How To Create A Community In Google Plus

Currents best practices

Create communities

Next: Manage communities

Share ideas and engage with people by creating a Currents community.

Note: You can only create public, private, or "ask to join" communities within your domain. Outside your domain, you can only create private communities. You can no longer create public communities, but you can still interact with existing public communities.

Public versus private communities

When choosing whether to make your community public or private, consider the following:

Who's the audience? Will the content be relevant to a small or large group of people?
What's the subject? Is it sensitive or public in nature?
What's the scope of your topic? Is it broad or niche?

Public communities:

Are open to anyone. People can join or ask to join a community. If someone receives an active invite link, they can automatically join the community.
Can't be made private later.
Are visible to anyone in your organization. People in your domain can see the community members and posts without having to join.

Private communities

Can't be made public later.
Only people with access to an active invite link can join the community.
Only members can see the community's posts.
Only members and invitees can see who belongs to a private community.

Note: To create a public or private community, see Get started with Currents.

See members in public and private communities

Types of communities

There are 3 types of communities that organizations typically add: role or team-based, region or location-based, and external-facing.

Role or team-based communities

These internal communities center around roles or teams in a company (for example, a marketing team). Sometimes these communities are used:

For operational purposes, such as assigning tasks.
To crowdsource solutions or best practices.
As an email replacement for project or team planning.

Regional or location-based communities

These internal communities are more general. They're often used to communicate high-level company information or announcements, such as:

Major company events.
New store openings.
Philanthropic initiatives.
Business acquisitions and mergers.

External-facing communities

Communities for external divisions, such as marketing or technical support, are useful for organizations to:

Co-ordinate with different departments.
Work with partners or external vendors on projects.

Note: Partners or external vendors need to have Google Workspace accounts to use Currents.

Overview of the 3 types of communities

Customizing your community

Identify what's unique about your community and its focus.

Introduce your community

Add a customized cover photo that's relevant to your community.
Describe the community's goal in a brief descriptive tagline.
Add a description with details about the community's purpose.
Mention what type of activity is expected and encouraged as well as any community rules.

Add a description of a community

Add category filters

Add filters to make it easy for community members to post content for specific groups of people. For example, create a project filter where team members can see all content related to a project.

Other examples of community filters include:

Announcements
Questions
Internal resources
Project updates
Industry information

Use community filters

Next: Manage communities

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