As you may have noticed, Facebook are constantly updating their social media site to keep up to date and rival other platforms. Facebook’s most recent new feature is group calling. Facebook messenger is said to have over 900 million monthly users so it is no wonder they are constantly trying to improve the service it offers.

Facebook group calling is extremely straightforward and user friendly. You simply have to select the phone icon in your group conversation to begin the call. You can then manage individual users, with you even being able to pick up and join the call half way through if you have missed it.

It is believed this new feature will massively benefit businesses, with them being able to call clients from all around the world using this simple method. After giving this a try myself, ringing family members, I found it was a very effective and easy way to communicate with other users. The messenger app displays the group and its members, you are then asked to invite members to your call, with them being able to accept or decline.

Your group calls can contain up to as many as 50 people, with this being extremely advantageous for businesses. However, I’m personally not sure I could manage talking to 50 people all at once, so if you’re like me, you’ll be pleased to learn there is a mute button. In 2014 Facebook launched one-to-one audio calling and last year they introduced one-on-one video calling, however it is not yet known whether they will introduce a group video chat, merging all features.

One huge advantage with Facebook messenger is that you can communicate and chat to users even if you aren’t friends with them, giving you little limitations globally. Messenger could essentially act as a substitute for Skype, letting you easily set up conference calls with users whose numbers you don’t have. It seems Facebook are trying to provide all the services that a smartphone user might require, so that their users never have any reason to leave the platform.

By Rebecca Guest