What are communities in Viber? Features and functions

The community is a new way to unite people in the Viber network. This is a chat where up to 1 billion people can communicate.

What new does Viber offer us?

Super-administrators and administrators

The group can be managed by super-administrators and administrators. Their powers differ:

Community type: open or closed

There are two types of chats available: public or private. People can be added to the closed community only by the invitation link of super-administrators, and to the open community – by the invitation of any subscriber.

If you are a super-admin and want to limit the ability of strangers to be added to the correspondence:

• Open Viber, select the desired community;
• Click on the “Info” button and then “Community Info” (three dots on Android) or on the name of the community (iOS) in the top corner of the screen;
• Then – “Share Link”;
• Click the toggle to prevent people from sharing the invitation link. Then the current link will be replaced by the new one.

To send an invitation, you need to select one of the following options – “Send via Viber”, “Copy link” or “Share link”.

Important! If the person has turned on “Settings for adding to groups” > “My contacts” in the application – only contacts can add it to a community or group!

Unlimited participants

The Viber community unites up to 1 billion people, but users often face a problem: when adding new users, an error is displayed.

This means that the Viber algorithms considered the user’s actions as “spam”.

• To avoid such situations, we recommend adding no more than 10 people per day whose numbers are not in your contact list.
• If the issue has already occurred, please wait 72 hours before inviting followers again.

Community members list

To view the list of participants, click on “Info” at the bottom of the screen, then “Show All”.

Viber shows who is the administrator, super-administrator and ordinary participant in the conversation.

How to find and join a community on Viber

Private chats can only be accessed via the link. You can search for public chats in the search through @, for example:

Community History

Each new subscriber can see the entire message history, regardless of when they were invited to the conversation. The administrator does not need to duplicate information for a new user each time.

The “member rights” button in the community

The super admin can allow/deny users to write messages or share active links in the Member Rights section.

For this you need:

• Go to the desired community;
• Tap on the “Info” button and then “Community Info” (three dots on Android) or on the name of the community (iOS) in the top corner of the screen;
• Select “Participant rights”;
• Move the switch to enable/disable user rights.

If you are not a super administrator, you will not be able to use this feature.

Right of members to post

Super admin can prevent all chat members and admins from writing to the feed.

For this you need:

• • go to “Participant Rights”;
  • toggle to prevent member from posting to this community.

Also, it is possible to delete all messages of a particular participant. For this you need:

• Press and hold a message from the selected user.
• Select “Delete all messages from member” from the menu.
• Confirm your choice.

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Confidentiality

Only the names of Viber and the icons of all participants are displayed in the feed. Your phone number will be hidden, which guarantees your safety, since you will not receive personal messages from unknown Viber users, invitations to unknown chats.

You will only be able to see the contacts of the people you have in your phone list.

Community privacy protection

If you created a conversation for sales or other purposes and do not want competitors to “pull out” your customer base, write to community members in private conversations – you must:

• Click on the “More” tab in Viber, which is located at the bottom right;
• Select “Description and Support” and then “Support”;
• You will be transferred to the Viber website. Scroll down the site and find the “Support” function;
• Leave a request with a request – “I want to hide the phone numbers of chat participants and limit the ability of users to write to each other in private messages”;
• You will receive an email from Technical Support. Follow the prompts and instructions. You will need to send a link to your community and wait a couple of hours.

This process is very simple and fast, and the result is reliable.

An answer to a specific question

So that informative messages or answers to questions are not lost in the feed, you can answer a specific question or SMS. What should be done:

• Press and hold the desired message.
• Select “Reply” from the menu, send the reply.
• The person you wrote to will receive a notification about your message.

Important message

New Viber features allow admins to pin important messages to the top chat window. Important messages include: topics for discussion, rules to follow in the community, contacts of super-admins. But you can choose the content that you would like to pin for participants. This message will always be visible to all subscribers of the community. Very handy when adding new people to the chat.

There are two ways to pin an important message:

Method 1: Press and hold any message from the chat. Select “Pin” from the context menu.

Method 2: Open the information screen. Select “Write and Pin”. Enter the text of your message and click “Pin”.

Having considered the main functions of the community, we can say that this is one of the most promising areas for development in the Viber network. There are already many convenient features that are useful for both administrators and all users.

Post Popularity

In Viber, you can send reactions to messages, like them.

If in the group you can see which of the participants left which reaction, then in the community you can see only the number of reactions from users.

When a message gets the most views and reactions, a special icon appears next to it – a “blinking star”. This is a convenient opportunity to track the interests of the target audience.

Channel, Group or Community?

In addition to the Community in Viber, you can create a Channel or a Group.

The group is intended for communication of a small company of familiar people (up to 250 people). The channel is suitable for one-way communication of an administrator (for example, a brand) with an audience.

If you want to leave the ability to send messages only to the administrator, it is better to create a channel or community with the appropriate settings. The group is not suitable for this purpose.

Change channel type: closed to open

By analogy with the Community channel can be open or closed.

People can find an open channel in the Viber search by name or keywords and subscribe without restrictions. If you have created a private Viber channel but want to change its status to public:

• Open Viber and click Chats;
• Select the channel where you are the super admin. Only super admin can change channel type;
• Tap the Info button, then the Channel Info (Android) or channel name (iOS) at the top of the screen;
• Select “Channel Type” and then “Open”.

While Viber is considering your request to change the status of the channel, the “Channel Type” field will be marked “Checking the request.” When the application is accepted, the inscription will change to “Open”.

If your channel does not comply with the Channel Guidelines, your request may be denied.

Viber support

If some functions on your device do not work or are not displayed, we advise you to contact Viber technical support. To do this, click on the “More” tab, which is located at the bottom right. Select the item “Description and support”, and after that “Support”.

Many users are faced with the lack of a “Create Community” button. This situation is solved only through the Viber Technical Support service – the ability to create a conversation is turned on manually for such accounts.

But there are also hopeless situations. For example, leaving a super-admin from a community results in its automatic removal.

Please note that the messenger is supported in English and Russian, there is no Ukrainian functionality yet.