Find strangers who are also trying to get off the couch more.

LAS VEGAS—One of the reasons Fitbit trackers are so popular is that the companion app for Android and iOS is so easy to use. Its simple-yet-friendly software makes it almost too easy to see your daily and historical activity data, participate in challenges, and check in on friends' activity. Fitbit is trying to make it better still: at CES 2017, the company announced some additions to its mobile app that make it more personalized, with tailored goals and an emphasis on social aspects.

Let's start with the new Personal Goal feature, which has been a long time coming for the Fitbit app. While you can currently set a daily step goal, the update lets you set a Personal Goal which can be more broad: do you want to maintain your weight? Lose a lot of weight or just a couple pounds? Do you want to work out five days a week? Any of those goals and more are options now with Personal Goals, and the app will tailor its activity recommendations to help you meet that goal.

When I got a demo of the new app features, I was excited to see that the app also offers up suggestions for additional goals after you picked your main Personal Goal. So once you set your main goal to maintain your current weight, the app will ask you if you're also interested in sleeping better, for example. While you may want to only focus on one goal at a time, this feature could be useful since it will make you think about what other health goals you may have that were not already at the forefront of your mind.

In the same vein is an update to Fitbit's Fitstar integration. Fitbit bought Fitstar a few years ago, and the two apps remain separate. But now Fitbit's app has some special Fitstar integration (besides the Fitstar workouts that appear on its Blaze tracker) that will suggest workouts for you based on your completed activity. For example, if you want to do a leg workout today but you ran five miles the previous day, the Fitbit app's Fitstar integration may suggest an upper-body workout instead so you can rest your lower body. However, since the apps are still separate, you'll be prompted to download Fitstar if and when you want to complete any of those strength training workouts.

The biggest change to the Fitbit app, though, comes with the new Community section. Previously, you could see you friends' and family's activity progress in the Friends tab. That still exists, but the Community tab is essentially a Facebook-like social feed full of updates from friends, family, groups you follow, and Fitbit itself. Those groups are new as well—you can search for groups based on taste, topic (if you're training for a 5K, there could be a group full of people who are doing the same thing), and location.

Fitbit hopes this makes it easier for users to find and interact with other Fitbit users that they don't already know. You can add friends like you would on any other social network; your Community feed will populate with their posts, and you can "cheer" them on (Fitbit's version of a "like" button) while they work toward their health and fitness goals.

Many fitness tracking apps, whether they are companions for wearables or not, have social feeds to keep you updated on friends' and family's progress. If you don't have friends or family using the same app or tracker, your feed will be pretty empty. Since Fitbit dominates the fitness tracker market, there's a decent chance that you know someone who uses a Fitbit.

With the new Community features, you can find others who share the same goals and health interests as you do, even if you don't know any of them personally. It will be a while before we see how successful Fitbit's Community is and how many users take advantage of it, but it will certainly be an intriguing feature for those who want to build a new community of friends and acquaintances as they try to live healthier.

Fitbit's Personal Goal setting will be available this month for all Fitbit users, and the Community feature will roll out to all users in March 2017.