Where You Should Build Your Online Community (and Why Facebook Groups Suck Sometimes)

Are you wondering where you should build your online community or group for your business? Many people think Facebook groups suck as a tool for business owners who are trying to grow their online community, instead opting for self-hosted community platforms like Discourse. However, there are endless groups that are successfully hosted on Facebook. How are you supposed to know how to choose the best community platform for your business? (I'll tell you today!) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In this video, I’ll be teaching you: • Whether or not you should build your online community on a dedicated community-building platform or a Facebook group instead • Why the decisions you make about your community platform relies on what your core audience likes, and why they'd prefer one option over another • How Facebook's free group building system allows for basic group functions but might throttle more advanced ones • How facebook's system allows a seamless way for people to take part in your community (without friction upon signup) • How the hardest part of building an online community is getting people there and keeping them there (and how Facebook does a great job of making this part easy!) • How your group notifications on Facebook will also blend in with subscriber's daily feeds, making it super easy for them to stay engaged • How choosing Facebook (and their less-than-stellar track record) to be a "middle man" to your group can be risky • How your choice in online group hosting can affect your SEO power, and why • How analytics are better on certain. platforms than they are on others, and what businesses might need this information • How your integration needs can affect your choice in community hosting, with some being more integration-friendly than others • How Facebook's seamless experience can be both a positive and a negative for your purposes (easier to use, but easier to get distracted!) • How self-hosting your community can offer a lot more control over the community functionality • How Discourse allows ways to incentivize the community experience for members to be more active than Facebook does • Some platforms' "real-time" features stop you from scaling a large group easily • How the saying "you get what you pay for" (or invest time-wise) is true for this subject too • How owning your own community platforms can cause more friction, and require more strategy to keep people coming back • How evaluating your target audience will help you decide the best platform for you • How your audience's view of privacy should help your decision-making process (their personal profile is linked on Facebook- this could be a downside!) • How the tools you use (such as email marketing plugins) should help you choose. • How owning your own infrastructure protects you (as a rule of thumb) • How whatever you do, you should make it easy for your community members to thrive and be active • and much, much more! ℹ️ Check out Stateshift 👇 Most tech companies struggle to build reliable user and developer engagement. We ride shotgun with you, with clear coaching and frameworks driven by 27 years of experience, to deliver consistent adoption, revenue, and brand growth. Customers inc. Dagger, Comcast, IBM, Linux Foundation, Neural Magic, CNCF, Pfizer, Okteto, Dragonfly, Gates Foundation, and many others. Find out more: https://clcl.ink/yt-d Also check out: Stateshift LinkedIn: / stateshift Stateshift Reddit: / stateshift ------ 🚀 SHIFTsignal 🚀 Weekly insights to help you grow your community or DevRel program—fast. Get practical tips, guides, and training you can use right away. No spam. No fluff. Just useful ideas that work. 🔗 https://blog.stateshift.com/shiftsignal