EDIT: Someone just helped me tag this community-management, which I’ve just found to have a TON of answers to my questions. So I’ll delete this topic in a couple hours, unless someone has a suggestion specifically related to enticing people to move from Facebook Groups.
Hi, Just discovered Discourse a few weeks ago and now we already have a server running, categories all organized and some great content. We’re really happy to have found Discourse!
Building Knowledge
We’ve been looking to an alternative to our 10000+ member Facebook group. We are interested in BUILDING knowledge, unfortunately Facebook Groups is a horrible place to do that. Poor search functionality, no search from outside the group or outside Facebook, and the group’s knowledge slowly disappears as time goes by. The same questions get answered over and over again.
With Discourse, we have a well-structured set of categories in which most Topics are added as Wikis. Topics are pretty static, representing a single issue or concept. When good ideas are mentioned in the Topic posts, they get slowly edited back into the Wiki Topic.
Luring People In
Now the problem is luring people into the Discourse site. Unfortunately Facebook is just too convenient, people are used to just posting directly into the Facebook Group. We are starting to direct questions on the Group board directly to Discourse, and it works somewhat.
How to further encourage migration to Discourse?
Being new to Discourse, we don’t have any other strategies to encourage people to spend more time on Discourse (and away from Facebook). Can you suggest any configuration settings, plugins, or strategies for us?
The one major option I can think of (if your haven’t done it already) would be to configure the facebook login, it’s pretty easy to do and it will take for your users 5 secondes to create an account. The facebook logins will import the profile pic too.
The Quick Message plugin is also interesting for big facebook users, it (kinda) reproduces facebook messenger. They can send MP pretty easily. But it’s more an idea for “after they are lured in your community” proposition.
Essentially you need to persuade your members of the value proposition that a forum offers over Facebook.
As you say, it’s a tricky proposition because you’re asking people to form another habit when their lives already feel insurmountably busy. That’s why Facebook communities work so well – the habit already exists.
In your OP you list many of those value points, but from the perspective of the organisation, rather than the member.
The trick is to find out what your member’s primary values are, and appeal to those as motivators.
Thanks, I’ve been reading the articles on the feverbee website, great resource.
This is the key. As your article mentions, right now I’m focusing on the “Non-Social” and “Social Rewards”. The Discourse Badges are a great feature in this regard.
Absolutely. The badges are really powerful, but use them wisely. Depending on the nature of your community, you might not want to use all of them. If something takes little or no effort to earn, it has very little perceived value.
