Establishing a facebook group for you discussion board!

[Altair]

Would you establish a Facebook group for your discussion board.
What do you think about this idea? Has this ever been done by you?

 

[Shawn Gossman1]

Would you establish a Facebook group for your discussion board.
What do you think about this idea? Has this ever been done by you?

I have a Facebook group for my influencer brand. It has nearly 30,000 members. I've used it in an attempt to convert members to my forum (not this one) with very little success.

Between the Facebook algorithms and people just not wanting to leave Facebook, I've not seen real success with general forum promotion.

But I'm interested in what others think about this method.

 

[Uncrowned]

Social media presence is definitely needed for most sites anymore. Exactly what social media is needed varies by the site and topic. However, I do not believe a FB Group is appropriate for most projects as they are designed to be self contained communities in Facebook. Overall FB Pages would be a much better solution for most.

 

[Shawn Gossman1]

Overall FB Pages would be a much better solution for most.

I think Facebook pages would work well for forum promotion.

But only if you have a community strategy in place.

We already know FB will put less ranking weight on external links.

But if you build a community on your page, it'll be easier to get them to your forum based on the brand you built.

In many cases though, it means you have to run tow communities, a forum and a Facebook page.

I think that always tends to freak people out.

 

[Tracy]

A group will simply (and ultimately) steal a LOT of traffic from your forum. It's just in it's very nature. There is no easy way to exchange data between the two, and way to many find FB easy to deal/interact with on mobile devices.
Personally, I simply maintain a FB page.

 

[Shawn Gossman1]

A group will simply (and ultimately) steal a LOT of traffic from your forum. It's just in it's very nature. There is no easy way to exchange data between the two, and way to many find FB easy to deal/interact with on mobile devices.
Personally, I simply maintain a FB page.

You're right.

I have a 25,000+ member Facebook Group. My page is 11,000+ followers. Trying to get them to my outdoor forum is practically impossible.

Most of them are so born into social media that they don't even understand a forum.

I think I destined them to be social followers from the start and now I have to sit on that.

I do try to convert as many to my mailing list tho just in case social crashes, I still have my audience.

 

[secretprojects]

I actually linked my forum so posts went into a Facebook group, but It's didn't work for me. Without the topics, it was a jumbled mess.

Because my forum has specialist content you can't find elsewhere and requires registration, what did work was finding groups interested in similar stuff, and then posting some content and also links to my forum into discussions. I found a large amount of posts were already taking content from the forum and posting it without attribution, so posting links along the lines of "much more on this subject can be found on my forum" did get me some signups.

 

[Shawn Gossman1]

I found a large amount of posts were already taking content from the forum and posting it without attribution, so posting links along the lines of "much more on this subject can be found on my forum" did get me some signups.

That's a good idea.

Find the groups posting your content and adding your link to say that is where it came from and you can find more information there.

I like that idea!

 

[Elseb1]

I built one years ago but we never used it and probably didn't put enough time into it tbh. I can't see myself doing it in future.