Would a FaceBook Group make sense for the IntuiFace community?

I’d like to relay my experience about using FB (FaceBook) Groups as a community forum to exchange experiences. I’m member of several FB groups that discuss emerging technologies. One of these is a closed group of Matterport 3D scanner users. Before creating the FB group, they launched a web based community that struggled to catch up. The reasons were very simple:

  • posting content was complicated
  • it was not very mobile friendly
  • people had to bookmark the site to check what’s new (poor notifications)
  • it required discipline to share anything

Matterport decided to create a FB Group moderated by their team and a few selected admin users. They created some basic guidelines and the community took off very rapidly.

I’m wondering if IntuiLab may benefit of a FB Group too. There are several pros:

  • Great mobile experience
  • Notifications
  • Easy posting
  • Most IntuiFace users probably have a FB account

And some cons:

  • It’s a walled garden, no SEO
  • Posting a screencast would still require being on a PC
  • No badges
  • Potentially complicated to cross link content or upload examples
  • No categories

I believe that FB groups are a great way to generate conversations and engagement, and personal connections too. And by combining FB with links to your wonderful KB, I think you could have the best of both worlds.

Does anybody have an opinion on this matter?

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Hi Paolo,

Having a Facebook group here are a few cons i can think of on the top of my head.

Cons to Facebook:

  • Hard to keep track of topics and Features
  • Personal profile needed
  • Poor search functionality.
  • Offsite and away from your content which i’m sure it will either be linking back to the community or KB
  • Quick post turnover – easy for things to be missed when people are posting its hard to manage.
  • No automated access – members need to be approved or removed manually
  • Members not necessarily in the right mindset or abusing the group.

Pros to the Community.

  • Keeps members onsite in the community
  • Easy to search for information and previous discussions either on here or on the KB
  • More advanced features such as text formatting, private messaging
  • Full member profiles specific to the site for example its easy to who are the experts.
  • Better categorisation of topics and posts
  • Fully focused on Intuiface and nothing else.
  • Members are there specifically to talk about Intuiface and nothing else

Please let me know if anyone thinks of anything else?

Kind Regards

Louie

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