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8 Comments

If you start a B2B community today, should you host it in Slack or in a private Facebook group?

Or somewhere else?

  1. 5

    It all depends on your target Audience. I think I can share my experience.

    Most small business communities I am part of are Facebook groups. It's where these people are most of the time. I can hardly think of them being on Slack. Slack may not even be something they have heard of.

    However, almost all my startup related groups are on slack, whether it's marketing, development or growth hacking. You can think of Slack for a bit tech-savvy audience.

    I like discord and use it daily. But it's most popular among gamers and younger ones. I won't think of building a community over there unless they are my target customers.

    Another factor is the geo-location. All of my local communities are on Facebook. Slack or discord is not very popular here.

    So it all depends on what kind of B2B community you are targetting.

    1. 3

      On top of this, I'd look at what kind of discussions you plan on having. I've always felt like the slack/discord chat-like structure is much faster paced and usually shorter than facebook's posts and replies.

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

  2. 2

    I may be in the minority here but I REALLY dislike Facebook groups. I grew up with the Forum/Sub-Forum structure and I prefer that and the ability to have different discussions groups under a "Topic" vs the Facebook All-In-One-Feed format.

    I use Slack and Discord a little and prefer them to Facebook but still prefer forums the most.

    Just my thoughts

  3. 2

    I think you need a combination. We've had discussion recently in one Slack group - 2500 members, and only 4 people ever say anything. When it gets busy there are too many overlapping threads, channel hijackers, and spam. Intermittent users lose interest because there's too much going on.

    We're talking about setting up something using Discourse and Discord/Slack so that intermittent users have a forum they that can check on, and there's also a place for realtime discussion. Right now it's still just ideas, but we see problems with Slack on its own.

    LinkedIn groups can be pretty good depending the audience, too.

  4. 2

    Hard to know for sure without more details and research.

    My gut would say Slack or perhaps something like Discourse. Depends on the businesses and how they feel about having conversations and data in various places.

  5. 1

    I am toying with the idea of building an online B2B community and have asked around on this topic.
    So far, feedback has been that:

    • Facebook is C2C, so not great for B2B :)
    • Slack is not great for engagement, gets noisy and lacks structure for that purpose

    A Linkedin Group could be a good place, as easy for the right audience to join. BUt limited in what you can do with it.

    If you want to add tools that can add value - like lists of valuable resources that the community can upvote - probably best to build something yourself ("easy" these days with no-code platforms), but then more work to attract the right audience into your platform.

    There is no "perfect" solution, it's about finding the one that fits most your key criteria.

  6. 1

    non. You should own your community. and that's why we built www.Tribe.So
    It's a community platform, empowering new generation of online branded communities. We built it because people are moving away from social media both for privacy concerns and to own the data.

  7. 1

    One of the groups I'm in (which has a Slack AND a Facebook presence, incidentally) recently attempted to move to Spectrum. Most of the action still happens on Facebook, and they have Spectrum set up to autopost into the pertinent Slack channels.

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