Facebook Groups - Zuck is coming for us

We’re certainly not opposed to a community-contributed comparison :wink:

Beyond that, there’s just not a whole lot to gain from us trying to prominently position ourselves as a Facebook Groups alternative. Fact is, if your group is relatively tiny and strapped for cash then you’ll have an easier time getting started on a free platform that’s subsidised by a larger vertical play. Probably only 0.01% of Facebook Groups out there would be able to pay for hosting, and being willing to is a whole other story when you’ve gotten used to the idea of :free:.

Without even having a dedicated sales or marketing department to speak of, this isn’t a market segment we want to mess with at the moment.

My main concern about Facebook Groups is that as far as I can tell they still don’t provide a good export path, which is deplorable.

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I think this gets overlooked. The user experience on Facebook is not great… but people are indoctrinated to use it.

Offer a better experience with higher quality information/curation and clarity and people will come visit your forums.

Plus, search traffic.

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Indeed these are all valid, but none of them really matter to the people who you are looking to attract to your forums\website.

Whatever it is… it needs to provide value TO THEM vs facebook group (or anything else)

This isn’t a slight on Discourse, but most people won’t and don’t care about it’s features, or how much “better” (functionally) it is than facebook groups.

They do care about better conversation, better quality of information, curation, status and so on. You need to embody and demonstrate those values before you even think about a list of features of Discourse.

Features can be the icing on the cake. But if you dont have the above, you’re hosed until you figure out that part. Once you do, then you can start to talk about some of the benefits of the platform that can add value to their experience in your community.

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:100::exclamation: Content is king. If you have great content, everything else follows. If you do not…

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So I did a quick straw poll of my users and so far it’s looking like:

  • 18% refuse to touch Facebook for the purpose
  • 74% prefer to use my Discourse instance over an equivalent FB Group
  • 4% happy to use either
  • 4% prefer Facebook

So the message from my main Discourse forum is the vast majority prefer Discourse over FB :trophy:

The challenge for me is turning that into an instance that at least covers its costs … :slight_smile:

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That’s 75% of your user base accounted for. Where’s the other 25%?

Do you only have 8 users?

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hahaha, in fairness I did say ‘straw poll’ and ‘so far’ :wink:

Don’t curb my enthusiasm!

4k, but only about 300 or so active at the moment

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