Communities and group chats are a great way to bring people together and make connections based on the things we have in common, from family groups, to big communities of people who are all interested in the same thing.

When it comes to choosing the right type of chat to open for your group, you need to consider some important questions:

Size really does matter

Group chats are usually smaller and are perfect for private connections. A group chat on Viber is best for chatting with up to 250 members – usually family or close friends. Members are invited to join, or can join by a direct link.

Communities are much larger, public-facing groups, usually made up of people who don’t know each other. A community can have unlimited members, and admins can allow all members to invite their friends to join.

Inclusiveness is the name of the game

If someone joins a group chat in the middle of a conversation, they will miss all the earlier conversation, and it can take some time to catch up. Not really a great way to welcome a new member!

In a community, the entire chat history is available to everyone, no matter when they joined the community. New members can read back through earlier messages, or focus on the current chat and jump right in. The choice is theirs.

Your privacy matters whatever the chat

Group chats work best when everyone knows each other, and feels safe with the other members of the chat. The phone numbers of everyone in the chat are visible, so anyone can message or call another group member privately.

Communities are different. As anyone can easily join a community, phone numbers of members of the community are hidden. This is important to us at Viber – a way to ensure that communities are a safe space for members to meet new people and bond over their shared passions – all without exposing their private phone number.

Everyone in a community (admins included) can choose whether to let other community members message them in a Hidden-number chat. Even if you have enabled incoming chats from people you don’t know, you still have the choice to accept or decline a message from a new person.

You have the power

In group chats, admins can remove or members or add other members.

Communities come with special powers for admins to oversee the conversation. Admins can add and remove members, invite admins who can write in the community’s chat, remove people from the community, ban people from joining or rejoining the community, and appoint other admins or superadmins to help manage the community.

It’s time to take a snooze

In group chats, members receive a notification every time there is a new message. If there is a busy chat taking place, members receive smart notifications (several notifications in one) so that their phones don’t beep too much!

In communities, members can take a break from the community by “snoozing” it for 30 days. Snoozing gives the member a break from the community, but they are still a member. When the 30 days are up, the community will unsnooze, and the community will reappear at the top of the chat list the next time there is a new message.

When it comes to chatting in a big group of people, communities create great connections for more people.

Start making those connections and create your community today. Remember, your community can be based on anything at all, from candle lovers to Kendall lovers.

Read our other blogs in the communities series:

Get Started with Your Very Own Viber Community!

Your time to shine: Manage, grow and engage a Viber Community!

Community Insights: Measure The Success of Your Community

Master your Community: New ways to add members & more

Community Masters: Viber’s tools for outstanding content

Interesting and fun content is the must-have of any community. As the community admin, the content you post is the thing that will engage your members and make them come back to your community again and again.

Viber is full of great tools that will make you a superstar admin who creates super fun, engaging content.

Grab their attention

Announce your topic with a Shout. Shouts can be used to introduce a new topic, make an important announcement that your members won’t be able to miss, or as the focal point of a set of messages. Shouts turn any ordinary text message into something eye-catching and colorful.

Add a Shout to your message now: Tap the GIF+ button > find Shouts > choose a background for your message > and go!

Go live!

Give your community that “live” touch and send a 20-second Instant video message. It’s quick, it’s spontaneous, and it shows what is going on RIGHT NOW. Record a short video directly from the community chat screen, and share it instantly. For example, show yourself buying the ingredients for your next cooking masterpiece, or record your quick commentary on the latest community discussion.

Record and send an instant video: Tap and hold on the record button > record your video > release the button to send.

Pro tip: Regular videos sent in the chat will play automatically (without sound), bringing the chat screen to life! Give it a try!

Be interactive

Your members want to be more involved in the community, and Polls are a great way to achieve this. Ask your members a question, and have them vote by tapping on the button next to a set of answers.

Pro tip: The 90min Fanvoice community regularly uses polls on top of pictures, videos and GIFs, to get members’ views on the most recent football news.

Add a poll: Tap the polls button > ask your question > add options > and create. Watch your members vote in real time as the count on the poll goes up.

Ask me anything

When you really want to hear from your members, open yourself up to Hidden-number chats and encourage them to write to you in private. These chats are safe, all phone numbers are hidden from everyone in the chat.

These chats have been used by some communities for “Ask me anything” or “Q&A” days. Community members send their questions, and they are answered in the chat.

Pro tip: The FC Barcelona community uses Hidden-number chats for members to send in questions to their “Q&A with a Soccer Star” days.

Turn on Hidden-number chats: Open the community info screen > turn ON Receive private messages.

We’ve given you the tools, now’s the time to get out there and be that superstar community admin you always knew you were!

New to communities? Check out our other blogs in this series:

• Get started with your very own Viber community!
• Your time to shine: Manage, grow and engage a Viber community!
• Community Insights: Measure the success of your community
• Master your community: New ways to add members & more

Communities on Viber are growing and evolving all the time, offering you exciting opportunities to grow and engage with your audience.

As community superadmins and admins, you can do more in communities – from making it easier for people to add new members to your community, to helping them make safe connections.

Read more about Viber Communities in the previous posts in the series:

Community Insights: Measure the Success of Your Community
Your time to shine: Manage, grow and engage a Viber Community!
Get Started with Your Very Own Viber Community!

Invite new people to your community

We know how important it is to bring new members to your community, so that’s why we have updated the way to invite and add new people.

Anyone can add new members to a community simply by tapping on the share button at the top of the community screen and selecting up to 50 members to add to the community at a time.

Bring new members through virality

Your community could go viral throughout Viber when your members forward a message from your community to any of their friends, groups, or other communities. Every forwarded message has a label with your community name on it, so everyone who sees it knows where the message came from, and can tap the community name to join.

Help community members message privately and safely

The members of your community can chat between themselves in hidden-number chats, and stay safe, as they don’t share phone numbers.

As a community admin or super-admin you can choose whether you want to allow your members to message you 1on1. Your members will be able to send you hidden-number chats, meaning that neither of you can see each other’s phone number.

You can leave the 1on1 chat at any time and delete all of the messages you sent. You can also choose to block individual members from messaging you, either by not accepting their initial message, or by blocking them from inside the chat at any time.

Learn all about hidden-number chats in this blog.

Engage with your members with polls

Polls in communities are a great way to get your members opinions on any question you may ask, without being flooded with comments. Polls are quick and simple to set up inside a community, and you can watch how members vote in real-time.

Learn more about polls here.

Manage your community from your computer

You can manage your community from the convenience of Viber on your computer. Add new members, create polls, send messages, block members, reply to hidden-number chats, and more. Viber on your computer is fully synced with Viber on your phone, so you can continue managing your community seamlessly.

Take these ideas and enjoy taking your community to the next level!

This is how some of the most popular characters in literature would have chatted. We present… classical stories, which would have ended differently if only the characters had Viber.

Nowadays, we can’t imagine our everyday lives without smartphones and the Internet, and what would we be if we couldn’t constantly share our emotions in chats with our loved ones? These forms of communication have become mandatory in the really short period of time since the end of the 20th century. And imagine what would have happened if these technologies were available hundreds or even thousands of years ago? How would they change the outcome of some of our favorite stories, and how would technology have ruled over the lives of some of the most popular characters in literature?

Here we take a look at some examples of how Viber, one of the most popular communication apps we have now, could have rewritten literary history, if only these beloved characters had access to it:

Romeo & Juliet, 1597

The troubled outcome of the famous drama of Verona is known to almost everyone. Although written correspondence was a popular form of communication back then, especially when people were experiencing the need either to hide their feelings from others or were planning a secret mission, the possibility for end-to-end encryption, with that extra level of privacy, would have been a great asset to everyone.

Creating a Secret chat

Imagine Juliet sends Romeo a disappearing message:

Oh, Romeo! Father Lawrence and I have found a way for us to escape together! I will take a poison thus everyone would think I were dead, but don’t worry, I will wake up as soon as the effect expires! Let’s meet tonight at the Capulet crypt to plan it all my love! What say you? I can’t wait to see thee!

If there was Viber during Shakespeare’s time, the young lovers could have been fully aligned on their secret mission, escaped from their feuding families, and lived happily ever after.

Robinson Crusoe, 1719

Crusoe was the victim of a shipwreck accident in a storm in South America, 40 miles from the shores of the Orinoco river, that changed his life forever. Crusoe landed on the Island of Despair, where he managed to survive in the wilderness, by making his own hunting tools. Imagine if a man on a lonely island had the chance to interact with his favourite football team’s chatbot?

Subscribe to the FC Barcelona Chatbot ?

Being on a lonely island, with no chance of face-to-face social interaction, he would have been satisfied getting the latest Barça news, competing with his friends for monthly prizes and even paying a remote visit to Camp Nou!

With Viber on his phone, this man wouldn’t have been bored for even a minute!

Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798)

The world’s most famous lover managed to give each of his hundreds of women love, admiration, attention and a feeling they were the center of his world. But during his imprisonment and travels around the world, thousands of paramours were left totally heart-broken without the chance to interact with their lover.

Opening a community

Suppose he had opened a Community, an advanced chat without member limitations, to get in regular contact with his female fans and satisfy their hunger for his poems and intellectual quotes. Since he was a worldwide famous lover, women from other countries would have been able to join the Community as well, and understand everything their crush posted thanks to the translation feature.

If there had been Viber around, there wouldn’t have been a single lonely woman back then.

Snow White (By Grimm brothers)

Chased away by an evil queen, the princess flees into the wood where she meets seven dwarfs and starts living happily with them. Every morning they go into the mountains and every evening when they come back home Snow White has their meal ready and their house tidy.

Using polls

Imagine if Snow White could use Polls to ask what they want for dinner:

• Chicken with mushroom sauce
• Vegetable risotto
• Eggs and bacon

With Viber around, she would have saved plenty of time by knowing in advance what her small friends wanted for dinner and they themselves would have been delighted to eat their favorite foods!

Love stories are the same today as they ever were, but the way we express ourselves has changed dramatically. How lucky we are to have Viber in our lives to make it easy to keep in touch, share our secrets privately, and have fun as we do so!

Are you ready to write your story with Viber?  Try it now!

In previous posts, you learned how to Get Started with Your Very Own Viber Community and received helpful tips on how to Manage, Grow and Engage a Viber Community.

Now that your Community is up and running, you will want to know more about the people in your Community, how engaged they are, and what impact the content shared has had. To do this, get to know Community Insights, Viber’s easy to use Community analytics report.

Learn from Community Insights

Community Insights empower you by offering you a lot of information about your community.

See how many members you have in your Community every day. So, for example, understand how promotional efforts you carried out encouraged new people to join the Community.

Discover the countries your members come from, with a breakdown per day. With better knowledge on where you are growing your Community audience, you can adjust the content in your Community – making it more relevant for members.

Community Insights can teach you about the number of active members in your Community every day – see how many members have posted or liked posts in the Community. Every person who posts in your Community or likes a message is counted only once, so if the report says that there were 5 messages sent and 100 likes, you know that this is 105 different people.

Privacy First on Viber

Viber is, as always, all about the privacy of the people who use the app. It is important to note that Community Insights does not give Community superadmins any personal information about individual members. The information included in Community Insights is a useful tool for understanding the high-level trends in your Community, while guarding the privacy of all members.

Start using Community Insights

Community Insights are available once your Community has 1,000 members. The reports can be easily accessed by superadmins and admins from the Community info screen. Open the Community Insights screen and download the user activity report to find out more about the success of your Community.

Gain insights into your Community today.

Not started a Community yet?

If you haven’t started your Community yet, or it hasn’t reached 1,000 members, check out our other Communities guides:

Get Started with Your Very Own Viber Community
Manage, Grow and Engage a Viber Community