Facebook Group vs Forum?

Try https://www.discourse.org/ , you'll have full control unlike with a fb group and the software is from one of the stackoverflow founders. And you can host it yourself as well as a docker container.

I remember reading that https://spectrum.chat is rolling out private community as part of a private beta, maybe reaching out to them to see what they can offer?

Trello could be nice too

One thing to think about is SEO optimization. I don't think group topics will rank with Google. This is why I started https://botlist.co/community to help drive more traffic to BotList.

The advantage of user by Facebook is people are there already. On top of that it seems as though Facebook is optimised for groups at the moment so your content may bubble up in their feed and notifications.

In contrast getting people to your forum may mean you have to market it as much as the core offering.

Building and maintaining the engagement in a forum seems very difficult even when you have a lot of traffic. I believe that’s why Courtland has put the forum on the front page here and hidden the podcast despite multiple people saying they’d like the podcast to be made the priority or at least easier to find. He’s had to put lots of energy / sacrifices into making it work.

I'd avoid Facebook. They've changed their algorithms and show mainly posts by friends nowadays? You'd need to pay, for any posts in a FB page of yours, to be seen by your members?

Someone mentioned using Discourse instead = good idea.

There's also https://www.talkyard.io (I'm developing it. Open source + SaaS hosting) which is a bit like open-source StackOverflow ( + Discourse and Slack chat features) if you like the good-answers-rise-to-the-top approach to support.

Wordpress: You'd place both Discourse and Talkyard on a sub domain, don't think it matters much if you use Wordpress or sth else?

Check out mobilize.io as well. Free to start and a lot of great features.

I run a custom forum for a very niche part of the gardening community. We have both a Facebook group and a forum, and the Facebook group performs orders of magnitude better than the forum as far as number of users. However, the forum serves a part of the community that would otherwise be cut off due to refusing to use Facebook, and is more focused. The reason Facebook does so well for us is that there are a lot of gardening groups there, it acts as an agragator for the users, even if it gets watered down a bit.
So where am I going with this...
If you know where your users hang out, you can pick the best place to engage with them. Weigh the way you want to engage as well. You will have more focused users on a custom forum, but will have to work harder to get them there. Ask yourself, which will build a more effective community for your users?

One last point about custom forums. Managing the spam takes a fair amount of work. It pays dividends to use a tool that has plenty of features to help with spam and adding CloudFlare on top adds yet another layer of protection.

I believe you should open a forum because it will have more features than Facebook could provide that will come in very handy to you. Your users would be able to categorize their posts, tag them, and search all the categories for some answer they might need.

Why not both?
Facebook allows you to collect data from users on signup. I am currently collecting emails from my facebook group users for when I am ready to convert to a forum.

Another option is Mighty Networks, which I have just started for my project Expat Empire and added it as a subdomain at community.expatempire.com. Anyone else have experience with Mighty Networks?

This comment was deleted 7 years ago