

Groups help people form smaller communities based on their interests and further grow or enagnce it by having discussions aroud the topic, consucting events etc. The groups can be privae for only people with invite to join or it can be a public group for people to join and grow the community

User segment and Flow

Would check the user flow to ensure things are good by dogfooding,

Group creator : Login, create a group, provide details, Type(Public or private), invite people, Do admin activities

Group participants : Post, engage (Like, comment, share), conduct poll and other group related activities

Data Gathering Phase:

From the above flow I would like to understand more details which I will collect from a data scientist

1. Understanding if the engagement related metrics are all good

2. What type of group creation has gone down Public vs private

3. Are there any types of groups that we have segregated has gone down in particular

4. Percentage of people who attempted the group creation and have dropped without completing like (Inviting friends)

5. Is the group creation reduction device specific?

6. Is the reduction country specific? I hope it is not as that may lead to the reduction in engagement as well to a certain degree

7. Was there a new feature that has been rolled out pertaining to UI or UX related to the group module

8. Any other feature that has been lauched that has recorded the downstream metrics as groups in the recent past?

9. I hope there are no PR related issues as that still has to do with other areas as well

10. Any competetion that is driving users from using groups by providing exclusive disucssion forums. Even in this case there will be a drop in engagement metrics

Based on the above analysis I would more allign towards the possibility of a feature (UX) launching within the groups could have caused a friction by not allowing the users successfully create groups

Joe_riley · Answer 6 · 2021-12-18T02:59:56+0000

Clarification

What metric specifically are we using to make the statement that Facebook user group creation has gone done by 20%? If we are looking at the total number of Facebook groups created per week then that number is going to ebb and flow directly with the total number of weekly active users.

If we aren't already we should be looking at a number that is relative to the number of users. For example, weekly number of FB groups created per 1000 users.

I'm just going to go ahead and make the assumption here that we've vetted our metrics and there isn't a bug in our data pipeline or reporting.

Diagnosing the issue

When did this drop in group creation happen? Was it a sudden drop or gradual? Is this Week over week? Could this be seasonal, did a similar drop occur at the same time last year?
Are there any statistically significant increases or decreases in other metrics, either related to groups or not?
Did this drop happen universally across the globe or was there a certain geographic area or country where this drop was either more or less severe?
Did this happen across the board to all users? or were certain user groups affected more than others, maybe teenagers vs adults? Or power users vs casual users?
Is this drop happening on all platforms, mobile and desktop? All app versions? What about OS or browser?

Potential Causes

External

A new competing app with similar functionality has entered the market place, or maybe an existing competitor did a new release or bolstered up their marketing efforts.
Is there any recent negative PR or news regarding FB groups? For example, an article published by a popular news site accusing FB of using groups to spy on users would disincentivize use of the feature whether factual or not
Is the pain point for online affinity group communication that FB groups solves no longer as significant of a pain point as it once was? For example, during peak COVID when school was remote and everyone was in quarantine there could've been an increased demand for online groups but now that everyone is back in person the demand for such a feature could've decreased

Internal

Did we put out a release recently that could've introduced a bug that interferes with groups?
Are we doing any A/B tests with new product features that could directly or indectly FB Groups? Perhaps a different feature is given visual priority in the UI.
Did we increase our spam prevention efforts and make it more difficult for bots to make FB Groups

Action

What action we take really depends upon which one of the potential causes is responsible for the drop. Even without out knowing the cause for the drop we can discuss FB Groups in general and their importance to Facebook.

Facebook's mission is to bring the world closer together and give people the power to build community. FB groups are each little communities themselves. Well, some of the are quite large communities with thousands of members.

At it's core Facebook is a UGC platform that makes money by showing ads along side it's content. Facebook groups are collections of niche specific content and users interested in engaging with that type of content. Without support for this type of feature, Facebook could lose out on an engagement opportunity to other competitors like Reddit, Discord, or Telegram Groups.

In order to prevent this from happening our task then becomes how can we improve engagement with Facebook groups?

There are both Facebook group organizers and members. Since we are currently experiencing a drop in Fb group creation it makes more sense for us to focus on addressing the pain points of the group organizers. A few of those pain points might be:

It's hard to find new members for my group
It's tough to moderate the group and make sure members are following the rules
It takes a lot of effort to run the Fb Group and often feels like a second job
How do I vet a new user before adding them to the group

Some potential solutions that could address those pain points are:

New Member Suggestions -> Based off of comparing user profile to that of the members or membership in similar groups
Vouching -> If a current member was friends with someone who had applied to the group, they could see them as pending on the Group Members list or recieve a notification to Vouch for them to the Group owners
Event Suggestions -> These would be little notifications sent to the Group organizers giving them suggestions of events to hold based upon what they've done in the past or events done by similar groups
Moderation Bot -> Organizers could feed this bot different rules and requirements for conduct within the group and the bot could then police the group.

Out of the above solutions I'd suggest we prioritize the new member suggestions. The more members there are in a group, the more content will get produced, and the more engagement will happen which is our goal.