How do we compete with Facebook Groups?

Shawn Gossman

Shawn Gossman

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As online community managers, how do we forum owners, compete our communities with Facebook groups and the like?

I think this is an important question to ask based on my own observations and experience.

I once had a forum that took me about 10-years to get to 100K posts and over 10K members. That also included buying out the competition which was over $1,000. I had to post every day possible and spend a lot of time on the forum.

I have a Facebook group that is about to hit 20,000 members. It took me less than 5-years to get that. No money spent. And I only really post a few times a week, mainly to share content from my main brand's FB page.

Facebook was easy to get big, forums was not.

How can we as community managers compete with this today? I'm interesting in seeing innovative and revolutionary ideas!
 
I'm interested in reading what others have to say and how they achieved probably what is the impossible, for the forum to beat the FB Groups.

When I created Crafter Craze I had hoped hundreds of my Facebook friends would join me in discussions and sharing of our projects. But they didn't. They post all the time on various FB craft groups though and I'm not sure why there is that strong attraction to FB Groups. I love how you can see things on Forums all at once but in Groups you have to know what to search in order to return to someone's post from the day before or it's too hard to find (in bigger groups).
 
Katrina said:
I'm interested in reading what others have to say and how they achieved probably what is the impossible, for the forum to beat the FB Groups.

When I created Crafter Craze I had hoped hundreds of my Facebook friends would join me in discussions and sharing of our projects. But they didn't. They post all the time on various FB craft groups though and I'm not sure why there is that strong attraction to FB Groups. I love how you can see things on Forums all at once but in Groups you have to know what to search in order to return to someone's post from the day before or it's too hard to find (in bigger groups).
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It is a good topic to ask for sure because we have a big competition with social media.

When my Facebook group hit 15K members, a contractor hired by Facebook got ahold of me and got me a local news interview to advertise my group on the local news. Little did they know, I am on the local news quite a bit due to my local brand but still, Facebook got me a news segment. So they're trying to be the kind of community enough where they will do that for you for no cost!
 
From what I have seen is people are either Team Forum or Team Social Media. I like the way forums are laid out. Social Media, nothing is organized. A new person joining gets bumped down by people talking about random things. To me, there's no personal contact. Posts get lost in the shuffle. Forums tend to Discuss issues more.
I have had people try out my forum from social media but claimed it was "intimidating" because you can see the boards, threads, posts all at a glance. They prefer to scroll one post at a time. To me, that is a waste of time. To them, that's what they want to do!
To answer this question, I don't bother to compete because they are 2 very different things. Similar to how people like cola but would prefer Coke to Pepsi. No amount of advertising can entice them over to the 'other side'. They either like one or the other.
 
I do enjoy participating in Facebook groups. I find that topics are short lived whereas in forums they virtually last forever. I have threads in my forum that dates back years that are still generating feedback. I imagine there is a way to supplement traffic to forums from Facebook groups but... it's really hard to get people to sign up/register for a forum account. Facebook has that advantage when it comes to groups. Some admins require questions to be answered to be accepted but generally I find FB books are a one click sign up which is super convenient.
 
Facebook stocks have crashed so hopefully people are waking up, I’m not sure why people prefer Facebook Groups over Forums, if Facebook decides to close down one day there goes every group and it’s data.

Where the forums owner own the data if they are using proper software!

I use Facebook but I’m Team Forum.
 
Try sharing an engaging post that you created. If there are comments, there is engagement. Try treating the audience as your friends and not as strangers to connect more to them. Yet, there is always a but, by doing that your forum gets so much deadness as you are taken it away from your forum, can't win ;(

Works for some and fails for others, trying to get the right niche that works well is hard and also keep it going and flowing. What are good tips, I have a hard time even trying to grow my FB page 😛
 
Because people are inherently lazy.

People default to Facebook which is super easy to access and has everything on there from neighbourhood groups to local marketplace listings and also videos to watch content creators. It's all under one roof.

Forums on the other hand are individual websites for a specific topic. You simply can't compete with Facebook (or other social media) because quite frankly, forums are old tech that just isn't accessible like it once was.
 
I'd say give them a reason to come there rather than a Facebook group. I mean, look at FP. It's got a good base of posters. Some niches are also banned from social media, but they might not be family friendly.
 
Shawn said:
How can we as community managers compete with this today?
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Unfortunately, you don't. Social Media connects you to everyone you know in real life and allows you to meet singles in your area. You'd have to invent something new that would re-ignite the public's interest in forums.
 
It is really difficult to remain anonymous on Facebook, however, forums provide 100 percent annonymity. This is the main advantage of forums over facebook groups.
 
Might have to start thinking like a Facebook user and add to forums that Facebook has and what people want. Most people hate joining, they want to join a site as fast as they can without doing flip all. Start with easy fast joining.

Forums nowadays aren't like back in the day, they have to change with the times.
 
Empire said:
Might have to start thinking like a Facebook user and add to forums that Facebook has and what people want. Most people hate joining, they want to join a site as fast as they can without doing flip all. Start with easy fast joining.

Forums nowadays aren't like back in the day, they have to change with the times.
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I don't think forums are compatible with what most people want though. Going into a specific forum section, reading threads etc, it's a bit slow.
 
The users in my niche tend to avoid Facebook and the like, so that's never been a problem. Discord on the other hand has destroyed every other website-based community in the niche but ours.

I attribute our continued relevance to our recurring contests, and deep integration with Discord. Our content gets auto-shared to 6 Discord servers.
 
Tucker933 said:
iscord on the other hand has destroyed every other website-based community in the niche but ours.
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Worse that they are making more changes and added a forum categories to discord server 😉
 
as long as Google remains relevant i think we have a chance, Facebook groups isnt good for getting information from where Google indexes blogs and forums mainly.
 
Empire said:
or in my cases IPB forum XD
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That too!
Anything similar to Xenforo so even phpbb or Mybb.

So far forums & blogs are only decent to get support information from and people that don’t like Facebook still use them, as a forum owner myself it does suck to see people turn lazy for a Facebook then a real site like a forum.
 
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