What can a forum offer that a Facebook group can't?
I am in the process of creating a discussion forum for people in my industry, and told a couple of my friends about the idea. One of the responses was "Couldn't this be done with a facebook group?". I actually thought that was a pretty interesting argument, and a question I couldn't answer right away.
I wanted to reach out to people who run successful forums - what do you think your forum has that a standard Facebook group doesn't?
It gives you access to people who refuse to sign up for Facebook.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Yep! And probably the type you actually want in discussions the most.
I used to run Facebook groups, but around 2016 I sold them and transitioned entirely to websites that I own and run. Here's why:
Privacy
Came to type exactly the same thing. :+1:
Same :D
It lives on our domain
We own and respect their data
We can integrate should we want with other things
We can search content easily
We can reach out to them easily
We won't sell their data
We are ethical
We don't allow political advertising :|
It gives threaded discussions that stick around, the ability to categorize posts, the ability to be indexed by Google, and literally anything you want to design into it.
categorized posts is a biggie. The issue that to a regular user. They don't see the benefits of this until they use it. All the advantages are easily explainable to developers or community managers. As for users, it's a harder sell. I just bit the bullet and developed the community into it's own app. So now we have RTC and Push notifications. WHich are game-changers.
I will agree with another user. The information and knowledge expire. It's hard to do a search on Facebook.
This is always the question I get.
The tough part is that there is no slam dunk answer like for e,g why use stripe? Cause it works well and is better than 99% of processors out there and developer-friendly.
The only thing I'll say is your friends are not your target community and tbh they don't matter at this point. Find your community. when you do they'll get the need for it. You won't need to battle the FB Vs. Your forum questions.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago