Facebook Messenger How-To Guide: Share Your Real-Time Location With Your Friends

Facebook Messenger’s location tracking feature can help friends track your location, once you grant them the permission to do so. Facebook messenger got the feature recently, something, which has been is available on several messaging apps such as iMessage and Google Hangouts for sometime.

“We’ve been testing this for a little while, and people tell us that Live Location is helpful when trying to coordinate with friends, telling people how close you are when you’re on your way to an appointment, or even sharing where you are with your roommate when you’re on your way home at night. You can share your Live Location with a group of friends in Messenger or just with one person — it’s up to you!” Selena Wang, Product Manager, Messenger said in the company’s press release announcing the feature Monday.

Read: Facebook Announces Live Location Tracking In Messenger

You can share your real-time location, which Facebook calls Live Location, with people you are friends on Facebook with. You can share it with one person or multiple persons in a one-on-one chat or group chat, respectively, as per your preference. Sharing your live location will enable other people to know how long you would take to reach a destination by car — only people you share your live location will have access to the information.

The location can be shared for up to 1 hour at one time — a limitation that Apple’s iMessage and Google Maps don’t impose. After one hour, Facebook Messenger will automatically turn the feature off. You can also manually do so, whenever you want.

To make the feature work, you will need to provide Messenger with “Always” location access. You can do so by:

• Navigating to the settings app
• Scrolling to apps and tapping on Messenger
• Tapping on location
• Tapping on 'Always'

To share your live location, here’s what you need to do:

• Open the Messenger App and then open a conversation in which you want to share your live location
• Click on the More icon — the three ellipses-style dots on the right of window
• Click on location
• Click on ‘Share Live Location’ and you are good to go

When you share live location, what you would be doing is marking your location as a static point on a map. Once you indicate your destination, you will be tracked from your current location. If you want to just share your destination, you can just tap on the red pin at the top of the map and then tap on send.

If you reach your meet-up point before 60 minutes or don’t want to share your location any longer, here’s how you can stop sharing your location:

• Open the Messenger app and navigate to the conversation in which you shared your location.
• Go to the message in which your shared your live location and tap it.
• Tap on the ellipses-style "More" icon and tap on location
• Tap on ‘Stop Sharing’ on the map and you are done.

Read: How To Use Reactions, Mentions In Messenger

The feature will let your friends know your location and estimated time to arrive. It will also let you share your real-time location to a large group of people easily. In case you haven’t got the feature on your Facebook Messenger app, just navigate to App Store/Google Play Store and update your app.